Archives des mots-clés : open access

AgriDrupal : repository management integrated into a content management system

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One of the main obstacles towards a more efficient management and sharing of agricultural knowledge is the lack of good standard-compliant tools whose adoption and maintenance is really sustainable. In particular, in the implementation of repositories, agricultural Institutions have often faced some common issues in the selection of appropriate software tools, like the need to integrate a repository search and browse interface with their website, the need to implement custom content models, or custom metadata models, and the need to be able to exchange information with other systems and participate in networks. The proposed poster will describe AgriDrupal, a “suite of solutions” for agricultural information management and dissemination, with special functionalities for repository management, built on the Drupal Content Management System.

These solutions are provided, discussed and tested by different Institutions and individuals who are sharing their experiences in the AgriDrupal community. Besides being available as modular solutions for Drupal, AgriDrupal can also be delivered as a full-fledged information management and dissemination tool putting together the best solutions implemented by the members of the community. This tool can be considered a “reference demo package”, it is not a software tool that the community maintains or gives assistance for: it is a normal Drupal installation with a customized configuration and special modules, and support for Drupal and its modules can be found directly in the Drupal community.

This is one of the reasons why AgriDrupal is a sustainable project. Indeed the focus of the project is on sustainability: beside minimizing maintenance issues by leaving the bulk of maintenance to the community of Drupal developers, the adoption of AgriDrupal does not involve writing code in house or contracting a company, it leverages the open source approach and the wide community behind the tool, therefore benefitting from continuous improvements and upgrades to the latest technological developments. In addition, the features are not just developed ad hoc: the tool allows to handle all common needs of information management and is easily customizable to specific needs: the definition of metadata models, display criteria and browse/search functionalities can be done through an administration panel, and consequently it doesn’t require highly skilled IT capacities.

The AgriDrupal reference tool has advanced features for managing open access repositories in compliance with widely adopted library standards and the OAI-PMH protocol. The document repository features include: a) a cataloguing interface that out of the box provides the most commonly used metadata elements in bibliographic databases, in particular those defined by the Agris Application Profile , but is easily extendable to include any other element;
b) internal authority lists for authors (personal and corporate), journals and conferences;
c) special input interface for subject indexing with the Agrovoc thesaurus;
d) search and browse functionalities;
e) exposure of records through the OAI-PMH protocol, implementing the Dublin Core metadata set;
f) exposure of records also as RDF feed and XML file: the XML file is compliant with the above mentioned Agris AP, while RDF feeds can be customized in order to include properties from any vocabulary, thus making the repository fully interoperable – the use of Agrovoc URIs also linking it to a published Linked Open Data (LOD) triple store;
g) extensible import and harvesting functionalities that also facilitate the exchange of information with other Institutions and the building of networks.

Since it can be very easily extended to manage any information type according to any metadata standard, AgriDrupal allows to easily integrate a document repository with a website and more in general with an integrated information system. The current 0.7.3 release of AgriDrupal manages documents, news, events, vacancies, institutions, experts and of course web pages. The resulting integrated information system exposes RDF feeds for each type of information managed in the system, and the vocabularies and properties used in the RDF output can be customized, thus making an AgriDrupal installation a potential Linked Data provider.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15768

Open Access to Research Changing Researcher Behavior Through…

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Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates :

“The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of “eDemocracy” one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno’s Paradox). The solution is for the world’s research institutions and funders to (1) extend their existing “publish or perish” mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) depositing their final drafts in their Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22401/

Online Access and the Scientific Journal Market An…

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Online Access and the Scientific Journal Market: An Economist’s Perspective (Draft Report for the National Academy of Sciences) :

In Section 1 of the report I will focus on the most basic unit of analysis – the scientific journal as a communication platform – and then discuss the behavior of publishers, authors, libraries, etc. Once this is accomplished, I can address the questions identified earlier: in Section 2, the journals crisis, and in Section 3, the impact of online access on citations. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the main conclusions of the report, considers the policy implications and offers some directions for future research.”

URL : https://commons.georgetown.edu/blogs/copyrightnrc/files/NRC-Copyright-McCabe-NAS-Report-draft2.pdf

Best practices and policies in institutional repositories development: The Ktisis case

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Libraries worldwide have realized the importance of institutional repositories in the intellectual life and output of an institution. Institutional repositories are now clearly recognized as essential infrastructure in the digital world. An institutional repository is a means for the institutions to manage the product of their academic research and to increase accessibility to that product. Generally, institutional repository development is still in the process of establishing guiding principles and best practices, through established cases which can be used to learn development options and risks.

This paper begins with a brief description of the implementation process of Ktisis, the open access institutional repository of the Cyprus University of Technology, and continues to describe the set of activities used in the strategic plan of Ktisis. Among those activities was the definition of the promotional plan, the engagement in the international community and the definition of the Ktisis policy of use.

URL : http://ktisis.cut.ac.cy/handle/10488/4837

Owning the Right to Open Up Access to…

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Owning the Right to Open Up Access to Scientific Publications :

“Whether the researchers themselves, rather than the institution they work for, are at all in a position to implement OA principles actually depends on the initial allocation of rights on their works. Whereas most European Union Member States have legislation that provides that the copyright owner is the natural person who created the work, the copyright laws of a number European countries, including those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, establish a presumption, according to which the copyright of works made in the course of employment belongs initially to the employer, which in this case would be the university. In France, a similar presumption applies to works created by employees of the State. Even if researchers are in a position to exercise the rights on their works, they may, nevertheless, be required to transfer these to a publisher in order to get their article or book published. This paper, therefore, analyses the legal position of researchers, research institutions and publishers respectively, and considers what the consequences are for the promotion of OA publishing in light of the principles laid down in the Berlin Declaration and the use of Creative Commons licenses.”

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1829889

OAPEN Final Report OAPEN started its activities…

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OAPEN Final Report :

“OAPEN started its activities on September 1, 2008 and has now completed its project phaseco-funded by the European Commission. The final stage of the project focused on the launch
of the OAPEN Library, usability, and especially sustainability after the project period. The results were presented during the final conference in Berlin in February 2011.

In the future OAPEN will continue as an independent foundation governed by representatives of the participating institutions. The objectives for the foundation are to stimulate further OA
publishing of academic books, to further develop OAPEN as a platform for OA books and to develop a sustainable business model. In the meantime, OAPEN is conducting a number of experiments in Open Access book publishing, in the form of pilot projects. The first pilot is conducted in the Netherlands with support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Ministry of Education. For the UK a similar pilot project is being prepared by JISC Collections.”

URL : http://project.oapen.org/images/documents/oapen_final_public_report.pdf

Current Issues in Research Communications Open Access –…

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Current Issues in Research Communications: Open Access – the View from the Academy :

“This is the fourth and final quarterly report to JISC from the Research
Communications Strategy (RCS) project. In addition to a strategic overview of developments and issues in the sector, it contains a number of recommendations for further action. It includes:

  • initial results from the RCS‟s recent opinion-gathering activities on attitudes to open access among researchers and senior managers in HEIs
  • comments on some ongoing issues relevant to the open access (OA) agenda
  • suggested approaches to future OA advocacy.”

URL : http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1480/1/RCS_March_2011.pdf