Digital/Open Access repositories

Paul Sheehan

Director of Library Services DCU

HEAnet National Networking Conference

Athlone 11th November 2005

Outline

• Open Access repository/digital repository

• What are Open Access Repositories?

• Why are they important?

• What is the global picture re. OARs?

• What is happening in Ireland?

OA Repositories• Purpose is to make scholarly articles freely available to

anyone in global scholarly community who wants to use them

• Open Access - Definition:

OA is the free availability on the public Internet, permitting all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles…without financial legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself.

Source: SCURL declaration on Open Access. http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm

OA Repositories - protocols• OAR is a server conforming to the OAI-PMH protocol

– OAI-PMH Open Access initiative protocol for metadata harvesting

• Protocol is a low barrier, platform independent harvesting standard

• The standard renders all compliant and registered servers interoperable, so that their information can be shared.

• Server content may be metadata or metadata and related objects

• Creation of OAR server requires implementation of free software and registration with OAI registry at Cornell University

Open Access Repositories

Data Providers

Service Providers

Users

1

2

n

1

2

n

Which journals?

• A recent survey (http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html) found that:

– 92% of (8853) journals surveyed

permitted lodging of a pre- or post- print in a repository

– 80% of journals permitted lodging of a peer reviewed form of paper (but not pdf) in a repository.

Publishers (Peer-reviewed versions)

• American Institute of Physics• American Physical Society• Blackwell• Elsevier• Emerald• Institute of Physics• John Wiley• Kluwer• Royal Society of Chemistry• etc

Why Open Access?

• Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly funded research must be made available and accessible for public use … as widely, rapidly, and effectively as possible. Research Councils UK 2005

• The current subscription –based system of scholarly communication…now operates at a sub-optimal level and is reaching the point where it is no longer sustainable in the research context. Universities UK position statement 2005

The Funders’ position

• The National Institutes of Health in USA (in 2004 $27b funding) is advising its authors to lodge copies of peer-reviewed papers in its repository, Pubmedcentral within 12 months of publication.

• The Wellcome Trust (c. £400m funding p.a.). now requires all funded researchers to deposit electronic versions of their peer-reviewed research articles in an OA repository within 6 months of publication

• The House of Commons Select Committee report Scientific publishing - free for all? also recommended that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate researchers to deposit a copy of their articles in institutional repositories.

Who has IRs?• In UK (almost) all Russell group universities • The UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science

and Technology investigation into science publishing Scientific publishing - free for all? (2004) recommended that all UK universities should have an institutional repository

• Australia, Holland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Canada, and Scotland, among others, have numerous IRs at institutional level and advanced plans for national co-ordinating structures.

• Australia ARROW project – Monash U., U. New South Wales, National Library of Australia, Swinburne University of technology

Global distribution of OARs

USA – 129UK – 59Germany – 42Brazil – 30Canada – 27France - 24Ireland – 2 (28th) Total - 434

Source: Browse Institution archives registry – http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse

Types of OA Repositories

• Institutional - 230

• Disciplinary, departmental - 60

• Other – 190

Source: Browse Institution archives registry – http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse

Institutional Repositories - Strategic benefits

• Aggregates university publications in one place• Index/record of quality of university publications

and research • Increases citations (Online or invisible. Lawrence,

S. Nature Vol 411. No. 6837. P521)• Improves measurement and quality of impact• Potential to be linked to institutionally generated

CVs for a range of research supports

Content of IRs

Records MeanMedian

Global 660365 3439 286

Ireland 284 142 124

Source: Browse Institution archives registry – http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse

Other functions of IRs

• Theses

• Grey literature

• learning objects

• digital preservation

IUA Initiatives

• IUA Library’s Group Institutional Repositories Working Group 2005

• DCU 2002/5 3 year project-based IR. From October 2005 IR a mainstream activity

• NUI Maynooth• Other IAU institutions are actively pursuing

setting up IRs