Open access: why and how

No library can afford to subscribeto every scientific publication andmost can only afford a smallfraction of them. The open accessmovement believes it can solve thisproblem to a great extent. Openaccess literature is digital, online,free of charge, and free of mostcopyright and licensing restrictions.This literature can be communicatedthrough open access journals, openaccess archives or repositories, andopen courseware. To be “openaccess” means to remove the pricetag and permission barriers to someextent.

Objectives and methodology

The main aim of the study was toidentify open access resources and tostudy their actual usefulness in the LISteaching and learning process. Openaccess resources are comprised of openaccess archives, open access books,open access journals, open accesscourseware, open access searchengines, and open source software.The researcher visited many libraryscience department web sites, variouslibrary web sites, and OA forums/blogsfor locating resources. The exhaustivelist is prepared and discussed in thefindings.

Findings

The LIS field, being one of thepioneers and supporters of the openaccess philosophy does make availablea significant amount of information inopen access format as follows.

1. Open access library sciencerepositories/archives

DLIST: (http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/105067).DLIST, the digital library ofinformation science and technology(DLIST), is a cross-institutional,subject-based, open access digitalarchive for the information sciences,including archives and recordsmanagement, library and informationscience, information systems, museuminformatics, and other criticalinformation infrastructures. The serveris implemented by the school ofinformation resources and libraryscience and the Arizona healthsciences library at the University ofArizona. It contains 1,546 documentsand only accepts documents in English.

E-LIS (http://eprints.rclis.org). E-LISis an international open access archiverelated to librarianship, informationscience and technology, and relateddisciplines. It uses the open archivesinitiative (OAI) protocol and tools tofacilitate interoperability betweenrepository servers. It contains 14,603papers. E-LIS is the first internationale-server in this area, is part of theresearch in computing, library andinformation science (RCLIS) projectand is organized, managed andmaintained by an international team oflibrarians working on a voluntary basis.

Librarian’s digital library (LDL)(http://drtc.isibang.ac.in:8080/).LDL is a repository where any digitalresource related to the library andinformation science domain can bearchived by anybody across the world.It has been developed and maintainedby DRTC, India. It contains 708documents in the English language.

OCLC research publications repository(www.oclc.org/research/publications.html). The OCLC research repositorycontains works produced, sponsored, orsubmitted by OCLC research. In general,the works are research-oriented and are inthe subject area of library and informationscience. Many items describe OCLCresearch projects, activities, andprograms and were originally publishedby OCLC, while others are from peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

2. Online free dictionary for libraryscience

Online dictionary for library andinformation science (ODLIS) by JoanM. Reitz (www.abc-clio.com/ODLIS/odlis_A.aspx). ODLIS is designed as ahypertext reference resource for libraryand information science professionals,university students and faculty, and usersof all types of libraries. With more than5,000 terms and cross-references, thedictionary’s content has been carefullyselected and includes terms frompublishing, printing, literature, andcomputer science where, in the author’sjudgment, they are relevant to both libraryprofessionals and laypersons. It can besearched alphabetically. ODLIS was firstdeveloped as an online resource availableworldwide,with an e-mail contact addressfor feedback, and users from manycountries have contributed to its growth,often suggesting additional terms andcommenting on existing definitions.Expansion of the dictionary is anongoing process.

3. Electronic theses and dissertations(ETD) archives: the following are theimportant ETD archives which house anumber of LIS ETDs

ADT/National Library of Australia’sTrove service (http://trove.nla.gov.au).

16 Library Hi Tech News Number 7 2013, pp. 16-20, q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-05-2013-0029

Open access resources useful in LIS education

Sarika Sawant

The Australasian digital theses (ADT)program ceased operation on 28 March2011. The database server has beendecommissioned, and the content of thatdatabase is accessible from the NationalLibrary of Australia’s Trove service. TheADT included only theses fromAustralian and New Zealanduniversities, but Trove includes thesesheld by other Australian institutions andthose awarded elsewhere but housed inAustralian libraries. There are about 245,343 theses that can be searched throughTrove.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC)(www.collectionscanada.gc.ca). Themission of theses Canada is to acquireand preserve a comprehensivecollection of Canadian theses at LAC.It was first established in 1965.Currently more than 60 universitiesparticipate in the national program.

