ELPUB has a special developing country session

The ELPUB2008 conference 'Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0' (June 25-27) has now full details online, including all abstracts from the speakers. See http://www.icml9.org/meetings/openaccess/program.php?lang=en.

There is to be a special session devoted to activities taking place in (or of importance to) developing countries, with presentations from Brazil, Bulgaria, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. These presentations will be webcast so that we may take part in this interesting session.
Details of accessing the webcast will be made available nearer the time.

This conference is being organised from the University of Toronto, the home of Bioline International (http://www.bioline.org.br). BI now makes available on an open access basis 76 journals published in developing countries. In 2007 BI recorded 3.5 million full text downloads from these journals, showing how valuable this material is to the international scientific community.

eIFL's Ukraine OA case study

The presentations and posters at the recent OR08 Conference at the University of Southampton, UK, are now available online at http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. There is much valuable material relating to repositories to be found from this link.

Included in the OR08 posters was one presented by the eIFL Open Access program manager, Irina Kuchma. The title of the poster was ‘Open Repositories in Developing and Transition Countries: Results of eIFL.net Activities’. The text version and poster version are available from:

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/81/1/167-eIFL_OA_IRs_poster.pdf

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/81/2/167-eIFL_poster_curves.pdf

The poster included a case study of IR developments in the Ukraine. There are 7 pilot open access institutional repositories in the Universities and institutes of the National Academy of Science. According to this study, the Ukraine has had a law mandating open access to publicly funded research since January 2007.

CODATA, JISC and the Guardian Newspaper

Two valuable documents have recently been made available and could be of interest to the research communities in Latin America and other developing regions:

1. The report of the CODATA meeting (http://www.cria.org.br/eventos/codata2007/) that took place last autumn, ‘Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America: Focus on Health and Environmental Information for Sustainable Development’, has now been compiled by the organizers Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental.

2. A special supplement of the Guardian Newspaper in association with the Joint Information Systems Committee has been published, see http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/0,,2274706,00.html. Entitled 'Libraries Unleashed', it reviews the changes taking place in libraries in the digital environment. A piece specifically about Open Access policies in universities is available from http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/story/0,,2275369,00.html

OA Mandates

Institutional / Funder OA Mandates

There are now over 40 mandates requiring authors to deposit articles arising from research conducted in their organisations in their institutional repositories (IRs) – see ROARmap for details of existing and agreed mandates. The number includes prestigious organisations such as the Universities of Harvard and Southampton, the NIH, the Wellcome Trust and many more. Moreover, the council of the European University Association (representing nearly 800 European universities) has unanimously recommended the establishment of interoperable institutional repositories.

In spite of this growing trend, some researchers object to being ‘mandated’ to deposit their papers. They think it will interfere with their professional independence.

I find this attitude difficult to understand. On accepting their research position, researchers are ‘required’ to carry out research; they are ‘required’ to report the outcome of their research in institutional reports and in journals of their choice. Their institutes and funders have provided the resources for the research in order to increase knowledge and they rightly wish to justify their investment and ensure the research findings are as widely known as possible. By depositing articles in their interoperable institutional repository authors are hugely increasing the distribution of knowledge to the global academic community (see, for example EPT BLog, March 26^th 2008). So what’s the problem?

Those that have access already to much of the research information they need for their work may not feel there is any need to take another few minutes (because that’s all it takes) to deposit their publications in their IRs. But by deciding not to bother to do this, they are denying the 80% of the world’s researchers who live in less economically advantaged regions the means to access the research they need, to develop strong national research structures that in turn will lead to robust and independent economies. That’s the problem.

Researchers should consider an institutional or funder mandate as merely an additional small ‘requirement’ that can make a vast difference to the progress of science and the resolution of many of the world’s problems – unless of course their research is of limited value. . . .

Posted by Barbara Kirsop, Trustee and Secretary EPT

OA – the research laboratory without walls

Another OA benefit for all those struggling to equip their laboratories or purchase chemicals was highlighted in a recent posting on Peter Suber’s incomparable OANews. Glen Newton, Canada National Research Council’s Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, drew attention to the importance of machine open access to full text research articles, allowing all manner of research to be carried out from ‘literature-based discovery’. He referred to a study ‘that showed how researchers discovered the biochemical pathway involved in drug addiction from the literature alone. They did no experiments. This discovery was derived from an analysis and extraction of information from the literature alone’. From the published study, the methods section says, ‘The data and knowledge linking genes and chromosome regions to addiction were extracted from reviewing more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications from between 1976 and 2006.’ And there are many other examples, says Newton.

