NOPR (NISCAIR online periodical repository): NISCAIR initiatives

The development of technology has brought enormous opportunity to bring the results of research primarily to all through digital communication – anyone, anywhere and anytime.

IT is playing an important role in today’s world and these technologies are meant to help the customers/clientele. To keep pace with the changing world, libraries are also using these technologies to upgrade themselves, improving services, reaching each and every corner and making available resource to reach its users and Institutional Repository is an emerging concept and playing an important role in preserving the intellectual capital of the academic and research institutions.

Now every institution wants to launch its IR and one such initiative is done by NISCAIR by launching NOPR.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/14487/

Factors influencing the adoption of open…

Factors influencing the adoption of open access scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities :
Open access – a means for free availability of scholarly content via the Internet – is an emerging opportunity for wider and unlimited access to scholarly literature. Scholarly communication, through open access journals and self-arching, are the two main approaches of open access publishing. However, this mode of scholarly communication is not widely utilised in developing countries such as Tanzania. This paper discusses the factors that influence the adoption of open access for scholarly communication in Tanzanian public universities based on a study conducted from 2007 to 2010. A survey questionnaire targeted 544 researchers selected through stratified random sampling from a population of 1088
university researchers at six public universities in Tanzania. In addition, 69 policy makers from the six universities were interviewed. It was evident from the findings that the majority of both the policy makers and researchers were aware of open access. However, most of the researchers accessed free online content more (62%) than they disseminated their scholarly content (20%) through open access. Researchers’ Internet usage skills and self-efficacy, social influence, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and the respondents’ general perceptions about open access were identified as the positive factors likely to facilitate open access adoption in Tanzanian public universities. The current poor research conditions and researchers’ low Internet self-efficacy such as inadequate information search skills were cited as the main hindrances for researchers to use open access outlets to access scholarly content. Additionally, inadequate online publishing skills, and the slow Internet connectivity are the
main issues that deterred researchers to disseminate the research findings through open access outlets. The paper recommends that institutional policies on scholarly communication should be revised to incorporate the use of open access publishing. Furthermore, universities should accelerate the establishment of institutional repositories, advocacy campaigns and training directed to researchers, policy makers, readers and information managers of scholarly content, and the improvement of Internet speed at universities through subscription to more bandwidth so as to meet the demand from the scholarly community.

URL : http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/138-dulle-en.pdf

Science Dissemination using Open Access

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available.

The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet.

Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included. The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

URL : https://issuu.com/sdu-ictp/docs/openaccess

MIT Libraries offer aid to MIT authors p…

MIT Libraries offer aid to MIT authors publishing in open-access journals :
The MIT Libraries have established a special fund, the MIT Open Access Article Publication Subvention Fund (OAAPSF), to support equity in open-access publication by providing funding to MIT authors who might not otherwise be able to cover publication fees. A subsidy of up to $1,000 per article is now available to faculty authors publishing in eligible journals.
The fund was created as a result of MIT’s commitment to the “Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity,” launched with four other founding universities last September. The goal of the compact is to allow subscription-based journals and open-access journals to compete on a more level playing field by providing equitable support for the processing-fee business model for open-access journals.

URL : http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/libraries-open-access-aid.html

Measuring the visibility of the University’s scientific production using GoogleScholar, “Publish or Perish” software and Scientometrics

Open access to scientific information through institutional digital repositories presents today’s world information environment and the transformations imposed by information society.

The first Romanian institutional repository was implemented at Transilvania University of Brasov. As part of the undertaken research, the visibility and the impact of the university’s scientific production was measured using the scientific methods of scientometry, as a fundamental instrument for determining the international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.

The results showed that an open access institutional repository would significantly add to the visibility of the university’s scientific production.In this article we define the scientific production and productivity and present the main indicators for the measurement of the scientific activity.

The impact of the research is analyzed and measured through scientometric indicators. The analysis of the citations represents a scientometric indicator for the evaluation of the scientific researches.

Through the number of citations we can analyse the quality of the scientific information. Google Scholar was used as a scientometric database which can be consulted free of charge on the Internet and which indexes academic papers from institutional repositories, identifying also the referenced citations.

The free “Publish or Perish” software can be used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the research, by analysing the citations through the h-index.

We present the methodology and the results of an exploratory study made at the Transilvania University of Brasov regarding the h-index of the academic staff. H-index was calculated by using “Publish or Perish” software, comparing the number of ISI indexed published articles and the number of citations from “ISI Web of Science”.

Using “Publish or Perish”, we calculated h-index, g-index, hc-index and HI norm. We analyzed the research performances achieved by Brasov academic community in 2008, as realised in their annual evaluation -number of papers, books, research contracts, etc- by comparing the four indexes of those 60 professors with the best results.

We will present correlation indicators and the importance of open access for increasing the impact of scientific research by using institutional repositories.

URL : https://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-repanovici-en.pdf