Networked Digital Library of Thesesand Dissertations (NDLTD) (www.ndltd.org). The NDLTD is an internationalorganization that, through leadership andinnovation, promotes the adoption,creation, use, dissemination andpreservation of ETD. The NDLTDencourages and supports the efforts ofinstitutes of higher education and theircommunities to develop electronicpublishing and digital libraries(including repositories), thus enablingthem to share knowledge moreeffectively in order to unlockthe potential benefits worldwide.A collaborative effort of the NDLTD,OCLC, VTLS, and Scirus, the NDLTDunion catalog contains more than onemillion records of ETD.

The DART-Europe e-theses portal(www.dart-europe.eu). DART-Europe is an academic consortium ofuniversity partners and providesresearchers with a single Europeanportal for the discovery of ETDs.DEEP currently provides access to405,945 open access research thesesfrom 534 Universities in 27 Europeancountries.

Shodhganga (http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/). Developed by INFLIBNET,Shodhganga provides a platform forIndian research scholars to deposit theirPhD theses andmake themavailable to theentire scholarly community in open

access. The repository has the ability tocapture, index, store, disseminate andpreserve the ETDs submitted byresearchers.

EThOS – UK theses and dissertationsfrom the British Library (http://ethos.bl.uk). This resource offers a “singlepoint of access” where researchers theworld over can access ALL thesesproduced by UK higher education.EThOS offers a coherent andconsistent interface by implementing acentral “hub” comprising an e-store anda digitization suite at the British librarysite in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. The hubautomatically harvests e-theses frominstitutional repositories and digitizespaper theses from participatinginstitutions in order to offer the singlepoint of access. More than 300,000theses are available for immediate viewand download.

OpenThesis (www.openthesis.org/).OpenThesis is a free repository oftheses, dissertations, and otheracademic documents, coupled withpowerful search, organization, andcollaboration tools. OpenThesiscontains the bibliographicalinformation, normally includingauthor, school, title, abstract, date ofpublication, and more. Full text isgenerally not included unlessOpenThesis has received permissionfrom the school or author.

4. Open access course material

OpenCourseWare (www.ocwconsortium.org). OpenCourseWare consortium is afree and open resource offering highquality educational materials for collegesand universities. It includes coursescontributed by over 200 highereducation institutions. At present, fiveLIS course materials are available fromvarious universities.

Open.Michigan (https://open.umich.edu). Open.Michigan is a Universityof Michigan initiative to create andshare knowledge, resources, andresearch with the global learningcommunity. Open.Michigan iscommitted to open content licensingand supporting the use, redistribution,and remixing of educational materials.

Open.Michigan’s mission is directlyrelated to open educational resource(OER) production and publishing insome form. OERs are learningmaterials and tools offered freely andopenly for anyone to use, and undersome licenses to adapt, improve, andredistribute. There are about five to sixcourses in LIS, and these coursematerials are available under thecategory “information” (https://open.umich.edu/education/si).There are many more other

universities which provide open accesscourse materials, for example MITOpenCourseWare and Open YaleCourses, but they do not contain anycourse material on library science.

5. Open access search engines

DL-Harvest(dlist.sir.arizona.edu). DL-Harvest isan open access search engine fromdLISTat the University of Arizona. DL-Harvestsearches the OAI-PMH compliantrecords of various institutionalrepositories that collect library andinformation science papers, includingCalTech library system papers anddigital library of the commons atUniversity of Indiana. DL-Harvest hasindexed over 36,000 papers from 14different repositories thus far. DL-Harvest provides access through a quicksearch, an advanced search, and includesa means to browse papers by repository.

OAIster (www.oclc.org/oaister.en.html). OAIster is a union catalog ofmillions of records representing openaccess resources. It was built byharvesting from open accesscollections worldwide using the openarchives initiative protocol for metadataharvesting (OAI-PMH). Today,OAIster includes more than 25 millionrecords representing digital resourcesfrom more than 1,100 contributors.

