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.

The OA-Butterfly Effect

We talk a lot about the importance of sharing publicly funded research, but those working with the under-resourced countries sometimes get frustrated by the never-ending discussions between researchers in the more privileged countries about OA this and OA that, when all we urgently want is OA now.

So I felt a sense of familiarity as I was watching an excellent BBC TV documentary on January 16th, ‘The Secret Life of Chaos’. The presenter, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, reported that a remarkable Russian mathematician and chemist, Boris Belousov (above), had discovered an oscillating chemical reaction (but had been repeatedly rejected publication of his results and was accused of dishonesty). At the same time, Alan Turing was developing the mathematical theories that lead to modelling and computing and ultimately the chaos theory – now commonly referred to by the butterfly effect metaphor. The BBC programme suggested that had Belousov been able to meet and work with Turing, the understanding and applications of the chaos theory could have been advanced spectacularly. And Turing could have vindicated Belousov’s findings. But what would have been a natural and productive cooperation could not take place because of Cold War embargoes.

As I began to get lost in string, rope and chaos theories, my mind suddenly switched to the old question - what were current research communication embargoes doing to retard research progress? What would be the consequence of just a single butterfly wing-flap in, say, Sweden on some new medical development in Peru?

We can never know, but happily the progress of open access is gathering speed - and bravo Italy for providing the news yesterday that 13 of their universities had set up OA repositories and associated mandates for a variety of scholarly output! This brings the total of institutional/funder/departmental/theses mandates to 195 and the number of institutional repositories to 1564. When we can stop counting and when there are no embargoes left to block the exchange of research findings – then the research community can focus its energy on OA this and OA that. We just need OA first.

Posted by Barbara Kirsop

QMed Knowledge Foundation selects EPT paper as 'Article of the Month'

The QMed Knowledge Foundation, a Trust based in Mumbai, India, has as its mission, "To enable healthcare professionals and institutions in India to exploit the power of technology to get and produce the best of medical information for better patient care and preventive health services."

It recently issued its latest newsletter in which their ‘Article of the Month’ was reported as:

“The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access: Open Medicine 2009 3:111-119, Chan L(1), Arunachalam S(1), Kirsop B(1). The article focuses on the big gap between the large sums of money being spent on health research and the outcome that is expected (better health of people). One of the major reasons for this gap is inadequate access to peer reviewed evidence based research. The article discusses the progress of "Open Access" and future directions. We would add that along with access, training in searching information resources requires major attention. Otherwise it will be akin to having a gigantic library and not knowing how to identify the best resources in it!”

(1) EPT Trustees

A New Year's present

Peter Suber's January 2010 Open Access Newsletter provides a comprehensive and wonderfully encouraging report on all open access events throughout 2009. This is not only the best present we could wish for, but it provides all those working towards the free and open access to research findings with a promise of exciting developments in 2010. Things are at last looking up for the research communities in developing countries.

Follow the progress of open access in OAN by clicking here.