A very long post a long time ago covered the start of this subject upon which so many hopes were pinned, hopes that the results of publicly funded UK research would be made openly accessible online. As well as being published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, the researcher would place a copy of the research in a digital repository accessible online to all - a process termed ’self-archiving’. Many UK research establishments are setting up these ‘institutional respositories’ - for example our very own DSpace@Cambridge. Eventually, if this happened, any research could be found and freely accessed online - irrespective of whether your establishment subscribed (or could afford to subscribe) to the publishing journal.
We have been waiting since last October for the outcome to the Research Councils UK (RCUK) draft policy on access to research. The original draft policy, issued on 28 June 2005 - exactly one year ago from the new announcement - stated:
“From 1 October 2005*, subject to copyright and licensing arrangements, a copy of any published journal articles or conference proceedings resulting from Research Council funded research should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder. Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.” [The asterisked addition reads: “* Date to be amended on release of final Position Statement”]
Unfortunately, it seems that the eight separate research councils which make up the RCUK could not reach an agreement. The final result, after all this time, is that each funding council will be left to decide its own policy. As Peter Suber notes in the
latest issue of his excellent and highly rated Open Access Newsletter:
“On June 28, the Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy, one year to the day after it released a draft policy for public comment. The new policy is not as strong as the draft, but is nevertheless a very significant step forward that will mandate OA [open access] to a good portion of publicly-funded research in the UK.
“The draft policy mandated OA for all RCUK-funded research, but the new policy lets each Research Council go its own way. There are already signs that they will diverge. Of the eight Research Councils, some will take a few months to finish their deliberations, one will take at least until 2008, one has chosen to request rather than require OA, and three have chosen to mandate OA.”
The RCUK position on issue of improved access to research outputs provides links to the policy of each individual research council - some have yet to make up their minds. Only three of the eight have so far decided to mandate Open Access to the research they fund:
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) - ‘deposit required’
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) - ‘deposit mandatory in specified repositories’
- Medical Research Council (MRC) - ‘deposit required’
However, none of them state ‘immediately’ under ‘when to archive’. The MRC comes closest by stating: ‘earliest opportunity and within six months’. But, true Open Access as defined since the
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in February 2002 requires
immediate archiving - that is, concurrent with its publishing date in a peer-reviewed journal. The BOAI stated its purpose was to see:
“…world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
A new SHERPA JULIET web site is keeping tabs on the situation with each Research Council. JULIET is a sister site to the original SHERPA RoMEO site which monitors the policies of journal publishers towards researchers self-archiving a copy of their published paper in freely accessible online repositories [RoMEO stood for Rights MEtadata for Open archiving, JULIET is not an acronym as far as I can see]. Interestingly, as the RoMEO site shows, the vast majority of publishers - around 80% - already allow self-archiving of research papers!. The problem is that, without it being mandated it seems that only around 15% of researchers will take the minimal trouble of making the few extra keystrokes to upload a copy of their paper to their institution’s repository.
Stevan Harnad, a leading advocate of open access via self-archiving in an institutional repository, and whose opinion on OA developments is always worth reading, writes Fixing the few flaws in the RCUK self-archiving mandates by pinning down WHEN and WHERE to deposit, 30 June 2006 (Stevan Harnad) in his weblog Open Access Archivangelism.
The open access material already available can be found by the standard web search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Search. However, specialized search engines such as Elsevier’s Scirus, OAIster, Google Scholar or Microsoft’s new Windows Live Academic search attempt to confine their results to academic material including much that is openly accessible in digital institutional repositories.
Other links:
JISC: JISC welcomes RCUK’s statement on access to research outputs.
Ths Scientist: UK research to be open access.
The Guardian: Boost for free internet access to public-funded research.
BioMed Central [UK based Open Access e-journal publisher]: BioMed Central welcomes UK research councils actions to promote open access.
