Open Access News

Kimberly Barlow, Open Access: Online archives, University Times (from the University of Pittsburgh), July 10, 2008.  (Thanks to Colin Steele.)  Excerpt:

...Pitt’s [use of]... scholarly archives yields rewards in the form of more widespread dissemination of the University community’s academic work.

Graduate dissertations, for example, are archived online, and have been accessed more than a half-million times, Provost James V. Maher noted in a presentation on scholarly publishing to Faculty Assembly in April....

There’s no need for people to know that Pitt has a repository, noted University Library System [ULS] director Rush Miller, because “It’s indexed where people look.” Anyone searching on a particular topic will see the Pitt results pop up in the search.

In addition to posting dissertations online, the University hosts author self-archiving academic sites (with content contributed by the authors rather than selected by librarians) for the philosophy of science, minority health, aphasiology and European integration. Miller noted that the library’s infrastructure and technical support make it possible for various disciplines to launch and maintain such open-access repositories....

One such example is the Minority Health Archive, which Tim Deliyannides, head of the ULS Department of Information Systems, said is the first e-archive in its field. Having well-respected Pitt editors such as Stephen Thomas, who heads Pitt’s Center for Minority Health, “lends a lot of clout and credibility to the archive” and encourages contributions, Deliyannides said. The site, which aims to be the leading repository for health-related information on minority racial and ethnic groups in the United States, currently houses 779 documents....

Pitt’s first author self-archiving repository, the PhilSci Archive, houses conference proceedings and author-submitted preprints of scholarly articles in the field of philosophy of science.

Conceived in 2000, the archive — known informally in the field simply as the Pittsburgh archive — has secured its place as the worldwide clearinghouse for preprints in the discipline. The archive also is used for circulating papers in advance of conferences. Papers accepted for the Philosophy of Science Association’s conferences are posted so they can be read ahead of time — replacing a bound volume.

The archive is increasing in usage, adding 200-250 new submissions a year and logging hundreds of thousands of visits. In 2006, for instance, the site was accessed by registered users from 65 countries totaling 320,000 site visits and more than 1.2 million page views....

ULS’s Deliyannides said the University intentionally began with the strategy of subject-based archives, but the concept of an institutional archive has been on the radar here for five or six years.

“Only now are faculty at the point that they understand the need for a general-purpose repository,” he said. Awareness has been raised through recent developments such as the creation of an institutional archive at Harvard...and the National Institutes of Health’s new [OA] requirement....

“A lot of things are converging,” Deliyannides said, as ULS prepares for a September launch of Pitt’s institutional repository....

Deliyannides said the repository is intended for documents such as those that would be published in scholarly journals or professional society newsletters. The repository also could contain data files or other electronic files that support that research....

Authors would not be required to place their work into the open-access archive, but would be able to make submissions voluntarily....