Bookmark this infoKit!

If you want to set up a Digital Repository at your institute/university that will promote your scholarly output and enable global sharing of research information, look no further than this comprehensive new toolkit, prepared by collaborators within the UK-based Joint Information Systems Committee family. Known as the Digital Repositories infoKit, it provides a vast amount of information, links and advice. It states:

“The Digital Repositories infoKit is a practical 'how to' guide to setting up and running digital repositories. The kit contains information on a broad range of topics running from the initial idea of a digital repository and the planning process, via detailed sections on repository set up and promotion, through to the maintenance and ongoing management of the repository. The main focus is on institutional repositories and the kit reflects current repository community best practice.

This resource has been written for repository administrators. It assumes no prior knowledge of repository matters and, more importantly, assumes no prior technical knowledge. The kit can be used by anyone who needs an introduction to any of the topics covered.”

Congratulations to JISC and its many collaborators for providing this immensely valuable resource, prepared by experts for the benefit of research.

OA in Kenya

. An important workshop, titled ‘Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment’ has been held in Nairobi, Kenya.

Organised by the Kenyan Libraries and Information Services Consortium, Bioline International and eIFL.net, the workshop’s objective was to discuss how open access can maximise the visibility of research publications and improve the quality, impact and influence of research. Some of the questions discussed were:

- How to disseminate research results in the most efficient way?
- How to showcase the quality of research in universities and research institutions?
- What are the new tools to better measure and manage research in such institutions?
- How to collect and curate the digital outputs?
- How to generate new knowledge from existing findings, enable and encourage collaboration?
- How to bring savings to the higher education sector and better returns on investment?
- What are the key functions for research libraries?

Open access, as a viable solution to existing problems in scholarly communication, is now being debated by governments and publishers and mandated by funding bodies and universities throughout the world. The considerable economic, social and educational benefits to making research outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access, and strategies for collective advocacy of open access to research results, were discussed. Practical sessions included case studies on successful management of open repositories and open access journals, training on how to start, and the best approaches to collaborative promotion of research outputs.

EPT Trustee and associate director of Bioline International, Leslie Chan, was a major contributor and fellow-Trustee, Daisy Ouya, was also present. There are currently 20 African bioscience journals available on an open access basis via Bioline, and 31 African open access institutional repositories, 20 of which are in South Africa.

Happy Birthday to BOAI on Valentine's Day!

February 14th 2002 was the day on which the Budapest Open Access Initiative was signed. It was the day the possibility of a level playing field for access to published research literature took a big step foreward.

Much has happened since then. For the best review of recent OA events, read Peter Suber's piece, reported here. For those new to Open Access, the Open Society Institute supported website,OASIS is a great place to find out everything about OA.

OAIster returns

The good news this week is that the OAIster search service, recently moved to WorldCat, is now available once more as a search facility dedicated to OA articles because of the OAI-PMH international protocol associated with all OA material.
Here's the link.

Bookmark this, and use it to locate any OA articles in OA journals or in the >1600 OA repositories.