On 28 June, the Research Councils UK (RCUK) posted a Draft Policy on Open Access at the RCUK web site for public comment. The comment period will end on Wednesday, 31 August 2005. The RCUK Proposal requires the provision of ‘Open Access’ to all the research papers it funds via freely available versions online. If adopted, the Proposal would make the UK a world leader in the provision of Open Access to publicly funded research. The press release summarizes the RCUK position. RCUK spokesman, Professor Ian Diamond said that Councils have already widely consulted the research community:
“We’ve held workshops, given evidence at Select Committees, met with the publishers through a DTI working group and written out to all UK Vice Chancellors to share our views as they emerge on this issue and hear what others are saying.”
BACKGROUND: Open Access (OA) is a relatively complex subject, and this post has become rather long. I want to provide a basic introduction to OA first.
Open Access occurs when copies of full-text journal articles (and other research information such as data, conference proceedings and theses) are made freely available online. Anybody anywhere with an internet connection can immediately access OA research data and OA scholarly journal articles free of charge. The most swiftly effective method of achieving OA is by placing research articles in digital web-based ‘repositories’. Ideally, each research institution (eg. a university) would maintain its own ‘institutional repository’ (IR) of research output into which its researchers would upload a copy of their peer-reviewed journal-published research articles.
The IR method of achieving OA has many advantages - a repository becomes a ready-made ’showcase’ of a university’s research output and thus there is a natural vested interest in keeping the repository maintained, and to fill it up with research papers. For researches, it offers a handy way to maintain a collection of all their work and easy way to share it with students without encountering access problems. Two other OA methods are in use. (1) ‘Central’ (often subject-based) repositories used by researchers from any institution worldwide may not have such a clear ownership responsibility or incentive. (2) Scholarly peer-reviewed Open Access ‘Journals’ are unlikely to become a widely based possibility simply because relatively few OA Journals exist. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) currently lists around 1,650 - which represent less than 7% of the 24,000 scholarly journals worldwide. The number of OA Journals, though gradually increasing, is unlikely to rise to reach ‘critical mass’ in the near future. A personal observation here: OA ‘Journals’ - web-based e-journals - seem to be just more highly visible versions of a small central/subject-based OAI Repository and most of them deposit copies of their articles in OAI repositories as well.
Ironically, pace RCUK, it is already possible for most research to be made Open Access via copies in repositories as outlined above! According to the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which lists publishers’ policies on Open Access to copies of their articles, 91% of scholarly journals already allow copies of their articles to be placed in a web-based open access repository! This is often referred to in OA parlance as ‘archiving’ or ‘author self-archiving’. But - and here’s the sticking point - it is an entirely voluntary action on the part of the researchers who may perceive self-archiving as a lot of extra hassle. Therefore, despite the publishers’ permissions, only 15% to 20% of research papers are currently being archived worldwide in a repository. Admittedly, this could partly be because most institutions do not yet have a repository to archive in (or have not made known that they have one). Without some kind of compulsion, archiving of openly accessible copies of most research is not going to happen soon - or perhaps ever. The RCUK Proposal introduces this seemingly necessary element of compulsion: the RCUK would require the timely archiving of each research paper as a condition of its funding. [Also see Alma Swan - Faculty awareness. Key Perspectives Ltd, a report on what current self-archiving activity there is. Dr Alma Swan is co-founder and director of Key Perspectives, a UK-based scholarly publishing consultancy]
Despite the low number of Institutional Repositories (of which more detail below), amongst the top 20 research grant funded universities nearly all now have a repository. Our own University of Cambridge has its DSpace@Cambridge repository which is in Pilot Study mode with a limited set of users until end 2005 so it is hardly, if at all, publicized. However, DSpace@Cambridge states on its site that it now holds a total of 30,000 records.
To enable web search engines - and therefore web users - to easily find and index the research articles in the repositories, the articles must comply with the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) - which basically means that each article in an ‘OAI-compliant’ repository must be described using an agreed format of ‘metadata’ (the items of data describing the article such as author, title, publishing date, web address etc.). There also exist specialized ‘OAI Harvesters’ such as OAIster which can easily ‘harvest’ the standardized metadata to create a cross-repository bibliographic database: OAIster now has over 5m records from almost 500 institutions in its database (although, unfortunately, it seems that many of OAIster’s records do not provide access to the full-text article).
