SFU Search
This presentation explores the status of open access policy developments internationally, and particularly in Canada, as of April 2007. While open access resources are substantial, and growing rapidly, the primary issue for open access archives (institutional repositories) is content acquisition, and few researchers fully understand open access, illustrating an ongoing need for policy. Open access policy initiatives are happening around the world. Sherpa Juliet lists more than 20 funding agency policies, from at least 10 countries. More than half the policies are by medical research funders. ROARMAP lists at least 40 institutional policies from at least 12 countries. Many more policy initiatives are in the works, such as the European Commission and the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act. In Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council adopted open access in principle in 2004, and recently initiated an Aid to Open Access Journals program, a one-year bridge program for SSHRC subsidized journals. Genome Canada has a strong open access policy for both published research results and data. Policy development is underway at the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the International Development Research Centre, and the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance.
There are disciplinary differences in awareness of, and approaches to, open access and other types of "openness". It is likely that there are no great differences than the differences between physics and chemistry. Physics, as a discipline, has long been the leader in open access archiving, beginning in 1991 with the establishment of arXiv, and continuing with the CERN Documents Server. In physics, open access is mainstream, with open access archiving peacefully coexisting with traditional publishing. Physics is currently leading a push towards full open access publishing.
Chemistry, in contrast, has had very low rates of self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles, and traditional publishers, until recently, were fighting open access. However, a slightly different picture emerges when we consider the broader concept of "openness", as chemistry appears to be emerging as a leader in open data and open source science.
Provides a selective bibliography of English language multimedia resources for librarians, teachers, students, and activists interested in anarchism. Includes lists of suggested books, encyclopedias, journals, music, Web sites, e-books, videos, and indexes, as well as selection tools to assist librarians in developing anarchist collections.
This session addressed some of the practical issues arising from open access. The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) links members with open access resources through the Gold Rush service, which includes 80 open access title lists. Librarians at the Colorado School of Mines have collaborated to develop a subject specialized list of titles - for their own library, and to share with all CARL members through Gold Rush. E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies, provides a means for librarians to share our own work with colleagues.
High quality, comparable usage statistics are either available, or just around the corner, thanks to COUNTER and SUSHI. Librarians are very aware of the need for, and benefits of, usage statistics. This article will touch on the benefits of usage statistics, but focus primarily on some serious potential dangers to scholarship if these statistics are used as a basis for economic decisions. The most serious danger arises from usage-based pricing, which inevitably discourages use. Basing purchasing and canceling decisions on usage statistics can have enormous implications for scholarship; for example, there are important areas of research, such as endangered species and rare diseases, where the number of potential readers may be small.
The verbal protocol method is used extensively in computer usability studies. This study was designed to test the feasibility of using the verbal protocol method as a means of conducting field research on the online catalogue. Ten undergraduate students conducted their own research on DRA's Infogate. As they searched, they talked aloud about what keys they were pressing, what was happening on the screen, and their reactions. Transcripts of sessions were analyzed. A total of 65 different problems or comments were noted during search sessions, with 11 problems or comments noted in three or more sessions. This supports the hypothesis that the verbal protocol method is a valuable means of identifying common problems for users. It is suggested that the verbal protocol method offers great potential as a research tool in librarianship, for example in the area of interface design.
Usage statistics for electronic resources are needed, and highly desirable, for many reasons. It is encouraging to see the beginnings of quality, reliable usage data. This data can form the basis of economic decisions (selection and cancellation) that make a great deal of sense in the context of the individual library. However, the cumulative effects of such decisions could have serious implications for scholarly communications. For example, the journals of small research communities could easily be vulnerable to mass cancellations, and might fold. Fortunately, open access provides an alternative. The question of whether the impact of local decisions on scholarly communications as a whole should be taken into account in collection development policies is raised. The possibility that usage statistics could form the basis for a usage-based pricing system is discussed, and found to be highly inadvisable, as usage-based pricing tends to discourage usage.
This presentation, given on September 15, 2005 at the Vancuover Regional Digital Archives Group meeting, introduces institutional repositories, briefly surveys the international and Canadian repository communities, and describes the Simon Fraser University Institutional Repository. The presentation then focuses on aspects of the DSpace software that address digital preservation, and also surveys some current work being done to expand these aspects. A live demonstation of DSpace (in which this PowerPoint file was submitted to the Library Staff Papers collection) concluded the presentation.
CARL eLearning Report 2005: - Issues identified - Conclusions & Recommendations - Subsequent activities; State of LMS’s and libraries
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