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21 – 30 of over 12000Dale Peters and Norbert Lossau
DRIVER embodies a bold vision – that of worldwide networks of scientific data repositories. This paper seeks to examine the aims of the European Union funded project, to explore…
Abstract
Purpose
DRIVER embodies a bold vision – that of worldwide networks of scientific data repositories. This paper seeks to examine the aims of the European Union funded project, to explore the development of a distributed infrastructure that enables enhanced interoperability of data, resulting in a global knowledge infrastructure supporting the scholarly communication of the future.
Design/methodology/approach
The primary objective of DRIVER was to establish a flexible, robust, and scalable infrastructure for all European and world‐wide digital repositories, managing scientific information in an open access model increasingly demanded by researchers, funding organisations and other stakeholders. Adopting a result‐driven approach, activities focused on the expansion of the content base with high quality research outputs, including textual research papers, data sets and other scholarly publications.
Findings
The release of the D‐NET v1.0 open source software proved a successful basis for a distributed service‐oriented architecture, enabling enhanced interoperability of data and service‐providers, and offering wide‐ranging functionality including search; recommendation; collection building, and personal profiling as innovative tools for repository managers. In addition, it was found that in building a robust network of voluntary content providers, known as the DRIVER Confederation, the infrastructure came to support a durable organisational structure, now formally constituted as the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). The international repository organisation enables further collaboration between research communities in a co‐ordinated network comprising a growing number of institutional repositories, national federations and research institutions and data aggregators.
Practical implications
The development of COAR is the extension of the EU‐based infrastructure to global research communities in China, India, Africa and Latin America, deploying a vigorous awareness and advocacy programme. Evolving from the DRIVER Confederation, COAR aims to provide an ongoing support service for repository managers, in a dynamic set of guidelines aimed at data interoperability, and to provide the strategic support required to implement new forms of scholarly communication. These issues are addressed in terms of technical infrastructure developments but will focus on strategic issues of policy development, improved services and additional functionality offered to the scholarly community.
Originality/value
This paper outlines DRIVER's unique response to the changing global information environment. Concepts of strategic international collaboration are pursued in COAR, based on the scientific and technical collaboration achieved in DRIVER. The paper addresses significant repository development goals that currently challenge repository managers, librarians, scholars and funders and that indicate the future of Open Access publication – in the ultimate goal of a global and interactive representation of human knowledge.
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The purpose of this paper is to give a complex description and evaluation of open access adoption in the environment of the Czech Republic, from both the green road and golden…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to give a complex description and evaluation of open access adoption in the environment of the Czech Republic, from both the green road and golden road points of view.
Design/methodology/approach
Data and conclusions in this paper are numerically supported by quantitative analyses from several relevant databases (e.g. JCR, Scopus, DOAJ or ROAR).
Findings
The issue of open access has not been given appropriate attention in the Czech Republic. Therefore, most of the important activities have only recently been implemented, or are still underway. Open access is still being completely ignored at the level of Czech state offices and funding agencies, which leads to scientific institutions learning of this phenomenon individually. Compared to other Central European countries, the Czech Republic can be classified as average in certain respects, but it is no competition for developed West European and North American countries in terms of awareness, infrastructure and open access adoption.
Originality/value
This is the very first article that comprehensively sums up all aspects of the issue of open access in the Czech Republic.
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Korea has been at the forefront of the open access movement since 2003, with four nation‐wide repositories built to date. This study seeks to review their current status and to…
Abstract
Purpose
Korea has been at the forefront of the open access movement since 2003, with four nation‐wide repositories built to date. This study seeks to review their current status and to make proposals for further progress.
Design/methodology/approach
The study reviews the current status of the four nation‐wide repositories in Korea and identifies their drawbacks and solutions.
Findings
Korea's repositories were all built and are operated by government agencies. Their software is superb in contrast with the small volume of contents accumulated. If those repositories are to be invigorated, coordinated efforts are required to publicise the objectives of the repositories, and to try to have all research outputs contributed to the repositories with the cooperation of the operating agencies and researchers.
Originality/value
The study suggests several strategies for invigorating Korea's nation‐wide repositories. If the strategies are implemented in a calm and orderly way, Korea's nation‐wide repositories are expected to be more successful.
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Fayaz Ahmad Loan and Shueb Sheikh
This study aims to assess open access (OA) repositories in the field of the health and medicine (H&M) available in the Directory of the Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) by…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to assess open access (OA) repositories in the field of the health and medicine (H&M) available in the Directory of the Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) by analysing their various facets like geographical distribution, language diversity, collection size, content types, operational status, interoperability, updating policy and software used for content management.