The metadata format used by OAI-compliant repositories is called ‘Dublin Core‘ (that’s Dublin, Ohio, USA, where the original OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop was held by ‘geeks, freaks, and people with sensible shoes’ in March 1995). Dublin Core specifies 15 metadata elements, all optional and repeatable, which can be applied to each article in a digital repository (the elements include author, title, publishing date, web address, key words, type of resource, etc.). Dublin Core was adopted as an International Standard (ISO 15836) in October 2003.
For a more detailed introduction to Open Access, see Peter Suber’s excellent Open Access Overview: Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints and the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) Questions and answers about opening up access to research results.
[Back to the RCUK Proposal] The Proposal requires that a copy of every research paper arising from RCUK-funded work be deposited in Openly Accessible repositories at the earliest opportunity. Note that the Proposal specifically applies to articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals or presented at conferences. The Open Access version of an article (which would normally be a simple ‘text and tables’ version, not the ‘full PDF’ format as published) should be regarded as a supplemental version for those who cannot, for whatever reason, gain access to the published journal - after all, no library can afford all 24,000 or so peer-reviewed journals. However, the original journal-published article would always remain the definitive version.
The RCUK Proposal, if adopted, would apply to new research grants awarded from 1 October 2005. But, given the long-term nature of most research, the impact of the policy would not be felt immediately. Therefore the Proposal also encourages those currently engaged in RCUK-funded research to consider offering an OA version. The Proposal would cover a substantial proportion of all UK research: in 2003/4 the RCUK provided around half of all UK public research funding [source: Leslie Carr of Southampton University].
The RCUK Proposal has largely been built on a previous report published almost one year ago (20 July, 2004) by a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: Scientific Publications: Free for All? [A PDF version of the report is here]. This was a deeply researched report based on six months of inquiry, four rounds of public hearings, and hundreds of written comments. It included the following recommendation [my emphasis]:
“44. Academic authors currently lack sufficient motivation to self-archive in institutional repositories. We recommend that the Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all their articles in their institution’s repository within one month of publication or a reasonable period to be agreed following publication, as a condition of their research grant. An exception would need to be made for research findings that are deemed to be commercially sensitive. (Paragraph 117)”
However, a Government response (8 November 2004) rejected the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recommendations [A PDF version of the response is here]. For instance this quote about mandating the depositing of copies of research in repositories:
“(44) Institutional and thematic repositories can play a significant role in the dissemination of research outputs. However the Government has no present intention to mandate Research Council funded researchers to deposit a copy of their published material in institutional repositories.”
It should be noted that the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, unlike the RCUK, concentrated solely on Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) research - explicitly excluding from its considerations journals and other publications in the social sciences, arts and humanities (report, paragraph 6). However, the bulk of arts and humanities research is not directly funded by the UK Research Councils, but often by institutions themselves [source: Michael Fraser of Computing Services, Oxford University], therefore the RCUK Proposal would, unwittingly, also be biased towards STM research.
The Science and Technology Committee Report seemed to concentrate more on the so-called ‘author pays’ method of open access where authors (or their funders, in practice) pay the cost of publishing in Open Access journals such as those published by BioMed Central (BMC) or Public Library of Science (PLoS). The RCUK Proposal also mentions helping to pay for OA Journal costs where relevant - such as when the author’s institution does not have an OA Repository. But the RCUK could more usefully also offer to help fund the setting up of repositories for institutions which lack them. In fact, the RCUK Proposal even says:
“(14d) This position statement carries no obligation to set up a repository where none exists at present; and the requirement to deposit will therefore not apply to authors who do not have reasonable access either to an institutional repository or to a subject-based e-print repository […]”
This introduces a reasonably sized loop-hole in the Proposal as many publishing researchers don’t have Open Access repositories in their institutions or disciplines. The Institution Archives Registry maintained by Tim Brody at Southampton University is the nearest thing to a definitive list of all OAI-PMH compliant repositories worldwide (note it depends on institutions voluntarily registering their repositories). Currently the IAR lists 55 repositories registered by UK institutions. Analysis of these 55 reveals that 34 of them are of the ‘institutional or departmental repositories’ type we are concerned with. Of the remainder, 8 are cross-institutional, 1 is for e-theses only, 2 are databases, 6 are e-journals, and 4 are ‘other’ [analysis provided by Prof Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton].
