Open Access Initiatives in Medical Biology

Author(s):  
Rupak Chakravarty

Open Access (OA) is reshaping the world by redefining the scholarly communication methods with focus on building a knowledge society. It has the power to democratize the knowledge by removing hurdles from free access to scholarly works while encouraging knowledge sharing. Institutional Repositories (IRs) play a vital role in the OA movement by facilitating the Green Route to Open Access. In India, some elite educational and research institutes such as the Indian Statistical Institute, some CSIR Laboratories, IITs, and IIMs have taken significant initiatives in building IRs. In addition to theses, a few Universities have also taken the initiative and now have their own IRs as their proudest possession. However, many Indian Irs, once functional are in bad shape and a few have been closed. This paper deals with IR initiatives in the discipline of Medicine and Biology including. The paper discusses their scope, collection strength, growth rate and their current status.

2017 ◽  
pp. 99-126
Author(s):  
Rupak Chakravarty

Open Access (OA) is reshaping the world by redefining the scholarly communication methods with focus on building a knowledge society. It has the power to democratize the knowledge by removing hurdles from free access to scholarly works while encouraging knowledge sharing. Institutional Repositories (IRs) play a vital role in the OA movement by facilitating the Green Route to Open Access. In India, some elite educational and research institutes such as the Indian Statistical Institute, some CSIR Laboratories, IITs, and IIMs have taken significant initiatives in building IRs. In addition to theses, a few Universities have also taken the initiative and now have their own IRs as their proudest possession. However, many Indian Irs, once functional are in bad shape and a few have been closed. This paper deals with IR initiatives in the discipline of Medicine and Biology including. The paper discusses their scope, collection strength, growth rate and their current status.


Author(s):  
Shalini Wasan ◽  
Rupak Chakravarty

Open Access (OA) is a noble cause as it removes all hurdles from free access to scholarly works and promotes knowledge sharing. The OA movement is strengthened by Institutional Repositories (IRs). IRs are based on institute-specific requirements, workflow pattern, metadata, and other related standards for different kinds of digital documents, search and retrieval requirements, and user interfaces at various levels. In India, some elite educational and research institutes such as the Indian Statistical Institute, some CSIR Laboratories, IITs, and IIMs have taken significant initiatives in building IRs. In addition, a few Universities, such as the Central University of Hyderabad, are working on building IRs. According to various databases, the total number of Indian IRs exceeds 40, but out of these only 25 are functional, while the rest of them are either non-functional or inaccessible. The present chapter is an effort to cover the various aspects of functional IRs in India.


2015 ◽  
pp. 101-132
Author(s):  
Shalini Wasan ◽  
Rupak Chakravarty

Open Access (OA) is a noble cause as it removes all hurdles from free access to scholarly works and promotes knowledge sharing. The OA movement is strengthened by Institutional Repositories (IRs). IRs are based on institute-specific requirements, workflow pattern, metadata, and other related standards for different kinds of digital documents, search and retrieval requirements, and user interfaces at various levels. In India, some elite educational and research institutes such as the Indian Statistical Institute, some CSIR Laboratories, IITs, and IIMs have taken significant initiatives in building IRs. In addition, a few Universities, such as the Central University of Hyderabad, are working on building IRs. According to various databases, the total number of Indian IRs exceeds 40, but out of these only 25 are functional, while the rest of them are either non-functional or inaccessible. The present chapter is an effort to cover the various aspects of functional IRs in India.


Mousaion ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ncamsile Nombulelo Dlamini ◽  
Maritha Snyman

The purpose of this paper is to assess the current status of institutional repositories (IRs) in Swaziland’s academic institutions. The factors under discussion are the number of IRs in Swaziland, their usage, the level of awareness of these IRs, and the challenges that prevent the implementation of IRs in Swaziland’s academic institutions. A webometric approach, interviews and semi-structured questionnaires completed by IR managers or librarians working for the Swaziland’s academic institutions were used to collect data for this study. Responses were received from 11 respondents. The findings indicated that there is one IR in Swaziland that is accessible to the institution’s community via the intranet. This IR was, at the time when this study took place, not registered in any of the international registries of repositories, such as the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). Currently, this IR faces problems of insufficient content, a low level of IR awareness, limited knowledge of effective and appropriate IR advocacy strategies and limited knowledge of effective IR implementation and management strategies. Based on the findings and information gained from a literature review of IRs, the paper recommends strategies to academic institutions in Swaziland that may enable them to increase their number of IRs, the awareness level of IRs and consequently the use of IRs. The findings and recommendations may also benefit other African countries in similar situations.  


2021 ◽  
pp. 026666692110154
Author(s):  
Usman Ahmed Adam ◽  
Kiran Kaur

Institutional repositories are powerful tools to facilitate global access to intellectual output by members of the institution, particularly in assisting them to preserve and maximize access to their research output globally. This exploratory study of the status of institutional repositories implementation in African countries using the global Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and Transparent Ranking: All Repositories by Google Scholar, reports on the operational status and the performance of repositories. Factor analysis and cluster analysis are used to analyze the operational level of institutional repositories in African countries. The analysis showed that the typical performance of institutional repositories remains below average. The possibility of global open access to research results through institutional repositories in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt appeared to be relatively more feasible than other African countries. This study concludes that many organizations, institutions, and societies spend great efforts in support of open access implementation in Africa, however, the widespread implementation of institutional repositories is still very slow paced, and the performance of the implemented repositories was below expectation. Suggestions for regaining the intended direction of African institutional repositories are given based on the current status.


Author(s):  
Neeraj Kumar Singh ◽  
Jyoti Sharma ◽  
Navneet Kaur

The purpose of this chapter is to present the development and current situation of Institutional Repositories (IRs) in India. This chapter explores the main concepts of open access, institutional repositories, and their needs and benefits. The chapter highlights the current status of Institutional Repositories (IR) in India by its collection type, subject coverage, and present working status of the repositories available to the academic community as open sources. This chapter examines the overall growth of IRs in Asia and enumerates the Institutional Repositories in India. The chapter analyzes the accessible institutional repositories based on the selected study criteria and studies various digital library software used in the development of IRs in India.


2015 ◽  
pp. 254-268
Author(s):  
Neeraj Kumar Singh ◽  
Jyoti Sharma ◽  
Navneet Kaur

The purpose of this chapter is to present the development and current situation of Institutional Repositories (IRs) in India. This chapter explores the main concepts of open access, institutional repositories, and their needs and benefits. The chapter highlights the current status of Institutional Repositories (IR) in India by its collection type, subject coverage, and present working status of the repositories available to the academic community as open sources. This chapter examines the overall growth of IRs in Asia and enumerates the Institutional Repositories in India. The chapter analyzes the accessible institutional repositories based on the selected study criteria and studies various digital library software used in the development of IRs in India.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yimei Zhu

Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing. Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding. However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice. It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority. It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing. A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jeroen Sondervan ◽  
Arjan Schalken ◽  
Jan de Boer ◽  
Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access. Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route - open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way. Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories. This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”. In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level. It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.


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