Open Access News

Institutional repositories (IRs) form a key component in the open access movement to bring scholarly research onto the open Web. Librarians and their clients regularly search digital IRs in pursuit of scholarship, but now more and more research librarians have begun to envision institutional repositories as a responsibility, involving themselves in the creation, maintenance, promotion, and advocacy of IRs. The Association of Research Libraries has surveyed its members to collect baseline data on this potentially transforming, technological realignment of scholarly communication. Scholarly publishers also have their eye on the phenomenon. Elsevier has introduced a new “Search Sources” feature for its Scopus users; the feature allows librarians to customize interfaces to direct their users to specific institutional repositories and special digital subject collections. It appears that the new Scopus feature will simply allow librarians to preset the content preferences in Scopus that users of Scirus, Elsevier’s free scholarly search engine, can set for themselves on a search-by-search basis, using the Advanced Search features. Scopus announcements also encourage Scopus clients to open their institutional repositories to the expanding Scirus Repository Search Program.

The 123 members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) represent the largest academic research libraries in the United States and Canada. The 38-question survey in early 2006 received responses from 87 member libraries (a 71 percent response rate) with 37 respondents having implemented an operational IR, 31 planning an IR by 2007, and only 19 having no immediate IR plans. Results indicate rapid growth....

With most IRs only 2-years-old or less, it is not surprising that the mean number of digital objects carried in the IRs identified by the survey was only 3,844. Content usually encompasses theses and dissertations, article preprints and postprints, conference presentations and proceedings, technical reports, working papers, and multimedia material....Though the top reasons for establishing IRs were not open access, at 89 percent, it ran a close third behind increasing global visibility of an institution’s scholarship (97 percent) and preservation (95 percent)....

If you have any interest in IRs, this is a good start for examining what deep-pocket players are doing....

The Scopus service already has a Web search tab that takes users from the abstracts and citations that Scopus provides for print publications to the 250 million quality Web pages accessed by Scirus, Elsevier’s free scholarship search engine. But now, librarians can set a separate tab, Select Sources, to designate selected institutional repositories and digital archives for searching by their user communities. Last year, Scirus established a Repository Search Program to encourage universities and research institutions to make full content available to its spider software.

The announcement of the new feature indicated that librarians could choose from more than 19 institutional repositories. According to Niels Weertman, head of product development for Scopus, some of the 19 sources could cover more than one institution’s digital archives. He estimated that the number of archiving institutions was 60 or more. Among the 19 IRs or groups of IRs, the Scopus/Scirus connections lets librarians target the following:

• 6,000 documents via CalTech
• 4,400 documents via the University of Toronto’s T-space
• 54,000 courseware from MIT OpenCourseWare
• 237,000 full-text theses and dissertations via NDLTD
• 363,500 e-prints on ArXiv.org
• 2,600 e-prints through Cogprints
• 12,000 NASA technical reports
• 180,000 documents via RePEc
• 11,000 documents via DiVa
• 2,200 documents via HongKong University of Science and Technology
• 5,200 Organic e-prints
• 600-plus documents via PsyDok of Saarland University...