Design/methodology/approach
To achieve the objectives of the study, the OpenDOAR was selected as a source for identifying the H&M repositories. The required data were manually collected from 1 to 30 April 2014 and analysed using various quantitative techniques to reveal the findings.
Findings
The results reveal that the OpenDOAR lists 254 repositories in the field of the H&M contributed by the 62 countries of the world, topped by the USA (15.4 per cent), followed by Japan (7.9 per cent) and the UK (7.5 per cent). The majority of the repositories are institutional (187, 73.6 per cent) in nature, having less than 5,000 items (161, 63.4 per cent) in the collection and mostly consisting of articles (76.0 per cent), theses (49.6 per cent), unpublished documents (33.1 per cent) and books (31.9 per cent). The linguistic assessment shows that the majority of the H&M repositories accept content written in English language (71.3 per cent), followed by Spanish (16.1 per cent) and Japanese (7.5 per cent). The updating policy of these repositories is not up to the mark, as only 67.0 per cent of the H&M repositories have been updated from 2008-2012, but the majority are still operational (91.7 per cent) and are compatible (67.3 per cent) with the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). About 30 software brands, both commercial and open source, have been used by administrators for creating these repositories and managing their content. DSpace is the most popular software used by 88 (34.7 per cent) repositories, followed by EPrints (43, 16.9 per cent) and Digital Commons (18, 7.1 per cent).
Research limitations/implications
The scope of this study is limited to the health and medical repositories listed in OpenDOAR, and hence the generalisation is to be cautioned.
Practical implications
This study is useful for library and information professionals and health and medical professionals across the globe.
Originality/value
This study is the first attempt to analyse the health and medical repositories in OA sites.
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– The purpose of this paper is to explore various types of research materials in Indian institutional repositories.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore various types of research materials in Indian institutional repositories.
Design/methodology/approach
The repositories are identified from the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). The repository sites were visited to collect the data necessary for the study.
Findings
The present study reveals that barring a few repositories the collections of most of the repositories are very low. The percentage of archived materials is high for journal papers, and moderate for conference papers/thesis. However it is very low for preprints/working papers, teaching resources and patents.
Originality/value
The study provides an overview of archived material in institutional repositories in India.
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Milan Ojsteršek, Janez Brezovnik, Mojca Kotar, Marko Ferme, Goran Hrovat, Albin Bregant and Mladen Borovič
The purpose of this paper is to present a technical perspective when implementing the Slovenian open access infrastructure that consists of four institutional repositories (IRs…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a technical perspective when implementing the Slovenian open access infrastructure that consists of four institutional repositories (IRs) and a national portal (NP) that aggregates content from the repositories in order to provide a common search engine, recommendations of similar documents, and similar text detection.
Design/methodology/approach
During the project, the necessary legal background and processes for mandatory submissions of final study works, research publications and research data were established, as well as processes for data exchange between the IRs and the NP, and processes for similar text detection.
Findings
The consortium consisted of four Slovenian universities that significantly differ in size, organisation, and workflows. It was anticipated that exactly the same legal background and software would be used for the four repositories. It turned out that complete unification was impossible due to the differences.
Practical implications
The national open access infrastructure will improve the visibility of Slovenian research organisations. It supports the compliance with the funders’ open access mandates. The established infrastructure enables the depositing and archiving of approximately 80 percent of the peer-reviewed scientific publications that are annually published by Slovenian researchers. At the same time, the majority of final study works from Slovenian higher education institutions are available in full-text format.
Originality/value
This paper describes a technical perspective for setting up a national open access infrastructure, which has not been described in the literature previously.
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Shajitha C. and Abdul Majeed K.C.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the content growth of institutional repositories (IR) in South India and analyse the type-wise growth of items available in these IRs and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the content growth of institutional repositories (IR) in South India and analyse the type-wise growth of items available in these IRs and also discuss the traits and trends exposed by them.
Design/methodology/approach
With the help of Registry of Open Access Repositories and Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), 39 repositories were located in south India. From these, Personal websites, the IRs that are currently not working and the repositories used for journal archiving were excluded. A total of 22 operational IRs at 21 institutions were identified for the study. Within a 15 month period, the data were collected from the 22 IRs twice for monitoring content growth.
Findings
The content of nearly all IRs have grown over the 15 month period, and the overall content growth rate was 7.82 per cent. Journal articles were the important content type of IRs, while thesis and conference papers were the next common. Moreover, item monographs exhibited the highest growth rate. Other categories, conference proceedings, and conference papers also exhibited a high growth rate. The present study revealed that Indian repositories were actively engaged in data curation activities, depositing a wide variety of items in their respective IRs. Overall, South Indian repositories exhibited a slow growth rate and tended to become inactive. Most South Indian Universities had not constituted the IRs, which led to the dominance of English language material in these IRs.
