Archives des mots-clés : state of the art

India’s Efforts in Open Access Publishing

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For a long time, India has been generating a great deal of scholarly resources in all disciplines. After independence, there was a lot of investment in science and technology, and S&T were used to leverage development efforts and to improve the standard of living. However, one in four Indians still lives below the poverty line. There is a considerable research effort in a wide variety of areas including science, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences. Research is performed essentially in three sectors: (1) higher educational institutions, such as universities and deemed universities (2) laboratories under different government agencies such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and (3) laboratories in the industrial sector, both public and private.

With difficulties such as lack of funds and infrastructure for good quality research, a very common problem for Indian scientists is access and visibility. The accelerating cost of subscriptions to academic serials has created a serials crisis in almost all libraries around the world, including India. Most Indian libraries cannot afford to subscribe to key journals needed by their users/scientists. As a result, it becomes difficult for researchers to have current knowledge. After spending so much effort on research and getting it published in journals, small or big, from around the world, their work is often not noticed by others elsewhere, even within India, working in the same and related areas. No wonder Indian work is poorly cited due to low visibility or circulation of such journals where their works have been published.

To overcome both these handicaps, one possible solution may be the publishing through Open Access (OA). Open-access publishing is the provision of free online access to quality scholarly material that is available on “open domain,” and not having any restriction of copyright. Although the open access movement began before the advent of the Web, it became more widespread with the adoption of Web access in scholarly activities. The movement spread to all disciplines. There are many different models of open access publishing, for example sponsored OA, OA supported by author fees, and embargoed OA. The intention of all such models is to provide access to scholarly contents to clients. It is, however, assumed as one of the useful media to share research and getting wide visibility from around the world. Some countries like the UK and the US have made better progress, whereas many other countries are lagging behind. The primary goal of this study is to discover the present status of Indian open access ventures and help librarians to understand the opportunities in OA scholarly resources in India.

URL : http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/mukherjee-mal.htm

Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories

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Librarians need to be familiar with the evolving aspects of scholarly communication and the changing scholarly record. One component of that is the role of repositories. It’s crucial for anyone working in a research library to understand the repository landscape, both to advise researchers on where to look for information and how to disseminate their own research articles.

Librarians should appreciate the nature of the leading disciplinary repositories and have a sense of their motivations, their scope, and how they operate. Before getting involved with a disciplinary repository, they should be familiar with the risks and opportunities in depending on the repository and, most importantly, they need to know if the repository has a sustainable model.

For a library considering starting a disciplinary repository or taking on the operation of an existing one, these considerations are essential.

URL : http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf

Status of Institutional Repositories in Asian Countries A…

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Status of Institutional Repositories in Asian Countries: A Quantitative Study :

“ICT and availability of open sources software packages has enabled most of the institutions to maintain institutional repository or archive to collect, preserve, and make accessible the intellectual output created by their scholarly communities. There are more than 1800 Institutional Repositories (IRs) world wide of which more than 50% are in USA, UK, Germany and Spain. There has been relatively little systematic examination of the actual state of deployment of IRs in Asian countries. This study attempts to identify the present status of IRs in the countries of Asia. Data of repositories was collected from various directories of IRs. Data is analyzed in terms of quantity of IRs increased during last five years, country-wise IRs and number of objects, types of materials archived, subject coverage, software used, language of interface, host domains, and policy maaters. The results of the study suggest healthy growth in terms of quantity of IRs in Asian countries. The subject analysis of the IRs indicates that the institutes in the field of sciences and technology are more interested to create IRs than social sciences, arts and humanities. Currently the IRs mostly housed traditional (print-oriented) scholarly publications and grey literature, using DSpace software and most of these materials were of English language. However, the policy of content inclusion, submission and preservation is yet to be well defined in IRs.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16854

A Review of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Policies

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This article reviews the history of open access (OA) policies and examines the current status of mandate policy implementations. It finds that hundreds of policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizational levels and many of them have shown a positive effect on the rate of repository content accumulation.

However, it also detects policies showing little or no visible impact on repository development, and attempts to analyze the effects of different types of policies, with varied levels of success. It concludes that an open access mandate policy, by itself, will not change existing practices of scholarly self-archiving.

