Open access repositories: Sharing research to the global community

Peter Ballantyne

ICRISAT Capacity Development Program on Appropriate Technologies and Innovative Approaches for Agriculture Knowledge Sharing

1-4 September 2014

Context

In November 2013, all 15 members of the CGIAR Consortium

unanimously endorsed the Open Access and Data Management

Policy (the “Policy”) designed to make final CGIAR information

products – including publications, datasets, and audiovisual

materials – Open Access

http://www.cgiar.org/open

ARE THEY TRULY ACCESSIBLE?

OUR RESEARCH RESULTS, OUTPUTS, PRODUCTS

Not really …

• They are not captured

• They are locked up behind passwords

• They are kept inside intranets

• They are not on the Internet, or digital

• Their addresses are not permanent

• They are not easy to find

• Licenses do not encourage re-use

• They are not accessible

• They are deep in the iceberg

Acces to public goods long on CGIAR agenda

CGIAR Public Goods

• CGIAR-produced data, information or knowledge assets

– Benefits should be able to travel across boundaries

– Need to be described and stored for posterity

– Should be easily found & accessed

– Should be shared & re-used

– AAA: Available, Accessible, Applicable

OUR RESEARCH RESULTS, OUTPUTS, PRODUCTS

OUR RESEARCH RESULTS, OUTPUTS, PRODUCTS How they should be!

Going Open

More than just ‘Open Access’

1. Open research processes

2. Open research products

3. Open research activities

4. Open research platforms

5. Open ‘by default’?

Open planning – events and thinking

‘Open’ events – all the discussions

Open projects – work in progress

Open presentations

Open photos

Open books

Open outputs

Open source

Open data

Open to re-use

Open for feedback

Working in the open!

“bringing activities out of closed repositories and applications [and events and processes], and pulling them into the open increases the likelihood of learning information earlier.”

- Stowe Boyd: http://blog.podio.com/2011/08/01/working-out-loud-make-work-open-to-make-it-better

Steps we took

Late 2008 – review of ILRI’s KM

Late 2009 – in principle decision to have repository (dspace)

Late 2009 – google books 100% open

Early 2010 – management buy-in (creative commons, repository, social media, open access)

Late 2013 – CGIAR OA policy

Early 2014 – ILRI data portals

Mid 2014 – CGIAR OA guidelines

Late 2014 – ILRI OA and research data ‘plan’

Dspace at ILRI

• Established late 2009

• Driven by demands to have all outputs and products available and accessible

• Replacement for:

Inmagic document catalogue

PDF files spread across the web site

Home made lists of outputs

Manual linking from web sites and blogs etc

• Evolved into ‘CGSpace’ in 2011

• Dspace ‘the’ ILRI way to publish on the ILRI web …

• Gives projects ‘archives’ and visibility’

• We aim to ‘index’ everything, wherever published

• We aim to ‘publish’ as much as we can, with permission

• We decentralise content management: Program teams contribute content; info teams do quality control

• RSS gets content over the web and into mailboxes and onto desktops

• Mainstream, open source solution, with open (OAI) standards and wide support community

• The ‘repository’ is NOT the value proposition for the scientists ; we sell it as ‘publishing’

• It does NOT do all ‘library’ tasks

• Part of ‘being open’

Total web service views

'Open'

Composition of web services views

Open access

• Not by books and journals alone!

• Culture of ‘open’ … listening, sharing, engaging

• Social media opens flows and visibility and engagement

• Open platforms with open APIs

• Open licenses help others to re-use

• Open standards and metadata allow open aggregation and re-use

Institutional issues

• Attend to workflows

• Needs $$$ for articles?

• Needs expertise and capacities (content and technical)

• Questions on metrics and ‘impact factors’

• Take care of privacy and ethics

• Incentives and rewards and recognition?

The presentation has a Creative Commons license. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.

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