Using Fedora for institutional repositories

This article is a summary and review of a series of articles written by Peter Murray at Ohiolink and posted to the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog over the past couple of months .../2006/05/02/the-jesters-case-for-fedora

Fedora is used at OhioLink's Digital Resource Commons.

Interviews on Open Access in Research Information Magazine

Research Information has just published a series of interviews by editor Sian Harris on Open Access: http://www.researchinformation.info/rijunjul06openaccess.html

* 'Open access is much wider than just readers not paying' - Martin Richardson, Oxford Journals

* 'Academics have access anyway' - Michael Mabe, formerly of Elsevier

* 'Text mining of subject archives will enable new facts to be discovered' - Robert Terry, The Wellcome Trust

* 'Self-archiving should be mandatory' - Steven Harnad, U Quebec/Montreal & U Southampton (corrections by author in red at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/shcorrex.html)

* 'The environmental community will embrace open-access' - Tim Smith, Institute of Physics Publishing

* 'Many areas of research are funded by taxpayers but they do not see the results' - Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central

* 'The first priority should be awareness-raising' - Alma Swan, Key Perspectives

* 'Our community is used to immediate release of preprints' - Jens Vigen, CERN

* 'Get research authors to change their behaviour' - Leslie Carr, University of Southampton

- post adapted from list input by S. Harnad

Open data

SPARC-ACRL FORUM TO EXPLORE OPEN DATA

Washington, DC and Chicago, IL - May 11, 2006 - The upcoming SPARC-ACRL forum on emerging issues in scholarly communication, to be held during the American Library Association's annual meeting in New Orleans, will explore questions related to the field of Open Data. The forum will feature experts who are familiar with the issues associated with Open Data and known for their analysis of the evolving scholarly communication scene.

During the past several years, Open Data has become a field of urgent interest to researchers, scholars, and librarians. With the amount of scientific data doubling every year, issues surrounding the access, use, and curation of data sets are increasing in importance. The data-rich, researcher-driven environment that is evolving poses new challenges and provides new opportunities in the sharing, review, and publication of research results. Ensuring open access to the data behind the literature will play a key role in seeing that the scholarly communication system evolves in a way that supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.

As Open Data moves to the forefront of scholarly communication, librarians, administrators, and researchers will be responsible for considering new access policies for data and data curation issues. This SPARC-ACRL forum will introduce Open Data as an emerging focus, explore the challenges of managing the data deluge, and aid participants in crafting their own digital data preservation and curation policies.

Speakers will include:

* Christopher Greer, Cyberinfrastructure Advisor, Office of the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, National Science Foundation
* Robert Hanisch, Project Manager, Space Telescope Science Institute
* Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information

The SPARC-ACRL forum will be held on Saturday, June 24th from 4:00 - 5:30PM in the Morial Convention Center, Room 356 - 357. Reservations are not required.

The forum is followed by the ACRL Scholarly Communication Discussion Group, an opportunity to exchange views with speakers from the forum and take the discussion to a deeper level. The Discussion Group convenes on Sunday, June 25th, from 4:00 - 5:30PM in Evangeline Suite of the Royal Sonesta Hotel.

For more information, visit the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ and the SPARC Open Data email discussion list at http://www.arl.org/sparc/opendata/.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and SPARC Europe are an international alliance of more than 300 academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc; SPARC Europe is at http://www.sparceurope.org.

ACRL
ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians.
Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 by Robin Peek, InfoToday, May 8, 2006 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060508-2.shtml

"One of the greatest events in the history of Open Access may have just happened. On May 2, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced the bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) (S.2695). The legislation is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. If passed, the policy would require that agencies with research budgets of more than $100 million enact policy to ensure that articles generated through research funded by that agency are made available online within 6 months of publication.

Aurarians can track this bill thru Legislative Histories, Bills & Laws (Lexis Nexis). Click on Bill Tracking and then do a search on S 2695 limited to the current session 109 (2005-2006).

Related story

Scholarly journals resist offering online versions By Sara Ivry, The New York Times, May 8, 2006 http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6069510.html

"Scholarly publishing has never been a big business. But it could take a financial hit if a proposed federal law is enacted, opening taxpayer-financed research to the public, according to some critics in academic institutions."

Meta universities and open access

Dr. Charles M. Vest discusses how the Internet, educational technology, and the open access movement will contribute to the globalization of higher education and the possible emergence of a global meta-university in Open content and the emerging global meta-university, May/June of EDUCAUSE Review. He writes:

My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university—a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure.

Big changes that can have unintended consequences.

Google Scholar at Auraria Library

Auraria Library is back in the list of library links from Google Scholar so you may again choose it as a resource. On campus, the linking to full text resources via Auraria Full Text Resources in Google Scholar works just fine without going through the Library proxy, since campus computers are in the valid ip address ranges for Auraria Library electronic resources.

You may also choose Google Scholar from the Library's list of databases, login with your student id and nine-digit password, and you will automatically be searching Google Scholar with Auraria Library and Open WorldCat chosen as your defaults. Each record that you have access to has a link to Auraria Library Resources.

The link to this resource is available from on and off campus because you log in. The direct link to it, which you can bookmark/make a favorite, is
http://0-scholar.google.com.skyline.cudenver.edu/advanced_scholar_search.

