Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States

The new report:
Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States
MIRACLE Project Research Findings
is at:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub140abst.html

gives some background to where OA material is being stored.
The report is 167 pages but their summary gives a sense:

In this report, the authors describe results of a nationwide census of institutional repositories in U.S. academic institutions. The census is one of several activities of the MIRACLE Project, an IMLS-funded research program based at the University of Michigan.

A considerable portion of the scholarly record is born digital, and some scholarship is produced in digital formats that have no physical, in-the-hand counterparts. The proliferation of digital scholarship raises serious and pressing issues about how to organize, access, and preserve it in perpetuity. The response of academic institutions has been to build and deploy institutional repositories (IRs) to manage the digital scholarship their learning communities produce.

Richard Baer

Sunday, February 25, 2007

OAIster: a union catalog of digital resources

OAIster, in addition to having passed the 10 million record landmark, has a new look and feel as well! For example, the OAIster web page now describers OAIster as a union catalog of digital resources. I like this - it seems easier to relate to this description than OAI-PMH metadata harvesting search tool. This could be because I'm a librarian, though!

If you know the name of a particular repository, you can do an OAIster search and enter the repository name as a search term, for an alternative way to search the other repository. For example, a search for "information literacy" and "E-LIS" yields all the documents in E-LIS on information literacy.

How do the results of an OAIster search of another repository compare with a direct search of another repository? Could this be an interesting question for a reference class?

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Happy Birthday - and Valentine's Day - to BOAI!

Today is the 5th anniversary of what many of us see as the first major, international defining moment of the open access movement - the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

And, what a birthday it is! The European Union Petition for Guaranteed Public Access to Publicly-Funded Research Results now has more than 20,000 signatories, including more than 1,000 institutional signatories; a new study just released shows that 85% of European researchers support the EU open access mandate; in Brussells, Ministers & Rectors have signed the Berlin Declaration; and tomorrow, in the U.S., is a student-led National Day of Action on Open Access.

Thanks to Peter Suber for a very modest alert about BOAI (he was one of the drafters of the statement). For more details on recent events, see Open Access News.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Belgian Officials Endorse OA

Next week, 13 senior officials in Belgian research and education - Ministers, and Rectors - will sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.

This is hugely significant; the signing will take place two days before the EC-hosted conference, Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area, in the context of the EU Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results

Details can be found on Open Access News.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Custom Search Engine for DOAJ

A couple of months ago, using Google co-op's Custom Search Engine (CSE) capability, Lukethelibrarian explains on his blog that he created a custom search engine that will perform a search across all the english language journals found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) collection.

Try out the DOAJ search engine for english journal content!

Lukethelibrarian is also looking for volunteers to help him refine his DOAJ CSE service. To volunteer, go to the main search page of his CSE and look for the "volunteer" link in the lower left part of the page. He is also looking forward to any suggestions or feedback.

Kudos!

Friday, February 02, 2007

Mandate Momentum in 2007!

The February 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter has been released. Peter's feature this month is the Mandate Momentum in 2007. As Peter says, "In the first month of 2007 we saw four adopted OA mandates, five pledges to adopt OA mandates, and five significant calls for OA mandates."

Time to set aside the furore over the PR pitbull episode, enjoy - and support - these historic initatives.


This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

New model for an online journal?

I was catching up with a great source of book reviews and everything else at
Political Theory Daily Review http://www.politicaltheory.info/
when I saw that The New Leader was back.
It had stopped publication as a print magazine in 2005 but was back at www.thenewleader.com


I would paste some of the announcement but cannot because the page announcing this is an image. They are calling it a bimonthy virtual magazine and publishing the issue as one large pdf.
It was indexed in Academic Search Premier and MAS Ultra article by article.

If they pick it up again, I wonder how they will handle the full text. You could index the titles from the bookmarks and the PDF does allow cutting and pasting so you can take it apart and print, email what you like.
But I have not noticed other magazines using quite this publishing model. I've furled this one and will see how they handle archiving and if Ebsco picks up the new version.
Richard