The ARL survey received responses from 71% of its members, and offers some interesting insights into how IRs are set up and managed by research organisations. 43% of respondents had an operational IR, with 35% planning an implementation in 2007; 22% had no development plans. The top three reasons for setting up an IR were to increase global visibility of, preserve, and provide free access to the institution's scholarship....
Research from Key Perspectives around this problem indicates that many academics are still unaware of the purpose and benefits of a repository. Once they are aware, there are concerns expressed over the time needed to make deposits, and over possible infringement of arrangements with publishers. Mandating content deposit seems to be proving effective however - over 90% compliance has been seen at the ECS repository in Southampton and at CERN....
Scirus, Elsevier's
science search engine, indexes content from a group of repositories (both institutional and discipline-specific) including MIT OpenCourseWare, T-Space and CalTech Coda. In a recent development, Elsevier has announced that its A&I database Scopus is to provide a customisable feature enabling users to search within selected repositories....This ease of access could increase the usage of repositories significantly, and this in turn is a valuable argument for libraries looking to persuade academics to deposit their content....In addition, Scopus customers can request that Scirus index their repositories free of charge, which could open up these archives to a much wider audience. Thomson has also been working in this area, and its Web Citation Index (WCI) product (designed to be a comprehensive index of scholarly literature within institutional repositories) is due for commercial launch in October. Using WCI, users can search the full text of the repositories, and cited reference search/navigation is enabled where cited references can be harvested from the repositories. Around 20 repositories are fully covered, with 30 more lined up - those covered include arXiv with over 375K records with cited references. Over 200 institutional repositories have been targeted for inclusion over the next year.
Elsevier is strongly positioned here with its ability to use Scopus and Scirus together to broaden the service offering in two ways - increasing the profile of the IR within the institution, and making its content easily searchable by a global audience. Thomson's position is also compelling - all records are linked to the Web of Science and enable users to track citations within repositories and peer-reviewed literature. Additionally, repositories can link to citation counts in the Web of Science for documents that their researchers post - this enables them to show verified citation counts from the peer-reviewed literature to their faculty as an incentive for posting to repositories. However, there may be less opportunity for smaller publishers to create much of a service offering in this area - markets are showing duopolistic tendencies as users increasingly want to use only a small number of offerings....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/30/2006 08:22:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
