Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, October 23, 2008

Southern Illinois U launches an IR

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SUIC) has launched Open SIUC, an institutional repository.  From the article in yesterday's issue of the SIUC paper:

...OpenSIUC is...an online storehouse giving one and all permanent, reliable, free access to research and scholarly material produced at the University. A service of Morris Library, it is a one-stop location for accessing material previously unavailable or posted on scattered Web sites here and there.

Faculty, staff and students contribute to OpenSIUC with published and unpublished materials. Featured will be journal articles, conference papers and proceedings, technical reports, working papers, posters, videos, audios, data sets, theses and dissertations, honors theses, REACH posters and much more....

“The idea is to make SIUC output more visible, more accessible and to preserve it,” said Jonathan Nabe, SIUC collection development librarian/science and technology....

Nabe said materials within OpenSIUC are more visible because Google, GoogleScholar and other search engines index them higher than they would the same content on individual or departmental Web sites....

They’ll accept all file formats for inclusion. Microsoft Word documents automatically convert to PDF files. Nabe said the site’s software also supports journal publication and includes a peer review tracking system and other necessary tools. Those who contribute can elect to receive automatic monthly e-mails indicating the total downloads of their posts.

“We help with copyright issues as well,” Nabe said. “Many publishers allow the posting of journal articles in repositories.” ...