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Yearly Archives: 2016

Upload-A-Thon: research outputs & institutional repositories

Friday, November 18th, 2016 | Briar Ballard | No Comments

By: Alexander Ritchie

2016-11-18_16-02-11

On Wednesday 23 November the University of Otago Library will be hosting the first OUR Archive Uploadathon. This drop-in event will be held in Central Library Seminar Room 3 between 9am – 4pm as the final part of the Library’s Maximise your Research Impact series.

The aim is for academic staff from all disciplines to deposit their Otago research into OUR Archive, and librarians will be on hand to guide staff through the process of uploading key details and the research outputs (where publishing agreements allow). Anyone interested in coming along on the day is strongly encouraged to create an OUR Archive account in advance.

What exactly is an ‘Uploadathon’?

Uploadathon is one of those Frankenwords, a combining of upload(ing) and marathon, and is one of many civic-minded –thons, like New Zealand’s fundraising Telethons of the late 70s through to the early 90s. Uploadathons are more about raising research profile than money though, and bring academics together with librarians to deposit their research into institutional repositories in order to make the work both more visible, and easier for funders, research participant communities, and members of the public to access.

What is an Institutional Repository?

For those that don’t know, an institutional repository (IR) is an online collection of research produced by scholars at a particular institution. At the University of Otago, this is OUR Archive, and it includes not only theses and journal articles, but also grey literature and conference papers and posters. Together with the related disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv in Physics and Mathematics, institutional repositories are synonymous with Green Open Access publishing, where scholars self-archive their work, having obtained any necessary permissions from the publisher and any co-authors.

 Why Would I Choose to Use One?

Dr Janet Stephenson makes a succinct and compelling case for the benefits of OUR Archive for the Centre for Sustainability in this short video interview – https://unitube.otago.ac.nz/view?m=oxRH9u8Os3U – but if you need more convincing, here are five reasons why uploading research to OUR Archive makes good sense:

  1. Visibility

Research is easier to find as search engines such as Google Scholar, and Aotearoa-based aggregators such as Digital NZ and NZResearch, harvest the metadata directly from the repository. Depositing work into OUR Archive and linking to that work from profiles on ResearchGate or Academia.edu can move research outputs higher in search engine results lists.

  1. (Open) Access

Institutional repositories are a way to enable public access to research. Self-archiving post- or pre-print versions of accepted research outputs is well established within certain sciences, and it not only broadens the availability of scholarly work, but helps ensure accountability to research participants, interested communities, and funders.  Most scholarly publishers allow archiving of a post- or pre-print of a published article, but do check the SHERPA/RoMEO site if you are unsure about your situation.

  1. Stability

OUR Archive uses the Handle system to provide a stable URL, the digital equivalent of a permanent address for your research in the shifting sands of the digital realm. This is particularly important for grey literature, and outputs like conference posters, where ongoing access can be difficult to maintain.

  1. Citing and Counting

Research within both the Natural and Social Sciences, such as this 2010 article from Gargouri et al. and this 2015 piece from Atchison and Bull suggest that there is a measureable citation advantage through making your work openly available. OUR Archive also provides individual page view and download counts for all deposited outputs.

  1. Open Sourced and Locally Supported

OUR Archive uses the open source repository software DSpace, and the Library has local support staff who manage the repository and troubleshoot any issues that arise. This means timely responses to queries, and help when something goes wrong.

The Library continues to develop the OUR Archive platform and interface and wants to hear how we can improve it, so please drop us a line @ https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/feedback.

OUR Archive Uploadathon | Wednesday 23rd November 2016 | Drop In Event 9am‐4pm | Central Library Seminar Room 3

We look forward to seeing you there!

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Shiobhan Smith for her very useful report on OUR Archive which was invaluable in structuring this post.