So, there are 34 registered ‘institutional or departmental’ OAI compliant repositories in the UK. But there are around 140 to 160 (depending on your source and definition) universities in the UK - therefore the 34 registered repositories represent, at most, only one quarter of all UK universities, leaving a majority of them without an OA repository. However, if self-archiving is made mandatory or suddenly takes off, the number of IRs could swiftly increase - and, indeed, the RCUK Proposal asserts this probability.
A solution for UK universities without repositories is to ask the RCUK, or JISC, to help fund one. Another solution, which could act as a stop-gap, is the proposed launch of an OAI-compliant “universal repository” by Brewster Kahle [co-founder] of the Internet Archive (IA). The Universal Repository would accept e-prints from any scholar in any discipline with no repository of their own. Not only would it host new content for scholars with no other place to deposit their work, but it will offer to preserve all the other OAI-compliant repositories. The Internet Archive has a proven commitment to Open Access and long-term preservation: it has been archiving nearly everything on the open web since 1996 (and is well worth exploring).
The RCUK Proposal comes after three previous statements on UK Open Access: the Wellcome Trust position statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research (October 2003; revised June 2005), The Scottish Declaration on Open Access (October 2004) by a group of 20 Scottish institutions, and the Russell Group Statement on Scholarly Communication and Publishing (June 2005), the Russell Group being an association of 19 major UK research-intensive universities. The Proposal from the RCUK should act as a further motivator for other institutions to develop equivalent policies which take into account the full range of subjects and research outputs. [sourced from: Michael Fraser of Computing Services, Oxford University].
There are two excellent commentaries on the RCUK Proposal: by Prof Stevan Harnad in the American Scientist Open Access Forum (which he moderates) (28 June) and by Prof Peter Suber in his Open Access Newsletter (2 July). Incidentally, this post owes much to these two high-profile proponents of the Open Access movement, from whose writings I have picked up most of my knowledge about OA.
Two Education Guardian writers have written about the RCUK Proposal: Richard Wray Funding aid for open access (29 June) and Donald MacLeod Research councils back free online access (29 June).
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) quickly produced A response to the RCUK Proposal (30 June although, strangely, it is dated 19 April) which is largely against the Proposal on the grounds of it leading to cancellation of journal subscriptions. There is no evidence for this so far. For example, in the physics area the use of openly available archived ‘preprints’ and ‘postprints’ (pre- and post-refereeing) has been standard practice for over 10 years (for example, in the seminal arXiv subject-based repository originally created in 1991). During this considerable time, physics journals do not seem to have suffered any loss of sales. The ALPSP response has been comprehensively and robustly critiqued by Professor Stevan Harnad, a passionate proponent of OAI Institutional Repository archiving as the best method of quickly achieving Open Access to current research.
Another personal observation here: Ironically, the perceived need to mandate Open Access to articles may now lead to journal publishers closing ranks and placing obstacles in the way of what, up until now, 91% of them have voluntarily allowed! This has already happened in the U.S. with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposal to archive all research in their PubMed Central Repository (PMC) being reduced to having a 12-month embargo on becoming Open Access! True OA should be OA immediately on publication.
Graham Taylor, director of educational, academic and professional publishing at The Publishers Association, questions the RCUK Proposal in a Guardian article: Don’t tell us where to publish (1 July). He is not happy about the RCUK Proposal and his article, therefore, has not escaped the finely tuned critical faculties of Prof Stevan Harnad who really is in top form these days: Critique of Graham Taylor’s critique of the RCUK policy proposal (5 July).
BioMed Central (BMC), an Open Access Journal publisher, welcomes the RCUK Proposal: BioMed Central applauds Research Councils UK draft statement on Open Access (5 July) - but, naturally, they emphasize the point about funding the costs of publishing in OA Journals (the ‘author pays’ route to Open Access) whilst the academically preferred route to Open Access seems to be via self-archiving of articles in Institutional Repositories.
