Institutional Repositories: An Effective Scholarly Communication Channel Poornima Narayana

Institutional Repositories: An Effective Scholarly Communication Channel

• Poornima Narayana

• Deputy Head,

• Information Center for Aerospace Science & Technology

• National Aerospace Laboratories

• Bangalore –560017 India

•  

• Presented at National Symposium on “Open Access and Building Institutional Repositories” 21st-23rd January 2009

• National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore, India

Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication

• The broadest possible access to published research and other scholarly writings

• Increased control by scholars and the academy over the system of scholarly publishing

• Fair and reasonable prices for scholarly information

• Competitive markets for scholarly communication

• A diversified publishing industry

• Open access to scholarship

Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication ……

• Innovations in publishing that reduce distribution costs, speed delivery, and extend access to scholarly research

• Quality assurance in publishing through peer review

• Fair use of copyrighted information for educational and research purposes

• Extension of public domain information

• Preservation of scholarly information for long-term future use

• The right to privacy in the use of scholarly information

What is Open Access

• User’s aspect

• 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.

What is Open Access

• Author’s aspect

• The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be given to authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Open access increases impact Nature, vol. 411, No. 6837 (2001) p. 521

Open Access Channels

• - Refereed free electronic journals,

• - Research-area-specific archive

• (e-print) servers,

• - Institutional repositories of individual universities/institutions and

• - Self-posting/archiving on authors'

• home pages.

Indian OA Journals

• International Open Access Day on 14 October 2008

• National Institute of Science Communication And Information

• two journals of NISCAIR [ CSIR India ] -

• Indian Journal of Chemistry - Section A and

• Indian Journal of Biochemistry & Biophysics in Open Access mode .

• NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository [NOPR] [ http://nopr.niscair.res.in ].

What is an IR

• An IR is a service that a Research Organization offers to its community for the management and dissemination of research materials created by the community members

• Currently used by leading academic and research institutions worldwide for providing improved access to their research publications

Institutional Repositories

• Definition:

• An Institutional repository is an Organization based set of services which the organization offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation, where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution” (Clifford Lynch 2003)

• “Digital archives of intellectual products created by the faculty, staff and students of an institution or group of institutions accessible to end users both within and outside the institution.”

Institutional Repositories

• Institutionally based

• Scholarly material in digital formats

• Cumulative and perpetual

• Open and interoperable

• But not necessarily free!

IR Users

• Senior administration

• Graduate students

• Retiring professors

• University research documents

• Institutes and Centres

• Your own organization

Why an IR?

• Halving the double dip

• Providing outlets for monographs and other specialty publications

• Ensuring persistent access to information

• Better representation of scholarship created within the institution

• Stake or further leadership claim in a specific subject area

• For consortia, display the depth and breadth of members’ intellectual output

Why Institutional Repositories?

• For the Individual

• Provide a central archive of their work
• Increase the dissemination and impact of their research
• Acts as a full CV

• For the Institution

• Increases visibility and prestige
• Acts as an advertisement to funding sources, potential new faculty and students, etc.

• For Society

• Provide access to the world’s research
• Ensures long-term preservation of institutes’ academic output

Why Establish an IR?

• Institutional Benefits

• Stewardship of scholarly output
• Efficiencies through centralization
• Showcase
• Proactive response to scholarly communication crisis/open access movement

Why Establish an IR?

• Individual Benefits

• Wider distribution
• Showcase
• Safekeeping
• Lowers technology barrier
• Time
• Persistent URLs

Type of Research Material in an IR

• Published Research Material

• Ex: Journal articles, Book chapters, Conference papers

• Unpublished Research Material

• Ex: preprints, working papers, Thesis/dissertations, technical reports, progress/status reports, committee reports presentations, teaching materials, audio/video clips

• Supporting Research material

• Ex: Data sheets, models, blue prints

An Institutional Repository can provide

• A complement to existing Scholarly Communication models

• A complement to other digital collections (dynamic connections between “texts”)

• Redundancy of scholarship (NELLCO & RePEc)

• Collocation for a scholar’s work (Researcher Page)

• Greater access to grey literature

• Institutional stewardship & preservation (Are data providers or aggregators as committed long-term as an institution’s library?)

