|
Return to Support for Research homepage
|
|
Related Links |
|
 |
|
 |
|
What is an Open Access Repository?
- also known as a digital archive or institutional repository
- a digital (electronic) collection that enhances scholarly communication by providing free, searchable, open access to publications, research and/or teaching materials
- commonly includes journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and proceedings and theses
- valuable source of "grey literature" e.g. unpublished papers, working paper series, technical and project reports
- supports principle of broad access to outcomes of publicly-funded research
- likely to increase impact of research on diverse community
- increasingly used to promote individual research publications or those of discipline groups, academic units or universities
- may increase cites on original paper by up to 250%, depending on discipline - read more
- often either subject-oriented and set up by scholarly or professional societies, or institutional
- self-submission a key characteristic
- UTAS has its own institutional repository named UTAS ePrints
Useful Open Access Repositories
| UTAS ePrints |
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/ |
A digital archive that provides full-text access to publications by current University of Tasmania staff and higher degree students,
including journal articles, books, conference papers and theses. |
| ARROW |
http://search.arrow.edu.au/apps/ArrowUI/search |
A project funded by DEST to serve as a gateway to Australian higher education institutional repositories. Includes all contents of UTAS ePrints and fifteen other universities, as well as the Australian Digital Theses repository. |
| OAIster |
http://www.oaister.org/ |
As of July 2007, OAIster contains over 12 million records, "harvested" from more than 850 contributors worldwide. |
| Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) |
http://www.doaj.org/ |
A subject and title directory to over 2700 journals with free, fulltext scholarly content. Journals are multi-disciplinary and international. Content of articles is searchable for 832 journals. |
| Subject-Based Repositories |
See the Subject Guide for your area, to identify relevant subject repositories (e.g. arXiv, for physics, mathematics, computer science etc.) |
Indexes to Open Access Repositories
All repositories have their own search engine, usually offering a variety of access points including author and keyword. Additionally, the content of many are indexed by multi-discipline databases e.g.
| Google |
www.google.com |
Indexes UTAS ePrints (recognising it as an authoritative site compared with a personal web-page) and many other open access repositories.
NB Yahoo, Alta Vista and other web search engines also index institutional and subject repositories. Try different search engines to compare results and to see which you prefer. |
| Google Scholar |
http://scholar.google.com/ |
Indexes, and offers extensive fulltext access to, multi-discipline peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from a wide variety of academic publishers & professional societies. May provide extra cites, from publications in languages other than English and within document types not included in WoS and Scopus |
| Scirus |
www.scirus.com |
Searches over 415 million science-specific Web pages, with multi-disciplinary contents of many digital archive collections. See list of contributors. |
| Scopus |
http://www.scopus.com |
Indexes more than 500 open access journals as well as linking with the Scirus search engine to provide access to many reputable institutional or subject repositories. |
| Web Citation Index |
ISI Web of Knowledge [v3.0]
|
A Web of Knowledge database that indexes and provides full-text access to scholarly web-based documents, including pre-prints, open archive repositories and open access journals. Also includes citing items, where found. |
Selected Reading on the Open Access movement
Research Councils UK (RCUK)
- expressed their "commitment to the guiding principles that publicly funded research must be made available and accessible for public examination as rapidly as practical; published research outputs should be effectively peer-reviewed; this must be a cost effective use of public funds; and outputs must be preserved and remain accessible for future generations."
Research Councils UK (RCUK) (2006) Updated position statement on access to research outputs
- Since October 2006, 4 of 7 Research Councils have mandated open-access deposits at earliest opportunity.
Wissenburg, A 2007, 'The UK Research Councils and access to scholarly publications', paper presented to Open Research: Third London Conference on Opening Access to Research Publications, London, UK, 11 June.
Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC)
- principal body advising Australian Government on research information issues
Its goals are:
- to improve the access of Australian researchers to the information they need to carry out their research
- to make the results of Australian research widely available and easily accessible.
ARC & NHMRC
Articles
Brody, T 2006, 'Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication', PhD thesis, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Harnad, S & Brody, T 2004, 'Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals', D-Lib Magazine, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 1082-9873
|
|
