Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, March 03, 2007

Measuring the success of OA repositories

Jingfeng Xiaa and Li Sunb, Assessment of Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories: Depositorship and Full-Text Availability, Serials Review, March 2007 (accessible only to subscribers, at least so far).  Thanks to William Walsh for the alert and for posting the abstract and an excerpt to the GSU Issues in Scholarly Communication blog.  This is just the abstract:

Abstract:   This research evaluates the success of open access self-archiving in several well-known institutional repositories. Two assessment factors have been applied to examine the current practice of self-archiving: depositorship and the availability of full text. This research discovers that the rate of author self-archiving is low and that the majority of documents have been deposited by a librarian or administrative staff. Similarly, the rate of full-text availability is relatively low, except for Australian repositories. By identifying different practices of self-archiving, repository managers can create new strategies for the operation of their repositories and the development of archiving policies.

PS:  I'm using the URL that William Walsh used in his blog post, which only works for GSU-affiliated users.  I'd get a general URL, valid for any subscriber, but Science Direct is down for maintenance at the moment.

Update. Here's the DOI-based URL, which doesn't give non-subscribers access to the abstract, and here's the non-DOI-based URL, which gives everyone access to the abstract.

Update. Also see Les Carr's detailed comments in this article.

Update. This article has now been self-archived.