Open Access Week 2016 – take action

Monday, October 24th, 2016 | Richard White | No Comments

The theme for this year’s Open Access Week is “Open in Action.” OpenAccessWeek.org has published a list (where you can even tick boxes and submit a form to put your commitment to yourself in writing) of things you can do:

  • Start a conversation about Open Access during a research group meeting, journal club, or staff meeting.
  • Send at least one manuscript to an open-access journal within the next year.
  • Deposit at least one of my articles into an open-access repository during Open Access Week and encourage colleagues to do the same.
  • Use the SPARC author addendum on my next publication to reserve rights to make a copy of my work publicly accessible.
  • Contribute to a conversation on campus about institutional support for Open Access.
  • Sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and commit to not using journal-based metrics in evaluation.
  • Sign up for Impactstory to explore the online impact of your research and get an ORCID.

(Text from the bullet points used under a a CC-BY licence from http://www.action.openaccessweek.org/)

How to tell a ‘good’ Open Access journal

Sunday, September 18th, 2016 | Richard White | No Comments

Interested in an OA journal but not sure of its quality?

Erstwhile Otago colleague, now of the University of Canterbury, Anton Angelo has published a useful checklist to help determine the quality of an OA journal. Note that this is not to check the journal’s contribution to the discipline but rather its publishing and editorial practices.

(Copyright nerd note: I could just copy Anton’s post here, as he uses a CC BY licence, but linking to his page is good ‘internet etiquette’ in that he will see the use of his material if you go to his site.)

SciHub: academic publishing’s ‘Napster moment’?

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016 | Richard White | No Comments

Sci-Hub, the massive online repository of 50 million academic papers, chapters and books, was set up by a postgraduate student from Kazakhstan in 2011. Alexandra Elbakyan has said she her goal was to provide free access to research for people like herself for whom access was not provided by her institution and too expensive to pay for each article she needed for her PhD. She used login details of others (she claims provided willingly) to gain access to pay-walled research databases and add documents to the site, which, despite the name, includes non-scientific literature as well. Depending on your perspective, she’s either a Robin Hood providing access to the poor or a copyright pirate on a massive scale. Certainly what she has done is illegal — and she is being sued by Elsevier — but Sci-Hub’s existence and the widespread use that’s being made of it by people around the world says much about the state of scholarly communication and open access to knowledge.

If you don’t know what Sci-Hub is, think of a Google-style search box, where you type in an article title or other identifying information and, presto, the research you want appears in PDF format. No pesky institutional usernames/passwords, multiple-clicks inside learning management systems or searching different databases. It’s all there in one place. Try out a couple of article titles and you’ll likely find the work. If you get an exact match (e.g. using a DOI, a digital object identifier), it will appear immediately without even a the inconvenience of a search results page.

John Bohannon has published a fascinating piece in Science analysing data he obtained from Elbakyan herself. For one thing, he says, Sci-Hub is effectively “the world’s de facto open-access research library.” What he really means is “free access,” since open access implies a licence that allows reuse, but the point is well made. He obtained data from Elbakyan covering 6-months of use of the site: a staggering 28 million hits were recorded in that period. There is location information in the dataset too, which, while not necessarily 100% reliable, shows use not only across the globe but, interestingly, clustered around locations where people are likely to have access through an institutional subscription to the legitimate source. This suggests Sci-Hub is not only used by people who don’t have access and can’t afford to pay but also by those who just find it more convenient than conventional means. Check out the data in Bohannon’s piece, which has an interactive map (made possible by open software and data I should point out). There has been just under a couple of hundred accesses by people in the Dunedin area. Someone in Timaru has been reading Museum perceptions and productions: American migrations of a Maori hei-tiki. I didn’t even know there was a place called Mayfield on the Canterbury plains but there are 33 hits recorded for that location and at least one person is apparently interested in engineering and minimum design loads for buildings and other structures. This could be someone studying or teaching engineering, who might have legal access to such research, but equally it could be a private citizen who has a Cantabrian’s interest in things affected by seismic activity.

Will Sci-Hub be the ‘Napster moment’ for academic publishing, a development that challenges the established model to the extent that it is forced to change as the music and other industries have? Some long-time open access commentators hope it will, such as Peter Murray-Rust, who has written a three-part opinion piece on why Sci-Hub matters (part 1 here). The law is on the side of rights holders like Elsevier but then it was on the side of the music industry, which may have beaten Napster in court but was nevertheless forced to change its model by consumer demand.