Core Features

• Digital content

• Community-driven & focused

• Institutionally supported

• Durable & permanent

• Accessible content

Core Functionality

• Material submission

• Metadata application

• Access control

• Discovery support

• Distribution

• Preservation

How does IR work

• Research material is hosted and managed on an Institutional Repository server, using appropriate IR software

• Accessible on the organizational LAN (intranet) + Internet/private network

• Scientists use a web browser to submit (deposit) research material and also search the repository

• Through OAI inter-operability protocol, a central search service ‘Harvests” metadata from individual IR’s, builds a cross-index and provides single point cross-repository search service

• Security concerns could be handled at network, IR and publication level

IR Technology

• IR software (Open Source/Commercial)

• OAI-PMH harvesting protocol/software (Free)

• Intel/Pentium servers for IR

• Linux/Red Hat OS, MySQL/PostGress DBMS, Apache/Tomcat web server, Perl/Java (Free)

Standards

IR Software

• Key component of an IR is the repository management software

• Several software now available under open source license

• Comply with OAI metadata harvesting protocol

• Released and publicly available

IR Software

• ARNO (Academic Research in Netherlands Online), Tilburg University

• http://www.uba.uva.nl/arno

• CDSware (CERN Document Server software, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

• http://cdsware.cern.ch/

• I-Tor (Tools & Technologies for open repositories), Netherlands

• http://www.I-tor.org/en/toon

• MyCore

• http://www.mycore.de/engl/index.html

IR Software

• Dspace

• - MIT and HP, Cambridge, MA, USA

• - http://www.dspace.org

• Eprints

• - University of Southampton, U>K

• - http://software.eprints.org

• Fedora digital object repository management system

• - University of Virginia, USA

• - http://www.fedora.info/

What an IR aim to do

• • Capture and describe digital material using a

• workflow

• – Provide interface for online submission of research

• material (intranet)

• • Provide access to this material over the web

• (metadata and/or full pub)

• • Preserve digital material over long period of time

• • Expose metadata through OAI-PMH protocol

• – Default: Unqualified Dublin Core

• – Other metadata standards

EPrints and DSpace

• Widely used IR software

• Platform

• – EPrints: Unix/ Linux/ Perl/ Apache/ MySQL/

• XML/ HTML/

• – DSpace: Unix/ Linux/ Java/ Tomcat or

• Apache/ XML/ HTML/ Ant/ PostGreSQL

• Imply software knowledge required for installing, configuring, and

• maintaining archives developed using these packages.

Institutional Repositories

IR Statistics

• Software:

• Dspace - 30%

• GNU / Eprints - 25%

• Language:

• English - 85%

• German – 15%

• French – 10%

• Spanish – 6%

Growth of the OpenDOAR Database- Worldwide

Usage of Open Access Repository Software- Worldwide

Subjects in OpenDOAR - Worldwide

IR: Core Issues

Policy Decisions

Management and Organizational Issues

Cultural Issues

Key Features and Functionality

• Registration of institutional users (authors)

• - For document submission and other privileged use

• -User authentication

• - Profile setup

• Document submission

• - Authentication

• - Assign metadata

• - Upload document

• - Grant license

• Approval/moderation

• - Submission (metadata, format, affiliation etc)

• - Content approval (peer review)

Key features and Functionality

• Archiving

• - Date stamping

• - Unique/persistent identifier assignment

• - Preservation support

• - Indexing and storage

• Dissemination

• - Search/Browse

• - OAI registration and compliance (metadata exposure)

• - Rights management

• Administration

• -Administration communities, collections, users,groups

• - Document formats, metadata

• - Licenses, submission policies

• - Preservation

COPYRIGHT ISSUES

• Berlin Declaration Act recognises the view that community standards will continue to be important in the enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work

• The ROMEO project at Loughborough investigated publishers’ attitudes to mounting of pre- and post-prints on servers