Google/Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.co.in). Google Scholarprovides a simple way to broadlysearch for scholarly literature. Fromone place, a researcher can searchacross many disciplines and sources:articles, theses, books, abstracts andcourt opinions, from academicpublishers, professional societies,online repositories, universities and

Library Hi Tech News Number 7 2013 17

other web sites. Google Scholar helpsthe researcher find relevant work acrossthe world of scholarly research.

Citebase (http://iplus.ukoln.ac.uk).Citebase is an experimental citationindex service and scientometric OAsearch engine developed by theUniversity of Southampton that trackscitations of research literature fromphysics, math, information science, andpublished biomedical papers. Citebaseharvests pre- and post-prints (usuallyauthor self-archived) from OAI-PMHcompliant archives, parsing theirreferences and indexing metadata in asearch engine.

SHERPA search (www.sherpa.ac.uk).SHERPA is a trial search service for thefull-text of material held in the UK openaccess repositories that are listed indirectory of open access repositories(OpenDOAR). This has been madepossible through the recent launch byGoogle of its custom search engine,which allows SHERPA to define asearch service based on all UKrepository contents. This service doesnot use the OAI-PMH protocol, or themetadata held within repositories.Instead, it relies on Google’s indexes,which in turn rely on repositories beingsuitably structured and configured forthe Googlebot web crawler.

METALIS (http://metalis.cilea.it/).METALIS is an OAI service providerfor the library and information sciencefield. The service is based on specificpieces: the metadata harvesting process,the crosswalks designed to homogenizemetadata, the web interface of theservice provider METALIS, andOpenURL usage.

AuseSearch (www.google.com/cse/home?cx ¼ 012189697858739272261%3Ayyyqychcumo). AuseSearchsearches all open access researchrepositories in Australia listed byauthor Kennan and Kingsley (firstMonday, February 2009). In otherwords, it searches all full-text researcharticles and (if available) theses fromrepositories that responded to theirsurvey.

BASE (www.base-search.net). BASEis one of the world’s most voluminoussearch engines especially for academic

open access web resources. BASE isoperated by Bielefeld UniversityLibrary. As the open access movementgrows and prospers, more and morerepository servers use the “OAI-PMH”for providing their contents. BASEcollects, normalizes, and indexes thesedata. BASE provides more than 40million documents from more than2,400 sources. You can access the fulltext of about 75 percent of the indexeddocuments. The Index is continuouslyenhanced by integrating further OAIsources as well as local sources. BASEis a registered OAI service provider,and contributed to the European project“digital repository infrastructure visionfor European research (DRIVER)”.Database managers can integrate theBASE index into their own localinfrastructure (e.g. metasearchengines, library catalogues) via aninterface. About 40 library sciencerelated books from various sourcescan be discovered in BASE.

6. Open access journals

Directory of open access journals(DOAJ) (www.doaj.org). The aim ofthe DOAJ is to increase the visibilityand ease of use of open access scientificand scholarly journals, therebypromoting their increased usage andimpact. The DOAJ aims to becomprehensive and cover all openaccess scientific and scholarly journalsthat use a quality control system toguarantee the content. About 140library science journals are registeredin DOAJ.

7. OA books

Directory of open access books(DOAB) (www.doabooks.org/). Theprimary aim of DOAB is to increasediscoverability of open access books.Academic publishers are invited toprovide metadata of their open accessbooks to DOAB. Metadata will beharvestable in order to maximizedissemination, visibility and impact.Aggregators can integrate the records intheir commercial services and librariescan integrate the directory into theironline catalogues, helping scholars andstudents to discover the books. Thereare 11 books on library science in theDOAB at present.

Open access publishing in Europeannetworks (OAPEN) (www.oapen.org/ home). OAPEN combines theadvantages of an independentlyoperating commercial venture withthe benefits of being embedded in thescholarly community. Joining theOAPEN network involves nomembership costs while allowingprivileged access to information-sharing and lobbying that are animportant part of the initiative.OAPEN screens publishers who wishto join the network and provide openaccess publications to the collection.Publishers or publishing entities(usually research institutes with theirown publishing programs) need to bepredominantly academic publishers.This means that they should haveproper and transparent procedures forpeer review of manuscripts, and itshould be clear which publications arepeer reviewed. OAPEN enableslibraries and aggregators to use themetadata of all available titles of theOAPEN library. There are currently 20books available under library andinformation sciences.

