Category Archives
November 27, 2007
Ever wondered where institutional repositories are located?
If you've ever wanted to know where in the world institutional repositories are located, look no further than Repository 66 Repository Maps. As of November 27, 844 IRs are represented on a Google maps mashup that includes not only the location but information about specific repositories. When you first visit the site, you'll see a world map with 844 (or more!) colored dots scattered seemingly randomly around the globe.
The full map might be too unwieldy to use effectively, but you can filter it by platform (e.g. DSpace vs. EPrints), registration date range, or repository size. The dot color indicates platform, and you can also change the dots to show the size of the IR. When you hover over a dot, it shows the name of the repository, and then when you click on it, more information pops up. For instance, I clicked on the Vanderbilt University e-Archive dot and learned the type, platform, date registered, size, and description of Vanderbilt's IR. It also allowed me to search the particular IR using Google, Google Scholar, or Microsoft Live. Very cool.
The information comes from ROAR (the Registry of Open Access Repositories) and OpenDOAR (the Directory of Open Access Repositories) and is constantly updated through those sites. More information about the maps and the project is available on the Repository 66 Map Blog. One caveat is that the location isn't always 100% accurate, but it still gives a nice visual picture.
If a visual representation of known IRs is easier for you to use than a list of IR links, I highly recommend checking out this website. It's also a great way to procrastinate...
- Marla Ballou
Posted by colldev at 11:26 AM
May 31, 2006
University of Conneticut Opens Institutional Respository
May 30, 2006
Press Release:
The University has begun full-scale operation of an electronic institutional repository.
Following the successful completion of a year-long pilot program, the University Libraries has opened its digital collection of the University's scholarly products to all faculty, staff, and graduate students at UConn, including the regional campuses, the Health Center, and the Law School.
The website is: http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 11:12 PM
July 11, 2005
Several Studies Show Willingness to Archive
A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found
that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would
willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an
institutional repository.
The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by
Southampton's Professor Stevan Harnad as 'a historic turning point in the
worldwide research community's progress towards 100 per cent Open Access'.
The new results are being reported this week at the International
Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific
Information in Beijing, China (22-24 June 2005) by Dr Alma Swan of Key
Perspectives, along with new findings from Dr Les Carr, of the School of
Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the
only UK university that already has a self-archiving mandate. Southampton
is a leader in the worldwide Open Access movement.
The international, cross-disciplinary study on Open Access had 1296
respondents. The main findings are:
* The vast majority of authors (81 per cent) would comply willingly with a
mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their
articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; a further 14 per
cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5 per cent would not comply
(highest willingness, US: 88 per cent; UK: 83 per cent; lowest, China: 58
per cent).
* 49 per cent of respondents had already self-archived at least one
article in the previous three years
* 31 per cent of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of
self-archiving
* Use of institutional repositories for self-archiving had doubled since
the first survey (2004) ; the University of Southampton has the highest
rate of self-archiving in the UK
* Only 20 per cent of authors who self-archived reported any degree of
difficulty in self-archiving, and this dropped to 9 per cent with
subsequent experience. Les Carr's analyses of Southampton web-logs show
that it takes 10 minutes for the first paper, and even less for subsequent
papers.
* Self-archiving is done the most by those researchers who publish the
most papers
* Researchers' primary purpose in publishing is to have an impact on their
fields (i.e., to be read, used, built upon, and cited)
In a separate exercise the American Physical Society (APS) and the
Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) were asked about their
experiences over the last 14 years of existence of arXiv (the open e-print
archive which has over 300,000 physics papers deposited). Both publishers
said that they could not identify any loss of subscriptions due to arXiv,
did not view it as a threat to their own publishing activities and indeed
encouraged it.
'These results are hugely important,' said Stevan Harnad, 'and will be
highly influential. Currently only 15 per cent of articles are being
self-archived worldwide, but we can see from the survey that the
overwhelming majority of academic authors everywhere would willingly
self-archive if they were asked to do so. The results are already
confirmed by the 90% self-archiving rate at Southampton, the first
institution to adopt a self-archiving mandate, and by CERN, the world's
biggest institution to adopt a self-archiving mandate, with likewise over
90% self-archiving.
'Universities and research-funders who have hesitated about requiring this
now have the clear evidence that a self-archiving mandate would not lead
to resistance or resentment. And those who hesitated to mandate out of
concern for publishers should note that the publishers with the most and
longest experience with author self-archiving welcome it.'
On the critical question of whether the optimal route for self-archiving
is the central one (as favoured by the US National Institutes of Health)
or the distributed institutional model (favoured by the UK), Professor
Harnad says that the JISC/Key Perspectives reports provide strong support
for the UK Parliamentary Select Committee, which specifically proposed
distributed institutional self-archiving. This is now likely to form the
basis of a recommendation from Research Councils UK (RCUK), which has been
considering the future of Open Access to UK-funded research output.
1. Web links for further information
Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005)
Open access self-archiving: An author study.
Technical Report, External Collaborators, JISC, HEFCE
Powerpoints
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alma-amst.pdf
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt
Key-stroke study of archiving time
Publisher responses including APS and IOPP
Swan, A. (2005) JISC Open Access Briefing Paper.
Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.
Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A.,
Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints
and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned
Publishing 18(1):pp. 25-40.