• The SHERPA project at Nottingham has taken over and augmented the ROMEO data

• http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

• Yellow publishers allow preprints but not postprints; blue ones postprints but not preprints; green ones both; white neither

• 61% of publishers on the current SHERPA list formally allow some form of self-archiving; 38% out of the 61% are “green”

ARCHIVAL ISSUES

• Budapest Open Access Initiative

• Two complementary strategies:

• Self-Archiving: Scholars should be able to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives which conform to Open Archives Initiative standards

• Open-Access Journals: Journals will not charge subscriptions or fees for online access. Instead, they should look to other sources to fund peer-review and publication (e.g., publication charges)

IRs and Open Access

• Promote Open Access Archiving

• ‘Green Road’

• IRs are just one possible vehicle for open access

• Open access journals
• Subject repositories

Harvesters

• Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo

• Harvest metadata from OAI-PMH OAJS, E-PRINT Archives & IRs

• OAI (Open Archives Initiative) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

• Dublin Core
• Self-identification

• Web Citation Index

Metadata Harvesters

• Indexes/harvests metadata from OA Archives & OAJs

• Interoperable, cross searching over Repositories

• OAI-PMH Compliant

• OAIster – Uni Michigan (wwww.oaister.org)

• ARC - ODU, Virginia

• ArXIV (Physics, Maths., Comp.Sc)

• UIUC Registry of Cultural Heritage ; UIUC Data Provider Registry

Metadata Harvesters - India

• Search Digital Libraries (SDL) /DRTC harvesting L&IS subject-specific open access archives and repositories.

• ‘Knowledge Harvester@INSA’, experimental initiative harvests metadata from 3 archives.

• “SJPI Cross Journal Search Service” initiative from NCSI at IISc 13 Indian open access journals

• SEED IITD indexes 4 archives

• NAL OAI compliant IRs of CSIR Labs. through a unified search interface (PKP Harvester)

• Open J-Gate (www.openj-gate.org), a free service open access journals indexing service Informatics India Private Limited

Scholarly Communication Paradigm

IMPORTANT CASE STUDIES

• The ARNO project (Academic Research in the Netherlands Online

• SPARC launched in 1998 by the US Association of Research Libraries

• TARDiS (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure U K)

• CDSWARE (CERN)

• DAEDALUS (Univ at Glasgow U K)

• DARE (Digital Academic Repositories Netherlands)

• FAIR (Funded by JISC)

• LEADERS (Linking EAD to Electronically Retrievable Sources)

Important IRs (World over)

• Australian National University

• Aalborg University

• Universitat Stuttgart

• Lunds Universitet

• National University of Ireland

• University of Glasgow

• California Digital Library

• MIT

Scientific Research in India

Institutional Repositories: Indian Scenario

• Nearly 50 Institutions

• Public Domain (Internet): 35

• Campus Network/LAN : 15

• Leading IRs

• IISc, ISI, NAL, NCL, NIO, RRI, DU, IITs

Institutional Repositories: Indian Scenario

• IR Software

• Dspace – 25

• Eprints - 11

• Greenstone – 7

• Inhouse - 7

NAL IR website

NAL IR website

IR - Advantages

• New and innovative channel of scholarly communication

• Provide wider access and visibility to the research output

• Preserves of institution’s heritage

• Reduce the publication delay

IR – Advantages (Contd…)

• Faster communication

• Increase the citation to the publications

• Strengthens research especially in the Indian context

• Effective communication channel

• A boon for Gray Literature visibility

IR-Technical Benefits

Strategic Benefits

Constraints of IR

• Absence of a well defined institutional policy

• Lack of IR expertise in India

• Insufficient funds for IT Infrastructure and manpower

• Apathy of authors towards time consuming and lengthy deposition procedure.

• Ignorance of users in the absence of appropriate literacy program

Constraints of IR (Contd…)

• Publisher’s rigid attitude towards copyright policy

• Customization of open source software is a bottle neck

• Nature of content: Classified/restricted and Unclassified/Open

• Diversity of content and the language used in the full texts

• Relying on unproven methods for long term digital preservation.

IRs for sustainable development? A light at the end of the tunnel…..

Thank you ?