Sci-Tech Contributed Papers for the 2006 SLA Conference

"Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Sci-Tech and Engineering Libraries"
Monday, Jun 12, 2006 (3:30PM - 5:00PM)
Convention Center 311

Introduction
Acknowledgements
Additional Bibliography by Anna Pougas, SLIS Student, Indiana University

PDF Document

Open Access Initiatives in India - an Evaluation

Leila Fernandez
Science Librarian
York University
Toronto, Canada

Abstract

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Slide Presentation: PowerPoint Document

Developing countries have embraced open access with a view to promote visibility of research done in these regions. Open access initiatives described in this paper are based on interviews with information professionals responsible for creation and maintenance of online research repositories in the country. Open access journals, e-print archives and e-theses repositories are covered with an emphasis on the sciences including the physical sciences, mathematics and the biomedical sciences. Existing repositories were identified from the Institutional Archives Registry at http://archives.eprints.org. Key contacts were facilitated by well-known open access advocates Dr.Leslie Chan and Dr Subbiah Arunachalam.

Participants were contacted by e-mail and sites were visited wherever possible. Universities in India are at present lacking in infrastructure for establishing institutional repositories, so most of the institutions visited were research institutes and informatics centres. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to ascertain the background of participants, institutional culture, software selection, nature of funding, submission policies and future plans of these repositories. Also covered were promotion methods, training and support.

Barriers to setting up institutional repositories were identified. Whereas some sites have difficulties in populating repositories, others showed a lack of current research material due to faculty non-compliance. Sites flourish where there is adequate funding and institutional commitment at the highest level. Based on participant feedback a list of best practices will be presented. Certain commonalities and differences with the western world will be outlined. Key sites with innovative features will be demonstrated. The intent of this paper is to create an awareness of emerging institutional repositories in India in the context of recent developments with regard to open access.

Atkinson’s Control Zone: Ten Years Later

Daureen Nesdill, MS, MLIS
Science & Engineering Library
J. Willard Marriott Library
Salt Lake City, Utah

Abstract

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In the mid-‘90s Ross Atkinson of Cornell University promoted his Control Zone as a way for academic libraries to counteract the ever-increasing costs of subscriptions to science, technology and medical (STM) journals. The Control Zone is a “single digital research library” (national, international?) created and maintained by academic libraries for the purpose of selecting and publishing the papers resulting from the research of faculty. The research paper and not the journal acquires prestige from being admitted to the Control Zone.  Additional prestige is acquired by the number and type of reader accessing the paper and by the number of times the paper is cited.  

Since the mid-‘90s we have seen publishers of STM journals place their publications online; peer review become an online process; and the rise of open access journals.  The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) defines open access journals as “journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access”.  A few studies have shown open access journals to have impact factors comparable to that of non-open access journals.  In addition, the cost of publishing online journals approximates the cost of publishing in print so cost is not a factor, but a question of who will pay for the publication.  In general, open access business models shift the cost of publishing back to the author or the author’s sponsor. 

Open access journals are attempting to solve the problem of high cost journal subscriptions at the journal level.  Institutional repositories, on the other hand, are working at the level of the article. SPARC’s definition of an institutional repository, “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single university or a
multiple institution community of colleges and universities” is a close approximation of Atkinson’s Control Zone.  Thirteen nations reported having at least 792 institutional repositories in mid-2005.  The major impediment for an author to submit an article to a repository is copyright ownership.

Open access journals are changing the way academia pays for publishing its research while institutional repositories are leading academia away from dependence on the journal model.  Both are leading academia towards Atkinson’s Control Zone.  An issue not yet addressed is that of link resolvers directing researchers to the holdings of institutional repositories.  Studies have shown that researchers want to read articles not journals, and would rather search databases, not tables of content.  To access an article resulting from a search of Scifinder Scholar or Engineering Village, the interface currently does not take the user to the article in an institutional repository.  Link resolvers must be programmed to find the contents of all institutional repositories, i.e. transformed into one Control Zone, and make these accessible from the interfaces of commercial article databases.

Institutional Repositories: Beware the Field of Dreams Fallacy!

Sara R. Tompson
Deborah A. Holmes-Wong
Janis F. Brown
University of Southern California Libraries
Los Angeles, California

Abstract

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Slide Presentation: PowerPoint Document

Organizations constructing institutional repositories (IRs) must avoid the trap of “if we build it, they will come.”  The deliberate aim of the University of Southern California Information Services Division’s Institutional Repository Needs Assessment Task Force (chaired by Holmes-Wong) was to poll potential users to assess the need for an institutional repository on campus, prior to any full scale implementation of such a resource.

The IR assessment literature thus far does not indicate extensive use of document repositories, even at institutions that have led this innovation, such as MIT. As Task Force members, the authors teamed to conduct in-depth interviews of engineering, science and medicine faculty members regarding institutional repositories.  No resounding clamoring for IRs was uncovered over the course of our interviews during the Summer and Fall 2005 semesters.  We did discover some common needs amongst STM (science-technology-medicine) researchers’ for scholarly publishing support at all stages of the literature life cycle.  The success of our team approach to assessing needs, as well as the results of our interviews, will be presented as practical models for organizations interested in developing useful IRs.