URL : http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/portal_pre_print/current/articles/12.1xia.pdf

A Surfboard for Riding the Wave Towards a…

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A Surfboard for Riding the Wave. Towards a four country action programme on research data :

“The Riding the Wave report by the high level expert group on research data called for a collaborative data infrastructure that will enable researchers and other stakeholders from education, society and business to use, re-use and exploit research data to the maximum benefit of science and society. The Knowledge Exchange partners have embraced this vision and commissioned a report that translates Riding the Wave into actions for the four partner countries and beyond.

This paper builds on this report and presents an overview of the present situation with regard to research data in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and offers broad outlines for a possible action programme for the four countries in realising the envisaged collaborative data infrastructure. An action programme at the level of four countries will require the involvement of all stakeholders from the scientific community.”

URL : http://knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=469

Open Access to Scientific Information in Croatia Increasing…

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Open Access to Scientific Information in Croatia : Increasing Research Impact of a Scientifically Peripheral Country :

“Open Access (OA) to scientific information has become, during the last decade, an important means of communicating in science. The most important fact, proved by numerous studies, is that OA can increase visibility and impact of research results. The first chapter of the book gives an overview of the beginnings of formal scientific communication as an introduction to the further discussion on OA, especially OA in developing and transition countries. In the second chapter, basic definitions of OA and basic OA initiatives are explained as well as the two ways of achieving OA. The third chapter analyses access barriers for scientifically peripheral countries and the ways of removing them. Chapters four and five are completely dedicated to the Open Access in Croatia. Using an example of Croatia, the possibilities of increasing research results of a scientifically peripheral country are explained. Results of the complete study of OA in Croatia are analysed and explained. The study consists of two parts – study of Croatian OA journals and study of Croatian OA repositories. In the first part, the data on editorial policy regarding electronic publishing are gathered by the method of web content analysis. In the sample are all the Croatian scientific journals that had, by the end of June 2010, at least one 2009 issue freely available on the internet. The second part of the study discusses the problem of OA repositories in Croatia and gives an example of such a repository. Recommendations for further development of OA in Croatia are given as a part of the conclusion.”

URL : http://darhiv.ffzg.hr/1397/

Etat de la publication en Open Access dans les disciplines scientifiques présentes à l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

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Ce mémoire, réalisé sous mandat de la bibliothèque de l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), fait état de la publication en Open Access aujourd’hui. Il couvre ainsi les disciplines scientifiques présentes dans l’institution, plus particulièrement les Sciences, Techniques et Médecine (STM).

Bien que ce travail porte principalement sur la publication dans les revues en Open Access (« gold path »), il aborde aussi l’archivage ouvert (« green path»). La partie théorique de ce mémoire dresse un panorama actuel de l’Open Access. Elle détermine les principaux modes d’Open Access existants via une typologie et définit les différents modèles économiques existants.

Ce travail s’intéresse aussi à la question de l’évaluation des articles scientifiques, des droits en vigueur dans ce domaine, ainsi que l’usage d’outils statistiques pour la qualification des revues. L’importance de l’Open Access est démontrée, en tenant compte des particularités, propres aux grandes disciplines scientifiques.

Le point de vue des chercheurs sur la question du libre accès est présenté, suivi d’une réflexion autour de projets de financements institutionnels. Enfin, d’éventuelles perspectives de développements futurs sont élaborées.

La partie pratique présente, quant à elle, les résultats d’une enquête, menée entre février et juin 2011 sur le campus. Elle repose sur une analyse quantitative des références d’articles scientifiques publiés, présentes dans Infoscience, l’archive ouverte de l’institution. Une mesure de l’importance de la publication en Open Access à l’EPFL, entre 2008 et 2010, a ainsi été effectuée.

En parallèle, une analyse qualitative, menée sous la forme d’entretiens individuels, a permis de prendre connaissance des attentes et des besoins de certains chercheurs sur ce sujet. Les résultats obtenus renseignent aussi de manière significative sur leurs pratiques et leurs préoccupations, qui varient sensiblement selon leurs habitudes et leurs expériences.

Ce mémoire a donc pour but de faire une synthèse de ces différents éléments et ainsi, de déterminer les enjeux actuels de l’Open Access, que ce soit à l’EPFL ou dans n’importe quel autre contexte institutionnel, côtoyant la publication scientifique.

URL : http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/169218/