Research Using Open Access Resources and Search Systems

Ben HockenberrySt. John Fisher College

Delivered at Rochester Regional Library Council, Fairport, NYMonday, Oct. 29, 2012 2-4PM

Licensed for re-use under CC-BY

DEFINITIONS

First, what are we talking about when we say “Open Access Resources?”

Definitions

Open Access"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." (Suber 2004)

Practical consensus on this definition is elusive, though formalized OA definitions mostly agreee.g. the Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda statements

Definitions

Gold OAPublisher-managed OA Journals or OA option for authors submitting to otherwise non-OA journals Green OAAuthor-initiated archiving in a repository

These definitions are different from the colors used in SHERPA/RoMEO to define publishers’ policies regarding author self-archiving in repositories.http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html

Definitions

RepositoryDigital space for deposit of pre- and post-prints of journal articles and other scholarly output.

Some are oriented to:• discipline• country of origin• institution (or department)

The last are often called Institutional Repositories, or IRs.

Sample Repositories• http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/research/eprints/• http://trace.tennessee.edu/• http://dspace.mit.edu/• https://urresearch.rochester.edu/• http://arxiv.org

Definitions

OA MandateMany funders of research, particularly in government, now require that funded research be archived in a publicly accessible form, usually without embargo.• NIH, Harvard, MIT, Research Councils UK, U. of Southampton.

OA Mandates have led to significant expansions in the OA “market” as a whole.

EmbargoA period of time before access is “opened.” Many publishers require an embargo on post-prints or finalized publications.

What About Peer Review?

Some OA materials are peer-reviewed, and some are not. Users need to be aware of what they're looking at:• Indicators like "Refereed" or "Reviewed"• Pre-Print vs. Post-Print

Pre-Prints

Characteristics• Original submitted manuscripts• May or may not be accepted for publication• Pre-peer-review• Lack journal formatting• Published for timeliness, particularly in the hard sciences

Examples• http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6892• http

://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10649598154253732513&hl=en&as_sdt=0,33

Post-Prints

Characteristics• Post-peer-review• Post-acceptance for publication• Lacks finalized journal formatting (page numbering may be

different; in-text citations may require adjustment)• Largely the same text as the final published version, but there

may be slight differencesExamples• http://

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1003/1/bst-92-postprint-jan-2003.pdf• http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=h

tml&identifier=ADA458969

Finalized Publications

The version formatted for publication in the journal.Some publications publish exclusively for OA – i.e. “Gold OA.”http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039998

Search engines may display a full-text link from a journal that provides older articles for free and paid access to new research. At other times, an author (or someone else) will post finalized articles to a personal site, which is picked up by search engines. Very few publications allow upload of finalized papers to the web or to an IR – so the version you see may not be there long!

Conference Proceedings

Some institutions publish locally-held conference proceedings through repositories:http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/humtraffconf/22/

A faculty member may also post a copy of their conference presentation, transcript or research findings to a repository:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58999

You may also find poster presentations in repositories:http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/nursing_facpub/1

Conference papers may or may not be refereed – check main conference website if you need to know peer review status

Dissertations• Dissertations may be found in many repositories, expanding

access to these documents that are often otherwise locked in archives or available only through paid outlets like ProQuest Dissertations.http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/education_etd/1/

SEARCH SYSTEMS

There are a lot of ways to search for open access articles, but the simplest way is using Google. Per Norris, Oppenheim and Roland (2008), searching with Google and Google Scholar was more than 7 times more likely to retrieve an open access article than using OAIster or OpenDOAR. I’ll demonstrate them, but recommend Google Scholar for most searchers.

OpenDOAR

http://www.opendoar.org/search.php

A directory of repositories.Contains a search interface to find repositories, and another search interface (using Google Custom Search) to find items in those repositories.

OAIster

http://oaister.worldcat.org/

Powered by WorldCatContains other types of digital collections, i.e. photos and other archive documents

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

http://www.doaj.org/

• Searches exclusively journals that are OA• Not a repository search• Some journals are less stable; your mileage may vary

Google Scholar

http://scholar.google.com/

• Links together published and OA versions of documents• Keyword indexing of documents results in far more results

with more capacity to narrow a search• Sheer size delivers added bonuses: cited-by functions and

bibliography linking• Customizable for libraries/institutions with link resolvers• It just works

REFERENCES

This is just a taste of the literature out there on Open Access. Check out the Digital Scholarship bibliographies: http://digital-scholarship.org/about/overview.htm

References

Finding OA Articles• Norris, M., Oppenheim, C., & Rowland, F. (2008). Finding open

access articles using Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR. Online Information Review, 32(6), 709–715. doi:10.1108/14684520810923881http://hdl.handle.net/2134/4084

• Baldwin, V. (2009). Using Google Scholar to search for online availability of a cited article in engineering disciplines. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 56. doi:10.5062/F4WM1BBChttp://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/182/

References

General Background on OA• Suber, P. (2004). A very brief introduction to open access.

Retrieved from http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm

• Budapest Open Access Initiativehttp://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read

• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishinghttp://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm

• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledgehttp://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/

References

Further Reading• Björk, B.-C., & Paetau, P. (2012). Open access to the scientific

journal literature: Status and challenges for the information systems community. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 38(5), 39–44.http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-12/JunJul12_Bjork_Paetau.pdf

• Cassella, M. (2010). Institutional repositories: An internal and external perspective on the value of IRs for researchers’ communities. LIBER Quarterly, 20(2), 210–225.http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/URN%3ANBN%3ANL%3AUI%3A10-1-113593

References

Further Reading• Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., & Harnad, S.

(2012). Green and gold open access percentages and growth, by discipline. 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Montréal, CA (p. 11). Presented at the 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), Montréal, Québec: Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada). Retrieved from http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/

• Royster, P. (2012). Up from Under the “Open Access” Bus. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 1(2). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1045http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss2/3