Back links to previous relevant postings:
Open Access Journal launch and Impact Factors (June 2005)
Open Access round-up (June 2005)
e-Journals@Cambridge - improved online journal access (May 2005)
DSpace@Cambridge and open access to research (November 2004)
DOAJ introduces article level search (June 2004)
For reference, Research Councils UK (RCUK) is a partnership between the UK’s eight Research Councils. Through RCUK, the Councils work together to champion the research, training and innovation they support. The Councils are independent non-departmental public bodies, funded by the Science Budget through the Office of Science and Technology. Note that the new RCUK draft OA policy was issued in “partnership” with the British Library (paragraph 4), and counts on the British Library to play a role in the long-term preservation of OA research literature (paragraph 31).
The eight UK Research Councils are:
- Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
- Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC)
- Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
- Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
- Medical Research Council (MRC)
- Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
- Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)
PLoS, the Public Library of Science, have launched their third open access journal: PLoS Computational Biology. The Public Library of Science is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.
In its announcement, PLoS says: “The Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) are pleased to announce the June 24 launch of PLoS Computational Biology, a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal reporting major biological advances achieved through computation. Unique in its scope, the journal publishes research from one of the most rapidly growing and exciting areas of scientific inquiry. As a collaboration between a scholarly society and an open access publisher, the journal also provides further momentum to the shift towards unrestricted access and use of all scientific and medical literature.” PLoS Computational Biology joins PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. It is the first of three new titles planned for 2005. PLoS Genetics will launch (or ‘go live’) on July 25. PLoS Pathogens will debut in September 2005.
In an announcement on 27th June, PLoS Biology revealed that it has an ISI 2004 Impact Factor of 13.9, making it the number 1 general biology journal in the ISI rankings.
In a related announcement, another open access publisher, the U.K.-based BioMed Central announced ISI impact factors. BioMed Central is a for-profit independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. Five BioMed Central journals received their first impact factors this year. BMC Bioinformatics, with an impact factor of 5.42, has reinforced its reputation as one of the top journals in its field. Launched in 2000, it is the second highest ranked bioinformatics journal, and already has an impact factor comparable to that of Bioinformatics (5.74), the most established journal in the field, which has been publishing for more than two decades and is supported by a major society. BMC Genomics enters the Journal Citation Report with a respectable 3.25. This puts it in the top third of the genetics titles, and the top 20% of biotechnology journals. BMC Molecular Biology has an impact factor of 3.12, and BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders an impact factor of 1.00, putting it in the top half of the orthopaedics listing.
These numbers are very good and go some way in laying to rest accusations of Open Access journals accepting lower quality research. In fact both PLoS and BioMed Central reject around 90% of the papers submitted to them (see quote by Mr Vitek Tracz of BioMed Central, Chairman, Current Science Group at MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE: “It is a bigger in journals which reject a lot and it is a smaller problem for journals which do not reject so many. A top quality journal like PLoS and our journal, Current Biology, reject 90 per cent or so of papers, but for many journals which reject 30 or 40 per cent of papers the problem is smaller.”
The JISC’s Scholarly Communications Group study on author self-archiving behaviour final report Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Open access self-archiving: an author study is now available. This important and long-awaited JISC Report, destined to be very influential, is also available at http://cogprints.org/4385/ and at http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/ 2005_Open_Access_Report.pdf.
Excerpts of a summary by Professor Stevan Harnad, Southampton University, a long-time advocate of Open Access to publicly funded scholarly research:
“Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories […] There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access.
“Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and […] another worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided […] The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate.”
The JISC site includes a useful Questions and Answers on Open Access.
PubMed Central hits UK - 08 Jun 2005: Six biomedical research funding bodies and charities, headed by the Wellcome Trust, have formed an alliance to create the UK’s own version of the American National Institutes of Health (NIH) PubMed Central, a repository of openly available peer-reviewed scientific research. [via Open Access News weblog]
The University of Connecticut Libraries site has a useful collection of links to Open Access web sites.