Research limitations/implications
The study was conducted only in South Indian IRs.
Originality/value
This is the first study in India, attempting to determine the type-wise growth of items in IRs.
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The present paper is compilation of open access resources in the subject area library and information science (LIS) and their usefulness in the LIS teaching and learning process…
Abstract
Purpose
The present paper is compilation of open access resources in the subject area library and information science (LIS) and their usefulness in the LIS teaching and learning process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
Researcher compiled list by visiting library science department web sites, library web sites, OA forums/blogs, etc.
Findings
The library science subject area is rich in various forms of open access literature which is reported in the paper.
Originality/value
One of the first studies to report various forms of open access literature in the library science subject area.
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Valérie Spezi, Jenny Fry, Claire Creaser, Steve Probets and Sonya White
This paper aims to report on the findings of the second phase of the Behavioural strand of the EC‐funded PEER project (http://www.peerproject.eu/). The paper seeks to explore…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to report on the findings of the second phase of the Behavioural strand of the EC‐funded PEER project (http://www.peerproject.eu/). The paper seeks to explore authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to authors' peer‐reviewed accepted manuscripts in open access repositories.
Design/methodology/approach
The research was undertaken using a mixed‐method approach, involving the distribution of a survey by the 12 participating publishers to their authors in selected journal titles and a participatory workshop with European researchers from selected disciplinary areas.
Findings
Researchers' attitudes towards versions of published journal articles made open access via open access repositories may vary depending on whether researchers report behaviours from the perspective of an author or a reader. The research found that disciplinary cultures, norms and traditions shape authors' self‐archiving behaviour and readers' use of those versions of journal articles held in repositories.
Research limitations/implications
One of the limitations of the research is that it was impossible for the research team to gauge the representativeness of the survey compared to the actual disciplinary distribution of the population of EU researchers, as such population information is not available in an aggregated and consistent format.
Originality/value
The PEER Observatory is an unprecedented large‐scale collaboration between publishers, researchers and repositories to investigate the effects of self‐archiving at European level. The paper provides a disciplinary reading of the findings and augments the understanding of how disciplinary culture and norms shape authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to self‐archiving.
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Digital repositories are emerging technologies for knowledge sharing and management in academic institutions. Digital repositories collect, store, preserve, index and share the…
Abstract
Purpose
Digital repositories are emerging technologies for knowledge sharing and management in academic institutions. Digital repositories collect, store, preserve, index and share the intellectual capital of faculty and research staff, namely their scholarly publications and teaching material. In a developing country like India, capturing this intellectual capital is becoming important and unavoidable for business schools. Creation of a digital archive for scholarly and teaching material is a growing requirement and is feasible assuming faculties use digital resources for their creation and are ready to share them. The paper aims to discuss a survey conducted and a pilot implementation of an institutional repository at the Icfai Business School (Business School Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India), Ahmedabad, India.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey was conducted at the Icfai Business School, with the questionnaire being used as a tool to collect data, to determine the usage of digital resources by faculty and research staff in scholarly activities and teaching; understand the need and use of an institutional repository by the faculty. The pilot implementation of the institutional repository at Icfai Business School, Ahmedabad is also described.
Findings
The study indicates that faculty in business schools from different academic areas and teaching experience do use digital resources for scholarly publications and teaching material, they do indicate a knowledge sharing culture and tend to show a positive attitude towards the need and use of a Digital institutional repository. Implementing the pilot institutional repository using Open Source DSpace software was an experience and provided visibility to the institutional intellectual capital.
Research limitations/implications
Infrastructure, funding and manpower were the initial limitations. Once the institutional repository was installed, management of the repository was necessary. Planning of communities and collections, system maintenance like backups, populating the repository with the seed collection, creating awareness for initiating faculty self‐archiving for the growth of the repository were some of the challenges faced. Staff were to be trained to ensure that documents were properly uploaded and metadata submitted into the repository.
Practical implications
The pilot institutional repository aims to collect, preserve, share the intellectual capital and enhance institutional visibility. The intellectual output of faculty and research staff is available at one centralized location for search. Information retrieval from this repository on the basis of communities, collections, keywords, author, and titles is possible. As the repository is OAI enabled, visibility to the work of the faculty and the institution is enhanced.
Originality/value
Implementing the pilot institutional repository at Icfai Business School, Ahmedabad has created a central facility for systematic archiving of the intellectual output of faculty and research staff. The institutional repository is of utility and value to both the faculty and the institute as it gives visibility to the work done. It is one of the few business schools in India who have implemented an open access institutional digital repository to capture the intellectual capital and share knowledge.
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