Bookboon.com (http://bookboon.com).Bookboon.com originates fromDenmark, out of Ventus publishing, andwas established in 1988. Ever since itwas founded, the company has focusedon publishing education related books forbusiness professionals and students. As aglobal eBook publisher, bookboon.comoffers a huge range of over 1,000 eBooksin seven languages, directly available todownload from the web site.In 2005 the companymade a strategic

leap and became the first bookpublishing company in the world tofocus 100 percent on free eBooks. Sincethat time, the company has been aimingto set new standards in the world ofmodern publishing based on readers’needs.

College open textbooks (www.collegeopentextbooks.org/). The collegeopen textbooks collaborative, acollection of 28 educational non-profitand for-profit organizations, affiliatedwith more than 200 colleges, is focusedon driving awareness and adoption ofopen textbooks to more than 2,000community and other two-yearcolleges. This includes providingtraining for instructors in adopting

18 Library Hi Tech News Number 7 2013

open resources, peer reviews of opentextbooks, and mentoring onlineprofessional networks that offersupport for authors in opening theirresources, and other services. Collegeopen textbooks has peer-reviewed morethan 100 open textbooks for use incommunity college courses, and hasidentified more than 550. Opentextbooks are freely available for usewithout restriction and can bedownloaded or printed from web sitesand repositories. COT contains onebook related to library science, andseveral books related to IT and internetthat may be useful for library science.

E-books Directory (www.e-booksdirectory.com). E-books Directory isa free web resource which containslinks to free downloadable e-books,technical papers and documents, as wellas user contributed content, articles,reviews and comments. E-booksDirectory is a service to students,researchers and e-book lovers. The sitewas launched in 2008, and it is adatabase-driven web site using PHPscripting language and MySQLrelational database. There arecurrently 7,801 e-books listed in 634categories. There are about seven bookson intellectual property law useful forLIS students/librarians.

FreeTechBooks (www.freetechbooks.com/). FreeTechBooks lists freeonline computer science, engineeringand programming books, textbooks andlecture notes, all of which are legallyand freely available over the internet.There are about seven books onintellectual property law useful forLIS students/librarians. Also includedare approximately 28 books on digitallibrary and information theory usefulfor LIS students/librarians.

HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org).HathiTrust is a partnership of majoracademic and research institutionsworking to ensure that the culturalrecord is preserved and accessible longinto the future. HathiTrust is atrustworthy digital preservationrepository collaboratively owned andoperated by the partnering institutionsin order to preserve and provide accessto materials digitized from their librarycollections and other sources. It includesmore than 10 million volumes, making

it one of the largest research librarycollections in the world. Over 3 millionof these volumes are in the publicdomain and fully viewable online.HathiTrust brings together publicdomain and in-copyright materialsdigitized by Google, the internetarchive, library in-house operations,and other initiatives. Materials arestored securely for access now and infuture generations in a robust digitalpreservation repository. More than1,000 books on library science areviewable as well as downloadable.

8. Open source software

Reference management software:Zotero (www.zotero.org/). Zotero isfree, open source bibliographicsoftware. It is a research tool formanaging online references developedby the Center for History and NewMedia at George Mason University,Zotero is a Firefox extension thatprovides users with automated accessto bibliographic information forresources viewed online. Onlineresearchers can quickly and easilygather the information they will needlater to review and cite references andcreate bibliographies. Zotero includesfeatures to manage sources, and userscan also manually enter sources. Theresult is a centralized location forgathering and storing references,significantly streamlining the researchprocess. It is an important tool not onlyfor LIS members but useful for theentire research community.