This is from six months ago, but it is still available: Publish Or Be Damned, a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast on Tuesday 21 December 2004. An excellent introduction to the issues surrounding Open Access -
“Scientific publishing is undergoing a revolution. Scientists and policy makers, fed up with valuable research being locked away in expensive subscription only journals, are mounting a challenge to the publishers. They are launching their own competing journals and giving away the results for free. But not everyone is happy.”
Reading the articles in the current Cambridge University Libraries Information Bulletin (CULIB) about open access, journals and the DSpace@Cambridge project started me off on this whole subject of access to academic research.
You will probably not have heard of the University’s very own institutional repository: DSpace@Cambridge. Or, indeed, of institutional repositories at all! I will attempt a brief and hopefully clear explanation of what they are and why they are important to you.
Basically, institutional repositories (IRs), besides being a mouthful and tricky to type, are digital storage areas freely accessible to anyone online. Although anything that can be digitized can be placed in the repositories, current interest is about research staff posting copies of their journal-published articles in their repository. Over 90% of peer-reviwed academic journals now allow researchers to post a copy of their published articles in their institution’s repository: so-called ’self-archiving’. In some cases this is the ‘pre-print’ which can link to any later revisions, in other cases the final peer-reviewed version.
Because the repositories are freely accessible online, the exciting implication of self-archiving in repositories is that almost any research article published can be freely available online via the author’s institutional repository. This is known as ‘open access’ (OA): all would-be users can access any research article irrespective of whether their own institution can afford to subscribe to the journal they were published in.
Like Cambridge University, most academic institutions have set up repositories. The main problem now seems to be getting staff to place material in them - especially getting them to self-archive all their published research articles. For example, most of the stuff currently in DSpace@Cambridge is archival records - there are very few currently published research articles. In future, it may be made a condition of funding that all Research Council UK (RCUK) funded research must be self-archived by the author in the institution’s repository.
Indeed, the UK government House of Commons Science and Technology Committee investigated the whole area of access to research published in science technology and medical (STM) journals. Their report, Scientific publications: free for all?, was published in July. It advised the government to oblige UK authors to publish all research in their institutions’ websites or repositories.
Many specialist search engines are available, designed to search for articles in repositories across institutions worldwide. For example, OAIster, one of the most comprehensive, now indexes over 3.7m records across 363 institutions, and there are smaller experimental OA citation databases such as citebase search. Our Library User and Resource Guide will be covering open access, institutional repositories and IR search engines in the next edition available in January 2005. The wonderful thing about a search engine such as OAIster is that every single search result is freely accessible online with no restrictions! Others such as Elsevier’s Scirus scientific search engine covers some repositories as, indeed does Yahoo! Search (by collaborating with OAIster) and Google, especially its new Google Scholar offshoot (see previous item below).
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has launched its planned ‘phase 2′ article level search service of journals in its database. So far, 276 of its 1,100 or so journals have been article-search enabled. The 276 searchable journals contain a grand total of 48,613 articles.
The new article level search will allow searches for specific articles in its journals within the fields: title, journal title, ISSN, author, keywords, or abstract. Up until now, the DOAJ has simply been a listing of open access journals with data and search capability confined to journal titles.
The DOAJ defines open access journals as journals that do not charge readers or their institutions for access. It takes its definition from the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). This says that open access journals must allow users to freely ‘read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of their articles’. In addition, the DOAJ applies a ‘quality control’ which says that journals in its database must be scientific or scholarly journals operating a peer review system for all their articles.
Since the DOAJ’s launch in May 2003 with 350 open access scientific and academic journals, the number of journals in its database has steadily increased to the current 1,107 journals. The DOAJ is hosted by Lund University Libraries. The project is funded by Open Society Institute - Budapest and also supported by SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
The press release gives the full details.
Footnote: the DOAJ’s article level search is not a full text search - this is a possible future development. Interestingly, especially for librarians, a ‘demonstration’ full text search of 19 DOAJ library related journals, DOAJI Search, is set up independently of the DOAJ by Mr Eric Lease Morgan (a journal librarian enthusiast based at University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA).
