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 .
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
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)
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…..