FYI: As with all the online databases we buy or send you to, the number of resources Google Scholar can show you is large, very large, but is not the universe of scholarly resources available to you. As a matter of economics, each individual publishers' entire set of resources is not opened to Google to search. Many, but not a majority, of academic authors are turning to referreed open access journals as a place to publish their work (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html, http://www.doaj.org/) which are often available to anyone via the internet and thus to Google (and other search engines http://www.freefulltext.com/, http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/). So Google Scholar is well populated and extremely useful to serious researchers.

gathering storm

Three Gathering Storms that could cause collateral damage to OA and academia in general, is an article by Peter Suber in the March 2006 Open Access Newsletter, at:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-06.htm#collateral

Rationale for institutional repositories

Here is an article by Steven Harnad discussing the need for self-archiving by scholars, and consequentially institutional repositories. The data is presented that supports the university wide development of ir's.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12078/

When the internet isn't free

How is this going to affect higher ed?

When the Net Goes From Free to Fee
The fear is that big broadband providers will split the Net into first class and steerage.
By Steven Levy Newsweek Feb. 27, 2006 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11433420/site/newsweek

Report on orphan works to Senate Judiciary Committee

FYI: The U.S. Copyright Office submitted its "Report on Orphan Works" to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, January 31, 2006:

http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

Social Science Statistics repository

Another oa-discipline based repository established in 1962(!) at Univ of Mich.

Membership is needed to get at ALL the datasets. Member list at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/membership/ors.html.

Libraries cannot be members, only institutions. Info at http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-FAQ/0051.xml and this about the complete online access to datasets (http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-FAQ/0104.xml).

It's in the adi, under criminal justice and criminology, statistics and sociology.

ICPSR (University of Michigan Institute for Social Research) The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) maintains and provides access to an archive of social science data for research and instruction, and offers training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. Some datasets are available to the public.

Cites on IRs from our emails

from Ellen G:

As promised, here's a list of citations (in no particular order) that have been shared so far:

The PowerPoint slides and resource list from the "Policies and Practices of Institutional Repositories" program at Annual 2005 are available on the Emerging Tech. Interest Group site: See: http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/emergingtechnol/programs.htm

Interesting article/Fedora http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october05/johnston/10johnston.html

Celestial (software that harvests metadata from OAI-compliant repositories and re-exposes that metadata to other services - in effect an OAI cache) http://celestial.eprints.org/

ProQuest's Digital Commons http://umi.com/features/feature-15/default.shtml

Stanford iTunes http://itunes.stanford.edu/

...

And lastly,

Here's a list to join:
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
> A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
> open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online
> (1998-2005) is available at:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
> To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription
> address:
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> Post discussion to:
> american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org

And another list of interest: ERIL-L@LISTSERV.BINGHAMTON.EDU

Ellen

E-prints

from Jeffrey:

1. Here is E-LIS, E-prints in library and information science:

http://eprints.rclis.org/

Perhaps you want to have a look at the article I deposited there.

2. Here is a link to the open-source company that makes the software for this:

http://www.eprints.org/

3. Here is a link to a library's site using that software: (Queensland University of Technology)

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/

Recruitment of content

From Elaine:

Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories NF Foster, S Gibbons - D-Lib Magazine, 11 (1), 2005 - dspace.lib.rochester.edu http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html

Wikis - Chron of Higher Ed article

Disaster Reporting via Wikis
from The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog Education-technology news from around the Web from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Basically reports on a blog entry demonstrating how a wiki works using the London bombings entry on the Wikipedia as a example.

New international study demonstrates worldwide readiness for Open Access mandate

A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional repository.

The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by Southampton’s Professor Stevan Harnad as ‘a historic turning point in the worldwide research community’s progress towards 100 per cent Open Access’.

quoted from Innovations Report June 23, 2005

Open Access: Open Sesame or Opening Pandora’s Box?

June 2005 article by Marydee Ojala from EContent Journal

directory of open access repositories

Something is beginning that could be useful:

A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service, called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information. More about it.

Wonder though, why not find a way to catalog these databases into, say OCLC?

How much time would you have to spend to keep your work readily available?

Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr, Univ. of Southhampton, have posted a paper titled Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving
(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/)
from the abstract:

A common objection to self-archiving is that it is an extra task that puts an unnecessary burden on each researcher. In particular, the need to enter the extra bibliographic metadata demanded by repositories for accurate searching and identification is presumed to be a particularly onerous task. This paper describes a preliminary study on two months of submissions for a mature repository and concludes that the amount of time spent entering metadata would be as little as 40 minutes per year for a highly active researcher.

Syllabus Magazine on Campus Technology

Electronic Publishing >> Book 'Em by Matt Villano has some interesting info on both institutional repositories and open access. It also refers to the Proquest technology we've just been discussing.

"Digitizing selected, pre-existing printed content is only one approach to electronic publishing; in some cases, efforts are underway to publish original content in the digital medium right away, eliminating the printed page all together. On the publishing side, Oxford is leading the way here, publishing some of its newest journals only in digital form online. On the academic side, thanks to technology from the content-digitizing vendor ProQuest Information and Learning (www.il.proquest.com/umi), a leader in this effort is Boston College, where efforts to pilot an institutional repository of intellectual property have dovetailed with the publication of Web-only journals and have gained astounding momentum in recent months."