ProQuest Drops Dissertation E-Submission Fees

From Library Journal By Josh Hadro, Sep. 2, 2010

In a move with potentially broad implications for the world of Electronic Dissertations and Theses (ETD), ProQuest has dropped the fees for those using its ETD Administrator program and interface.

Ireland's National Portal for Open Access to Research Goes Live

Shortened version of an annoucement received on June 9, 2010 from Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services, Dublin City University

RIAN - www.rian.ie - will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities’ strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

Benefits of RIAN to Irish authors:
* Broadens worldwide access to material
* Increases citations for research material
* Makes easier access to material via search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo
* Raises profile of Irish researchers internationally

Benefits to Irish institutions include:
* Provides a showcase of the institution’s research output
* Raises the profile of the institution’s research internationally through broader access and citations
* Increases potential for collaboration and synthesis between Irish and international researchers

For more information contact:
Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services, Dublin City University
Telephone: (+353 1) 7005211, Email: paul.sheehan@dcu.ie

Recent blog posts on institutional repositories

University Lectures By David(David) ... Research Showcase Dan Hood, Research Showcase Outreach Coordinator, will define "institutional repository" (IR), cover the history of IRs, and highlight notable advances in open access publishing relating to IRs. ... News from the "Real World" - http://cmuptm.blogspot.com/

A few thoughts on the heels of Berlin 6 By Cornelius Librarians tend to see themselves as guardians of physical objects (books) and of digital objects which can be treated like physical objects (papers, dissertations, stuff that can be put into an institutional repository). ... CorpBlawg - http://corpblawg.ynada.com/

Paper — Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional ... Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional Repository Revolution The explosion of recent open access repositories and the future desire for global open access to scholarly communication has prompted the need to have more ... ResourceShelf » Resources - http://www.resourceshelf.com/

Overview of the literature on IRs By admin Nicole Carpenter, Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional Repository Revolution, deposited November 11, 2008. Student paper for a class at the School of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University. ... Edu Blog - http://blog.lider.tc/

Repository interoperability By dempsey In interviews with depositors and after conducting a case study of an Institutional Repository, we find different perceptions of the role of the repository, some seeing it mainly as an administrative tool for collecting and collating ... Lorcan Dempsey's weblog - http://orweblog.oclc.org/

Author guide to open access published June 2008

The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project of Australia has published an author guide to open access titled Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors.

Excerpt from summary:

This guide aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and academic institutions. The guide also explains different methods available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible, such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author’s relationship with their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.

Harvard Law Faculty join their colleagues voting for "open access" to scholarly articles

As their Arts & Sciences colleagues did in February 2008 the faculty of Harvard Law School voted unanimously to mandate that their peer reviewed articles be deposited in a digital institutional repository and be open access.

From the May 7, 2008 announcement:

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly
as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make
each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS
the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

"The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting,
groundbreaking scholarship in the world," said Dean Elena Kagan '86. "Our
decision to embrace 'open access' means that people everywhere can benefit from
the ideas generated here at the Law School."

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members
available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and
available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally
distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere
can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not
used for profit. "

This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law
School community can take great pride," said John Palfrey '01, executive
director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and newly appointed
vice dean of library and information resources. "The acceptance of open access
ensures that our faculty's world-class scholarship is accessible today and into
the future. I look forward to the work of implementing this commitment."The vote
came after an open access proposal was made by a university-wide committee aimed
at encouraging wider dissemination of scholarly work. Earlier this semester, the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy similar to the Law School’s
new initiative.

Harvard Faculty Unanimously Agree To Establish Open Access Repository

An article in the February 13, 2008 Library Journal announces that

Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) yesterday unanimously approved a motion that would compel faculty to deposit their research in an open access (OA) repository managed by the library to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet.

Losing access to research

Article by pHd student Danney Kingsley on a system built to increase access to government funded research in Australia that is going awry. Losing Access to Research, ScienceAlert, Australia and New Zealand, June 29, 2007.

American Scientist Open Access Forum

A recent post by Steven Harnad on the American Scientist Open Access Forum is a comprehensive critique of:

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. PM Davis & MJL Connolly. D-Lib Magazine 13(3/4) March/April 2007 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html

Nature: Agencies join forces to share data

From the March 22 issue of Nature.

Excerpt:
The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.

Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.