Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Agricultural Sciences: The Case of Botswana Agricultural Sciences: The Case of Botswana

College of Agriculture (BCA)College of Agriculture (BCA)

IAALD Africa Chapter Conference, Accra Ghana, 13 - 17 July 2009IAALD Africa Chapter Conference, Accra Ghana, 13 - 17 July 2009

Kebede Hundie Wordofa

&

Poloko Ntokwane-Oseafiana

IntroductionIntroduction Agricultural sector is faced with some major challenges:

• increasing production in a situation of dwindling natural resources necessary for production such as water shortages,

• declining soil fertility, climate change and rapid decrease of fertile lands due to urbanization and population growth.

• Agricultural information spread over different agencies, notably farmers, universities, research institutes, extension services, commercial enterprises, and non-governmental organizations.

• poorly documented information and hard to access; and indigenous knowledge on good practices and lessons learned about innovations is generally not captured .

Open AccessOpen Access

What is Open Access• Unrestricted access to scholarly information• advocates the principle of making scholarly literature available to the public at no

cost removing price barriers such as subscriptions, licensing fees • removes the financial, technical and legal barriers• makes the literature accessible online free of charge

• The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines OA as follows: By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet,

permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002).

Why Open Access (AO)Why Open Access (AO) AO overcome obstacles:

“Price Crisis” rising price of journals subscriptions and

electronic databases

“Permission Crisis” constrained licensing terms and software

locks

Why Open Access (AO) …Why Open Access (AO) …

Low cost of publishing on the Internet

Ease of accessing information online

The average prices of journals and the number of new journals have risen much more faster than the library budgets.

Internet Culture - Information should be free

Increasing legal restrictions on licensing and use of print and digital resources by corporations (since the 1990s).

Benefits of Open AccessBenefits of Open Access

• OA benefits authors, researchers, lecturers and students, libraries, universities, publishers, funding agencies, governments and citizens.

Major Vehicles for Disseminating Major Vehicles for Disseminating Open Access LiteratureOpen Access Literature

Preprint Services Open Access Journals Institutional Repositories

Institutional RepositoriesInstitutional Repositories

Definition Crow (2002) defines IRs as “digital collections capturing and

preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community.” Crow (2002) further explains that it is “a digital archive of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution and accessible to end users both within and outside of the institution, with few if any barriers to access.” defines IRs as “digital.

IRs are collections of research output or information generated particularly by academic or research institutions and stored in a digital format that can be preserved and made accessible to end users through the Internet.

Contents of institutional repositoriesContents of institutional repositories

• post-prints• Peer-reviewed articles• Book chapters• Monographs• Conference proceedings• Unpublished papers such as pre-prints• Working papers• Thesis and dissertations, • Reports • Video recordings etc.

Benefits of institutional repositoriesBenefits of institutional repositories

To individual authors To institutions To researchers

Benefits of IR cont..Benefits of IR cont..

• Besides, the benefits of IRs to research institutions in developing countries are numerous. According to Chan, Kirsop and Arunachalam (2005), these benefits are as follows:

• Access to international research output• International access to research generated in developing countries• Promotion of institutional research output, providing new contacts

and research partnerships for authors• Improved citation and research impact• Provision of usage statistics showing global interest of institutional

research• allows improved access to subsidiary data• Facilitating peer review.

Some Tools for Finding OA Some Tools for Finding OA LiteratureLiterature

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Launched in May 2003. As of February 2009, there were 3875 journals in the database, of which 216 journals are in the fields of agriculture and food sciences.

Users can browse journals by title or subject and search for them by keyword.

Institutional Archives Registry - As of 25 April, covers 421 archives Users can browse archives by country, archive type, or software, or search for them by keyword.

Some Tools for Finding OA Some Tools for Finding OA Literature….Literature….

OAIster - A project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, providing open access to over 20 million records from 1082 contributors as of March 2009 (e.g., preprints, journal articles, dissertations, etc).

Google Scholar - Launched in Nov 2004

Indexes the full-text (including the cited references) of articles in fee/subscription based scholarly journals on the Internet as well as open access literature.

Many others on the web

Challenges facing institutional Challenges facing institutional repositoriesrepositories

• Lack of faculty involvement• Lack of awareness of availability of different

mechanism for distributing and accessing research info.