9. Conference alert service

Lanyrd.com (http://lanyrd.com/).Most events on Lanyrd have at leastone speaker, but professionalnetworking events are appropriated aswell. You can add conferences,workshops, unconferences, eveningevents with talks, conventions, tradeshows and so forth. The site is gearedtowards knowledge sharing events withsessions and participants of some sort.Some more examples are as follows:

. http://conferencehound.com/

. www.conferensum.com/Proceedings

. www.conferencealerts.com/

10. Posters and slides

F1000Posters (http://f1000.com/).F1000Posters is an open access posterrepository that provides a permanent,structured environment for thedeposition of posters as well as atrustworthy venue for ongoingdiscussion and development of theinformation being presented.

11. Open repository directories

OpenDOAR (www.opendoar.org/).OpenDOAR is a directory of academicopen access repositories. EachOpenDOAR repository has beenvisited by project staff to check theinformation that is recorded here. Thisin-depth approach does not rely onautomated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.OpenDOAR is one of the SHERPAservices including RoMEO andJULIET, run by the Centre forResearch Communications (CRC).Current development work is currentlyfunded by JISC, with contributionsfrom the CRC host organization, theUniversity of Nottingham.

Registry of Open Access Repositories(ROAR) (http://roar.eprints.org/).ROAR lists open repositories. It ishosted by the school of Electronics andComputer Science at the University ofSouthampton. The aim of ROAR is topromote the development of open accessby providing timely information aboutthe growth and status of repositoriesthroughout the world. Open access toresearch maximizes research access andthereby also research impact, makingresearch more productive and effective.

12. Guidelines regarding open accesspublishing, author rights, self-archiving, and copyright issues

SHERPA/RoMEO (www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/). A database that includesthe copyright and self-archivingpolicies of various journal publishers,SHERPA/RoMEO is part of SHERPAservices based at the University ofNottingham. RoMEO has collaborativerelationships with many internationalpartners, who contribute time and effortto developing and maintaining the

Library Hi Tech News Number 7 2013 19

service. Current RoMEO developmentis funded by JISC.

Journal Info (http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/).This resource provides assistance forresearchers in the selection of journalfor publication. The service currentlycovers about 18,000 journals, in varioussubject areas. Journals added in thisdatabase have been indexed indatabases including BIOSIS Previews,Chemical Abstracts, Compendex,Inspec, MathSciNet, Medline, andScience Citation Index (to name a few).

Science Commons (http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/). ScienceCommons is a branch of CreativeCommons that is devoted to easingunnecessary barriers to the flow ofscientific knowledge and technicalinformation. Science commonsinitiatives are designed to acceleratethe research cycle. The Scholar’sCopyright Addendum Engine providedfrom the Science Commons web sitewill help authors to generate a PDFform that may be attached to a journalpublisher’s copyright agreement to

ensure that certain author rights areretained.

OAKList database (www.oaklist.qut.edu.au/). Queensland University ofTechnology’s OAK law project hasdeveloped a web-enabled databasecontaining information aboutpublishing agreements and publishers’open access policies and practices.It uses the same color designations asSHERPA/RoMEO.

Web site references

The following web sites wereconsulted:

. http://collegeopentextbooks.org/about-us/who-are-we

. http://eprints.rclis.org/6634/1/e-lis.pdf

. http://guides.ou.edu/openaccess

. http://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/content.php?pid¼109174&sid¼2475488

. http://libguides.northwestern.edu/content.php?pid¼262419&sid¼2266012

. http://libguides.southernct.edu/

content.php?pid ¼ 69634&sid¼1316002

. http://libguides.southernct.edu/

content.php?pid¼69634&sid¼791734

. http://library.nuim.ie/electronic-

resources/open-access-resources. http://mastersinspecialeducation.

net/2010/top-50-open-access-open-

source-education-projects/. http://scholcom.yorku.ca/?q¼gra

doaresources. http://tc3.libguides.com/content.

php?pid¼216203&sid¼1811965. www.library.uq.edu.au/bio/open

access/resources.html. www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/libsci/

fulltext.html. www.unom.ac.in/uploads/library/

gcl-opac/openaccess.html

Sarika Sawant (s1b1s@rediffmail.

com) is based at SHPT School of

Library Science, SNDT Women’s

University, Mumbai, India.

20 Library Hi Tech News Number 7 2013