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New Roles New Responsibilities Examining Training Needs of…

New Roles, New Responsibilities: Examining Training Needs of Repository Staff:

« INTRODUCTION : Institutional repositories play a critical role in the research lifecycle. Funding agencies are increasingly seeking an improved return on their investment in research. Repositories facilitate this process by providing storage of, and access to, institutional research outputs and, more recently, research data. While repositories are generally managed within the academic library, repository staff require different skills and knowledge compared with traditional library roles. This study reports on a survey of Australasian institutional repository staff to identify skills and knowledge sets.

METHODS :Institutional repository staff working at universities in Australia and New Zealand were invited to participate in an online survey which incorporated both open and closed-ended question types.

RESULTS :The survey found significant gaps in the current provision of formal training and coursework related to institutional repositories, which echoed findings in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States.

DISCUSSION :There is clearly a need for more and varied training opportunities for repository professionals. Repository work requires a specific set of skills that can be difficult to find and institutions will benefit from investing in training and ongoing development opportunities for repository staff.

CONCLUSION :The data from this study could be used to facilitate staff recruitment, development, training, and retention strategies. »

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss2/7/

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Supporting Open Access nationwide To support Croatian…

Supporting Open Access nationwide :

« To support Croatian scholarly publishing environment, and inspired by global open access movement, the portal of Croatian scientific journals HRČAK (http://hrcak.srce.hr) was introduced in 2006 offering an open access publishing platform for Croatian journals. Today, HRČAK gathers about 290 scholarly and professional Croatian journals. This paper is focused on the currency and visibility of the journals included in HRČAK, giving accurate statistical data about HRČAK repository, its growth and development. Collaboration with Croatian publishers, namely those are mainly academic and research institutions or professional societies, on the continuous work of raising the quality of Croatian scientific journals is presented in this paper. HRČAK journals are available for harvesting using OAI-PMH protocol and papers are distributed through many different repositories, archives, databases and search engines. The future plans include work on full-text documents, inclusion of the additional types of publications and formats, harvesting process improvements, additional functionalities and standardization. »

URL : http://bib.irb.hr/prikazi-rad?&lang=EN&rad=591272

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EN

The Embedded Repository: Introducing an Institutional Repository to a New Audience Via Location-Aware Social Networking

Authors : Robin A. Bedenbaugh, Holly Mercer

The authors report the outcome of a partnership between a university marketing and communications department and a university library. The research aimed to determine whether providing links to institutional digital repository content on location-based social media is a viable marketing approach.

Foursquare Tips were added to locations on the Texas A&M University campus with links to repository content. The authors subsequently monitored repository traffic using Google analytics to determine how many users were being referred by the Foursquare service.

Research indicates that users will click through links on Foursquare to visit the institutional repository, and that they will explore further once they are there. This was an initial exploration. More data will be needed to determine precisely the best way to market services through location-based or location-aware services. »

URL : https://journals.tdl.org/pal/index.php/pal/article/view/6062

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EN

Federated Search Service for OAI-compliant, Open-Access Repositories in India

Many of the research institutions and universities across the world are facilitating open-access (OA) to their intellectual outputs through their respective OA institutional repositories (IRs) or through the centralized subject-based repositories. The registry of open access repositories (ROAR) lists more than 2850 such repositories across the world. The awareness about the benefits of OA to scholarly literature and OA publishing is picking up in India, too. As per the ROAR statistics, to date, there are more than 90 OA repositories in the country. India is doing particularly well in publishing open-access journals (OAJ). As per the directory of open-access journals (DOAJ), to date, India with 390 OAJs, is ranked 5th in the world in terms of numbers of OAJs being published.

Much of the research done in India is reported in the journals published from India. These journals have limited readership and many of them are not being indexed by Web of Science, Scopus or other leading international abstracting and indexing databases. Consequently, research done in the country gets hidden not only from the fellow countrymen, but also from the international community. This situation can be easily overcome if all the researchers facilitate OA to their publications.