We should alert the research communities that OA to full text articles provides an Aladdin’s cave of experimental evidence from which new knowledge can be derived.

Bring on the IRs!

Having been alerted to the existence of statistical tools for measuring usage of articles deposited in a number of Institutional Repositories, I have collected some very encouraging statistics about how IRs are being used in developing countries.

The number of IRs using this software (developed at the University of Tasmania) is limited at present, but the following sites are among those I found that record usage by date and by country:

- University of Otago eprints Repository, New Zealand:
http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/es/

- University of Strathclyde, UK:
http://eprints.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/es/index.php?action=cumulative_usage_country

- African Higher Education Research Online:
http://ahero.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=cshe&action=statistics&view=country

- Rhodes eprints repository:
http://eprints.ru.ac.za/es/index.php?action=cumulative_usage_country

- E-LIS Repository: http://eprints.rclis.org/stat/bycountry.html

As some examples in the table below show, the full text download usage by developing countries was very encouraging indeed. India, China, Brazil, South Africa are among the busiest user-countries, and the less scientifically advanced countries are almost all represented as you go down the usage table.

Institutional Repository	University of Otago, based in New Zealand	University of Strathclyde, based in the UK	Rhodes e-Research, based in South Africa	E-LIS, based in Italy
Period of usage	2007	2007	2007	?
Number of records in repository	666	5052	808	7525
Full text downloads
From Canada	2977	2070	10413	20934
China	4673	1649	10196	22879
India	5022	1032	27609	33125
South Africa	1029	175	120598	5556
UK	8926	12664	25392	63362
USA	16830	44270	145356	1415807
. . . .and on to several hundred other countries

Encouraged, I searched other IRs and found the same story unfolding. Multiply the number of registered IRs (> 1000) by the usage figures and you can see that developing countries are using IRs a lot! Usage will vary substantially depending on the nature of the deposited content and the working practices of different disciplines, but it is very encouraging to see how IRs are closing the N to S, S to N and S to S information gaps that we used to talk about. The low-cost nature of establishing IRs allows institutes in economically constrained countries to be part of the global research community, readily using and exchanging essential information.

The wealth of information available from the statistics at these IRs raises the hope that with time all will do so. Not only do these statistics provide a true record of the need for the research information deposited, but they even provide information on the specific research that scholars are searching, an invaluable insight into priorities for development programmes. And of course, authors will be greatly encouraged to witness usage figures of their published research, and institutes will be happy to see their organisations high on the research map.

We can earnestly hope that someone – soon – will carry out an authoritative study on the usage of IR material. This would be a magnificent contribution of value to many sectors. Perhaps someone is …?.

eIFL doesn't stand still in supporting developing country research!

The latest newsletter from eIFL, see http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/news/newsletter/no32, leaves an impression of whirlwind activity around the world in support of scholarly information exchange.

As well as supporting libraries, developing consortia, encouraging educational and training material, and bringing new countries into the network (Kenya and Nepal are the latest to join), eIFL has a strong Open Access programme. Item 5 of the newsletter outlines the aims of eIFL-OA as:

"a.. builds networks of Open Access repositories, Open Access journals, Open Access education materials;
b.. provides training and advice on Open Access policies and practices;
c.. empowers library professionals, scientists and scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates."

eIFL will attend the important up-coming Open Repositories 08 Conference at the University of Southampton, UK, see http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.html, April 1-4, 2008, and is also organizing a workshop on Institutional Repositories in Nigeria. The newsletter says:

"Nigerian University Libraries Consortium, Department of Library and Information Science, Ahmadu Bello University and eIFL.net will organise a workshop Open Access Repositories: New Models for Scholarly Communication on April 28-29. Hosted by the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the workshop will address Open Access state-of-the-art, policies and recommendations; subject and institutional repositories, and case studies on Open Access institutional repositories in developing and transition countries."

A lot of people must be working very hard in eIFL-net!