Open Access repositories and journals fo…

Open Access repositories and journals for visibility: Implications for Malaysian libraries :

“This paper describes the growth of Open Access (OA) repositories and journals as reported by monitoring initiatives such as ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), Open DOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Directory of Web Ranking of World Repositories by the Cybermetrics Laboratory in Spain and published literature. The performance of Malaysian OA repositories and journals is highlighted. The strength of OA channels in increasing visibility and citations are evidenced by research findings. It is proposed that libraries champion OA initiatives by making university or institutional governance aware; encouraging institutional journal publishers to adopt OA platform; collaborating with research groups to jumpstart OA institutional initiatives and to embed OA awareness into user and researcher education programmes. By actively involved, libraries will be free of permission, licensing and archiving barriers usually imposed in traditional publishing situation.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=960

Global visibility of Asian universities’ Open Access institutional repositories

This paper highlights the current state of open access repositories of Asian universities. It describes their characteristics in terms of types, contents, disciplines, language, technical and operational issues, and policy.

The web performance of Asian institutional repositories as reflected through global visibility and impact of the repositories in Open Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR), is also examined; as well as the performance of Asian top-ranked universities in the archiving and sharing their research output through institutional repositories, based on the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR).

Findings signify Japan as the biggest contributor of Asian repositories, followed by India and Taiwan. An investigation of the status of these universities revealed that out of the 191 Asian organizational institutional repositories identified in this study, only 48 are listed in the Top 400 RWWR.

This implies that only 12% of Asian institutional repositories are visible and incorporate good practices in their web publication as extracted from the quantitative webometrics indicators used by the ranking. Out of these 48 institutions, 29 are among the Asian Top 200 universities.

However, only 14 of these 29 universities were ranked top 100 in the RWWR. It is revealed that some of the top ranked universities in Asia are not actively contributing to the open access movement.

It is suggested that if the web performance of an institutional repository of a research institution is below the expected position, the university authorities should reconsider their web policy to increase the volume and quality of their intellectual output / research publications through institutional repositories.

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=957

Librarians’ role as change agents for i…

Librarians’ role as change agents for institutional repositories: A case of Malaysian academic libra :

“The primary reason for establishing an institutional repository is to increase the visibility of the institution’s research output by making it Open Access. Academic libraries are becoming very involved in managing electronic scholarly products and participating in the evolving scholarly communication process through institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories can make room for easier access to universities’ research output, unfortunately it is not fully developed in some academic institutions. The origin of this problem is that there are known instances where librarians in-charge of institutional repository are unaware of their roles, and are unskilled in implementing the institutional repository. This paper describes a study conducted on the roles of librarians in the deployment and content recruitment of institutional repositories in eight (8) universities in Malaysia. Sample for this study are librarians who are involved with the development and implementation of institutional repository in their respective universities. The study reveals that the act of collecting materials for depositing is mainly done by librarians rather than the authors and researchers. Providing training sessions, holding meetings in departments and faculties, and also linking of the institutional repository website from the university and faculties’ website have the highest rank in librarians’ approach to promote the institutional repository. The paper also discusses the process of depositing, motivation factors, roles, marketing and benefits of institutional repository that will have reference value for the librarians who desire to embark on an institutional repository.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=961

The size distribution of open access pub…

The size distribution of open access publishers: A problem for open access? :

“I stumbled across the question of publisher size while preparing for an earlier article. From the viewpoint of an economist, the size distribution of open access publishers looked inefficient. In this article I first explore reasons to be sceptical to a situation with a large number of small publishers. Then I go through the numbers from the Directory of Open Access Journals, also discussing problems inherent in the material. The results are then compared to similar data about toll access publishing. A conclusion is that, even though numbers may lack in exactitude, there seems to be a need for institutions to look at how they organize their publishing activities.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3208/2726

Submission Fees – A tool in the transiti…

Submission Fees – A tool in the transition to open access? :

The study consisted of an initial literature survey, followed by an exploration of the experience of those currently using submission fees conducted via interviews (primarily with journal editors and publishers). We then developed some possible models for submission fees within open access that were tested and refined through discussions with relevant stakeholders. Finally the potential viability of these models was explored through a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders
including publishers, libraries, research funders, research institutions and individual researchers. In
total some 40 interviews were conducted.”

URL : http://knowledge-exchange.info/Admin/Public/DWSDownload.aspx?File=%2fFiles%2fFiler%2fdownloads%2fOpen+Access%2fKE_Submission_fees_Short_Report_2010-11-25.pdf

OA report in Southern Europe : “The cou…

OA report in Southern Europe :

“The countries of Southern Europe have unique characteristics as regards participation in the scientific communication process: they use languages that have a long tradition but are not the usual channel for scientific communication, they do not have a powerful publishing industry, they spend a smaller percentage of GDP on research and scientific data acquisition, etc. The present report arose from the activities of the Southern European Libraries Link (SELL),2 which represents library consortia of six countries (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey). Although this organization was created to exchange experiences and to act as a pressure group in relation to scientific and technical publishers, its founding charter also states clearly that one of its main goals is “to draw common policies towards information acquirement and provision”. In order to move towards common policies for open access to science, experts in each country were asked to provide reports on the situation of open access.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19429/