2. The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, the
most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and the
JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) TARDis (Targeting Academic
Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project, which has been investigating
the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround institutional
repositories.
3. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research
institution with a global reputation for leading-edge research and
scholarship. The University has over 20,000 students and over 5000 staff.
Its annual turnover is in the region of 270 million.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 09:43 AM
February 25, 2005
U of California Announces a Postprint Archive
UC LAUNCHES POSTPRINTS SERVICE TO PROVIDE GREATER ACCESS TO UC SCHOLARSHIP
The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication today
announced the public launch of its new eScholarship postprints service.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 24, 2005
Jennifer Colvin, California Digital Library (510) 287-3384
jennifer.colvin@ucop.edu
UC LAUNCHES POSTPRINTS SERVICE TO PROVIDE GREATER ACCESS TO UC SCHOLARSHIP
Access to previously published articles written by UC faculty will be
available free online.
The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication today
announced the public launch of its new eScholarship postprints service.
Scholars have been increasingly seeking new ways to distribute the results
of their research, and postprints -- peer-reviewed articles that have been
previously published in academic journals -- have recently been at the
center of this movement to reshape scholarly publishing. The new
eScholarship postprints service provides scholars with another option for
regaining control of their scholarship and maximizing its availability and
influence.
In addition, the academic community and general public gain an
unprecedented opportunity to study the published results from the research
happening at all UC campuses and research centers. The repository can be
accessed here.
Added to the existing array of eScholarship Repository publishing services,
which include working paper series and online journals, the postprints
feature allows UC faculty who have retained the appropriate copyrights or
who obtain permission from their publishers to easily deposit previously
published articles into a publicly accessible online repository.
The postprints are fully searchable, available free of charge, and are
persistently maintained in a centrally managed database. The established
popularity of the repository, with more than one million full-text
downloads of content since 2002, makes it an ideal venue for faculty to
reach new audiences of researchers.
Public access to scholarly research
Increasingly, universities are establishing institutional repositories such
as the eScholarship Repository to disseminate research results. In a
parallel development, both public and private funders are requesting or
requiring public access to the results of research that they fund. Congress
has recognized the importance of open-access to taxpayer-funded published
research by instructing the National Institutes of Health to encourage
grant recipients to deposit published articles into another open-access
database, PubMed Central.
"The eScholarship postprint service gives UC faculty an important new
opportunity to manage their peer-reviewed research publications so they can
be accessed worldwide by anyone with an Internet connection," said George
Blumenthal, chair of UC's Universitywide Academic Senate and a professor of
astronomy and astrophysics. "This kind of broad access is vital to
scholarly communication and to the formation and support of global research
and learning communities."
The repository has allowed many UC faculty to extend the dissemination and
influence of their research.
William R. Schonfeld, a professor of political science and director of the
Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine, said "the eScholarship
Repository has been an invaluable vehicle for sharing findings from our
center faculty and graduate fellows with a wide international audience.
After we joined the eScholarship Repository, we have seen the readership of
our paper series double each year."
Commitment to preserving scholarly information
However, the eScholarship program, established in 2000, is only partly
about access. It also demonstrates how seriously the University of
California takes its commitment to acting as steward over the vast well of
scholarly and cultural information that is produced by faculty, staff and
students, and acquired or created by its libraries and museums.
"These materials form a significant part of the scholarly and cultural
record," said M.R.C. Greenwood, University of California provost and senior
vice president for academic affairs. "They contribute directly to the
state's economic progress, educational advancement and cultural well-being.
"By providing access to these materials, UC can ensure its central position
in an evolving global marketplace for information and ideas. But their
value can only fully be realized if they persist through time. Only a
university is positioned to secure these assets in a way that will ensure
that they can be made accessible now and for future generations," she said.
UC faculty interested in joining the eScholarship Repository and depositing
papers via the new postprints service can find more information on the
eScholarship Repository Website.
About the eScholarship Repository
The eScholarship Repository is a project of the University of California
Office of Scholarly Communication's eScholarship program, which
was launched to facilitate innovation and support experimentation in the
production and dissemination of scholarship. The repository offers UC
departments, centers and research units direct control over the creation
and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship, from
pre-publication materials through journals and peer-reviewed series. The
Office of Scholarly Communication is housed in the California Digital Library.
About the California Digital Library
Through the use of technology and innovation, the California Digital
Library
scholarship for the University of California libraries and the communities
they serve. Established in 1997 as a UC library, the California Digital
Library has become one of the largest digital libraries in the world.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 03:21 PM
January 19, 2005
Presentations on Institutional Repositories
This weekend the American Library Association held its Midwinter Meeting in Boston. The University Libraries Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries' held a program called, Institutional Repositories: Their Place in the Evolution of Schorlarly Communication. Two presentations are available online.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 10:25 AM
December 01, 2004
Institutional Respository Conference presentations
Presentations from a conference, Institutional Repositories: The Next Stage.
[Source: Open Access News]
Posted by Donna Braquet at 01:02 PM
October 13, 2004
Institutional Repositories presentation
Paul Conway, Director of Information Technology Services at Duke University Libraries, gave a presentation called Institutional Repositories: Is There Anything Left to Say? (pdf of presentation)
content discovered on Open Access News blog.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 12:37 PM
