Open Access in developing countries – attitudes and experiences of researchers

Authors : Andy Nobes, Sian Harris

Open Access is often considered as particularly beneficial to researchers in the Global South. However, research into awareness of and attitudes to Open Access has been largely dominated by voices from the Global North.

A survey was conducted of 507 researchers from the developing world and connected to INASP’s AuthorAID project to ascertain experiences and attitudes to Open Access publishing.

The survey revealed problems for the researchers in gaining access to research literature in the first place. There was a very positive attitude to Open Access research and Open Access journals, but when selecting a journal in which to publish, Open Access was seen as a much less important criterion than factors relating to international reputation.

Overall, a majority of respondents had published in an Open Access journal and most of these had paid an article processing charge. Knowledge and use of self-archiving via repositories varied, and only around 20% had deposited their research in an institutional repository.

The study also examined attitudes to copyright, revealing most respondents had heard of Creative Commons licences and were positive about the sharing of research for educational use and dissemination, but there was unease about research being used for commercial purposes.

Respondents revealed a surprisingly positive stance towards openly sharing research data, although many revealed that they would need further guidance on how to do so. The survey also revealed that the majority had received emails from so called ‘predatory’ publishers and that a small minority had published in them.

URL : Open Access in developing countries – attitudes and experiences of researchers

Alternative location : https://zenodo.org/record/3464868

An Analysis of Search Results from Institutional Repository: Econpapers

Authors : Sidharta Chatterjee, Sujoy Dey, Mousumi Samanta

The goal of this research is to examine and explore information retrieval process of patrons who access institutional repositories. Repositories are generally hosted by public universities and run by volunteers which allow researchers to submit their draft versions of their manuscripts in pre-print forms.

In this study, we analyze using search methods to sort out research papers classified according to their levels of relevance that are available from a repository, and report the pattern of search results as our findings.

Our model employs search methods for searching Econpapers which utilize RePEc bibliographic data. Our analysis attempts to highlight how information seekers, scholars and researchers search relevant topics of their interest and how relevant such information is which is retrieved from an institutional repository.

This could aid researchers to modify their search processes to obtain better search results from their queries. The goal is to obtain the most relevant documents from online search.

We discuss about the methods employed to retrieve information which is most pertinent to the requirements of researchers. A broad implication could be better utilization of time and resources for efficient retrieval of the most relevant documents of interest that could be expected from searching institutional repositories.

URI : https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/id/eprint/96178

Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska

Author : Paul Royster

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy.

Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support.

Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time.

A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/382/

Open Access Routes Dichotomy and Opportunities: Consolidation, Analysis and Trends at the Spanish National Research Council

Authors : Mercedes Baquero-Arribas, Luis Dorado, Isabel Bernal

This article gives a comprehensive overview of recent Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) publications available in Open Access. With a focus on research articles from the last decade (2008–2018), this work aims to fill the gap in previous studies about publishing trends and impact monitoring of publications by researchers from the Spanish National Research Council.

Evolution and main trends of Green and Gold Open Access routes at CSIC are addressed through a close insight into DIGITAL.CSIC repository and institutional Open Access Publishing Support Programme.

The article draws on major conclusions at a time when an institutional Open Access mandate has just entered into force. The article also relates findings about performance of institutional Open Access Publishing Initiative and total volume of CSIC articles published in Open Access with an estimation of overall costs on article processing charges during these years.

Furthermore, the data serve as a basis to make preliminary considerations as to opportunities to move from a subscription-based model to one fully aligned with Gold Open Access publishing.

The data analyzed come from a variety of sources, including public information and internal records maintained by the CSIC E-resources Subscription programme, DIGITAL.CSIC and data retrieved from GesBIB, an internal, in-house development tool that integrates bibliographic information about CSIC publications as well as data from several external APIs, including Unpaywall, DOAJ and Sherpa Romeo.

URL : Open Access Routes Dichotomy and Opportunities: Consolidation, Analysis and Trends at the Spanish National Research Council

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030049

Aligning Social Media Indicators with the Documents in an Open Access Repository

Authors: Luis Meneses, Alyssa Arbuckle, Hector Lopez, Belaid Moa, Richard Furuta, Ray Siemens

In this paper we describe our current efforts towards building a framework that extends the functionality of an Open Access Repository by implementing processes to incorporate the ongoing trends in social media into the context of a digital collection.

We refer to these processes collectively as the Social Media Engine. The purpose of our framework is twofold: first, we propose to challenge some of the preconceived notions of digital libraries by making repositories more dynamic; and second, by challenging this notion we want to promote public engagement and open scholarship.

As a work in progress, we believe that a real challenge lies in investigating the implications that these two points introduce within the context of the humanities.

URL : Aligning Social Media Indicators with the Documents in an Open Access Repository

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.44

Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records

Authors: Karen Bjork, Rebel Cummings-Sauls, Ryan Otto

INTRODUCTION

Institutional repository managers are continuously looking for new ways to demonstrate the value of their repositories. One way to do this is to create a more inclusive repository that provides reliable information about the research output produced by faculty affiliated with the institution.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

This article details two pilot projects that evaluated how their repositories could track faculty research output through the inclusion of metadata-only (no full-text) records.

The purpose of each pilot project was to determine the feasibility and provide an assessment of the long-term impact on the repository’s mission statement, staffing, and collection development policies.

NEXT STEPS

This article shares the results of the pilot project and explores the impact for faculty and end users as well as the implications for repositories.

URL : Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2220