• Lack of promotion by institutions on the use of Internet

• Copyright issues• Lack of an IR start-up policy process• Content harvesting and digitization

Choosing IR software solutionsChoosing IR software solutions

Factors to consider when choosing IR software are: cost Staffing Support and training Development of system and Hardware requirements

Three main IR software solutions:• Open Source Software• Commercial or Proprietary Software • Vendor Hosted System.

Software Advantage Disadvantage

Open Source -It is free promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing .

-No marketing is involved

-Flexible and can be tailored to match individual institutional requirements.

-used by institutions with

minimal resources

No support , no training, time consuming in metadata, systems admin and programming skills required, more technical staff , development undirected

Commercial or proprietary

Proper support and training, Less technical skills, development directed, input of customers

Not free, pay for license and

maintenance

Vendor of Host no hardware to purchase,

install and maintain.

not as staff intensive in terms of set up, customization, configuration and ongoing administration and maintenance, backups and redundancy are the vendor’s responsibility

Institutions do not have control over it.

Implications of OA for developing Implications of OA for developing countriescountries

• Overcoming problems of inability to afford subscriptions to journals

• Overcoming inability to integrate national research into global knowledge base

• Expanded access to global scientific literature• Access to both published and unpublished

literature• Provision of a platform to e-journals• Research more exposed• Easy dissemination of research output.

Numbers and percentages of IRs by continentsNumbers and percentages of IRs by continents

20; 2%

58; 4%

77; 6%

146; 11%

375; 29%

628; 48%

Africa

South America

Australasia, Carribean andCentral America

Asia

North America

Europe

IR of Botswana College of IR of Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA)Agriculture (BCA)

Background information was established on 31st May 1991. is a parastatal under the Ministry of Agriculture and an

associate institution of the University of Botswana. offers programs at undergraduate and postgraduate levels Has five academic departments, namely; • Animal Science and Production, • Basic Sciences, • Crop Science and Production, • Agricultural Economics Educations and Extension, and

• Agricultural Engineering and Land Planning.

Vision and MissionVision and Mission

Its vision is to become “a world-class institution in teaching, research and service in agriculture and related fields.”

The College’s mission is “to produce high quality graduates, generate suitable technologies and provide advisory services to improve agriculture productivity through innovative teaching, relevant research, and customer-driven service” (Botswana College of Agriculture).

Institutional repository of BCA

Established an IR in 2007 with the following objectives:• Provide access to college output• Preserve the scholarly work in digitization format

The Development Phases of the BCA IR• Project Proposal• Develop a service definition

• identify collection• liaise with teaching staff and administrative staff

• Assemble a team• assessment of current staff and skills

• Acquire/install software/hardware• research and choose a software• download, install and configure• digitize collection• Setting up different collections

• Market the service• Test• Launched officially in

• October 2008

Figure 2 The screenshot of the Figure 2 The screenshot of the BCABCA IR homepage. IR homepage.

Figure 5Figure 5 The screenshot of the college journal in the BCA IR. The screenshot of the college journal in the BCA IR..

Figure 4Figure 4 The screenshot of the college volumes of the journal in BCA The screenshot of the college volumes of the journal in BCA IR.IR.

Figure 4Figure 4 The screenshot of table of contents of BCA journal in IR. The screenshot of table of contents of BCA journal in IR.

Figure 6Figure 6 The screenshot of the college journal full text in the BCA IR. The screenshot of the college journal full text in the BCA IR.

Lessons LearnedLessons Learned

• It needs support from management, IT staff, faculty, librarians, etc to succeed

• Do a pilot project to teach staff, test the software, and gain more support through demonstration

• Demonstration to relevant people through presentations convinces them to support - “seeing is believing”

• Contents harvesting, digitization and creation of metadata is time consuming and huge task

• Budget for staff time• Train staff on metadata

ConclusionConclusion• Researchers and academicians in developing countries face the impact

of financial constraints to access scholarly literature due to the escalating costs of journals and proprietary databases.

• Besides, the research output of developing countries does not get a wider audience, hence less impact globally.

• Agriculture is the most important sector that supports the majority of population in developing countries.

• The sector has its own challenges that need to be overcome through research and development (R&D) that needs adequate, relevant, and timely information.

• Much of agricultural research output and indigenous knowledge in developing countries are not well documented and not easily accessible.

• Concerned institutions and governments need to do more to make their research output accessible to the public through OA and IRs.

• By so doing, institutions will be able to collect, store and disseminate their research work.

Questions/Answers & Discussions.

Thank You.