One of the easiest ways to facilitate OA to scientific literature is through the institutional repositories. If every research institution and university in India set up an open-access IR and ensure that copies of the final accepted versions of all the research publications are uploaded in the IRs, then the research done in India will get far better visibility. The federation of metadata from all the distributed, interoperable OA repositories in the country will serve as a window to the research done across the country.

Federation of metadata from the distributed OAI-compliant repositories can be easily achieved by setting up harvesting software like the PKP Harvester. In this paper, we share our experience in setting up a prototype metadata harvesting service using the PKP harvesting software for the OAI-compliant repositories in India.

URL : http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/43176/

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Software systems for increasing availability of scientific research…

Software systems for increasing availability of scientific-research outputs :

« This paper describes the basic approaches for publishing scientic-research outputs using modern ICT technologies and web applications such as institutional repositories, the NDLTD, and CRIS. Also, the CRIS which has been developed at the University of Novi Sad is described. That system unies the mentioned approaches and it is compatible with all of them. »

URL : http://www.dmi.rs/NSJOM/Papers/42_1/NSJOM_42_1_037_048.pdf

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Repositioning academic repositories for better management through open…

Repositioning academic repositories for better management through open access :

« This is a literature-based opinion paper which examines how digital technology through Open Access has changed the way knowledge that was hitherto hard to find and expensive is finding its way into university electronic repositories and bridging the distance between searching and retrieval. The paper examines opportunities available to scholars, researchers and institutions of higher learning through Open Access and Open Content using electronic repositories. In a number of African academic institutions of higher learning, starting and maintaining journals is becoming the order of the day. Once launched, these journals provide ready material for Open Access through repositories.

Due to the prohibitive price of books it is difficult to purchase all the available books on certain topics. Therefore Open Access on the internet and in repositories would be a good option since updated materials will be available. Open Access repositories and archives are economically sustainable because they are affordable. Depositing new articles takes a few minutes, and is done by individual authors, not archive managers. Open Access repositories and archives at universities only require server space. This benefits the institutions that host them by enhancing the visibility and impact of the articles, the authors, and the institution.

The paper argues that the current scholarly communication system needs urgent reforms to cope with the rapidly changing technological environment. Open Access and Open Content are free, immediate, and handle multiple users. On the other hand, electronic repositories can be set up
effortlessly.

The paper recommends that electronic Open Access institutional repositories are a must have for academic institutions and that researchers, institutions and funders need to be informed and trained on the benefits of using Open Access and Institutional repositories. Through this management of knowledge, scholars worldwide will access and benefit from each other’s findings. This is in line with the universal drive to share knowledge propelled by new technologies. »

URL : http://scecsal.viel.co.ke/index.php?title=File:REPOSITIONING_ACADEMIC_REPOSITORIES_FOR_BETTER_MANAGEMENT_THROUGH_OPEN_ACCESS.pdf

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Promoting Open Access at the Cyprus University of…

Promoting Open Access at the Cyprus University of Technology: survey results :

« Today the Open Access movement gains more and more followers. The Library and Information Services at the Cyprus University of Technology has defined Open Access as one of its main strategies. Considering the current economic crisis, Open Access appears to be a solution to the reduction of funds at the academic institutions. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the perception and reaction of the academic community of the Cyprus University of Technology towards Open Access. The Library and Information Services conducted a survey in order to examine the familiarity of the academic community with Open Access and to define any difficulties that they find.

The survey results showed that the academic community is generally aware of the Open Access movement, but a lot of effort and work has to be done in order to make the academic community to trust and use Open Access. The survey also showed that Ktisis, the institutional repository of the Cyprus University of Technology, is not being used effectively by the academics. It was proved that the deposits in Ktisis do not reach the desired level and the reason is that the academic community is not aware of its existence. Therefore the academic community has to be convinced to prefer Open Access publishers for the deposit of their academic publications instead of commercial publishers and to retain sufficient rights adopting the SPARC addendum. Also, to promote open access through “author pay model” like Biomed Central. »

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/17339