April 24, 2007 - Launch of the IDRC Digital Library

The IDRC Digital Library provides the international research community with access to a current and comprehensive collection of research results and documents generated by IDRC-funded projects, IDRC funding recipients, and IDRC staff about a wide range of subjects related to international development.

Q : What is Open Access?? [#1]

A : The definition of open access (OA) has been a subject of debate among scholars, funding agencies, publishers and librarians since the concept?s inception.[1] The definition developed by the Open Society Institute endorsed Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) has received wide support from nearly all OA proponents.[2]

"By 'open access' to [research] literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."[3]

Q : What are the implications of Open Access for IDRC? [#2]

A : Open access is a familiar concept at IDRC.  The free and wide dissemination of funded research outputs is a principle that has been consistent with the core values of IDRC?s corporate strategy throughout the Centre?s history.  The MGCs signed by funded recipients have consistently stated that IDRC will retain the right to disseminate IDRC funded outputs. However, the Centre has been able to disseminate the digital full text of outputs only since January 2004.

Dissemination of IDRC funded research results has been done by Program Initiatives on their web sites and on the Library?s internet site through the library bibliographic database, BIBLIO.  BIBLIO contains an historical record of the research outputs created by IDRC?s southern researchers and by Centre staff since 1970.

New internet technologies and protocols have been developed to support open access and IDRC is taking advantage of these to enhance its dissemination efforts.    A new database or repository is being developed by a project team in RIMS to make outputs available in an OAI ? PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) compliant platform.  The Open Archives Initiative has designed a shared code for metadata tags (e.g., "date," "author," "title," "journal" etc.).  Full-text documents tagged with these metadata tags become "interoperable." Their metadata can be "harvested"and documents can be searched and retrieved not only by the database?s own search engine but also by Google and other specialized search engines.

Q : What is a repository? [#3]

A : Typically a repository is an OAI ? PMH compliant database that houses the full text of literature that is of value and interest to the research community.  This literature could include reports, books, theses, journal articles (pre-prints and/or post-prints), working papers, conference papers and images. 

Repositories started to be established in academic institutions and research organizations in 2000.  Repositories are usually either subject- or institution-based.  There are currently over 30 repositories in Canada and about 635   world-wide.  See Southampton University for an authoritative list.

Q : Program Initiatives puts their research outputs on their PI web sites.  Why should these outputs also be in a repository? [#4]

A : Research outputs in a repository are much easier for internet searchers to retrieve using general search engines, such as Google, and specialized search engines, such as Google Scholar and harvesters such as Oaister.  The interoperability of the repository database and its metadata tagging facilitate deeper and more sophisticated searching. The IDRC repository staff in RIMS will take responsibility for creating metadata for the outputs which will include not only title, author, and date fields but also fields containing keywords, project numbers and when available, abstracts.

The repository will hold a comprehensive historical collection of IDRC research outputs (in both paper and digital format) and it will provide a framework for preserving those digital documents over time. This will help to ensure that the Word, PDF and other digital documents that are created in 2006 will still be viewable in 2020. 

Q : How easy is it to place research outputs into the repository? [#5]

A : Livelink, IDRC?s records management system is the gateway to the repository.  IDRC staff will place all project documentation into Livelink.  The submission procedure enables submitters to flag documents that are appropriate additions to the repository. 

RIMS staff will be alerted to documents flagged for the repository.  The documents will be copied into the repository and metadata will be created for them.

Q : Can research outputs in paper format also be placed in the repository? [#6]

A : Yes but if a recipient can be contacted for a digital version of their document, this would be even better. 

The repository will contain an historical collection of IDRC research outputs that pre-date Word and other digital formats.  However, since most outputs are now created in digital format and because the availability of the full text of a document is the best way to disseminate, a digital document is preferable.

If an output is available in paper format only, it can be converted into digital format.  Contact Diane Ceponkus of RIMS for more information about this service.

Q : Can an article written by a recipient or IDRC staff member be placed in a repository and still be published in a journal? [#7]

A : A growing number of scholarly publishers now allow authors to deposit their published paper into a repository.  However, their policies vary considerably.  Some allow deposit before (pre-print) or after (post-print) the paper?s publication.  Some have an embargo period between publication and deposit in a repository.  Some publishers allow the deposit of the final pdf copy of the published article, while others limit authors to depositing a copy of the paper before it has been copy edited.

The SHERPA Project  at the University of Nottingham monitors the policies of major journal publishers and provides the details and conditions under which an author may deposit their work in a repository.

Q : Can an article be published in a repository without going through a journal? [#8]

A : Yes, but the paper will not be peer-reviewed in the same way as a journal article. One preliminary idea is that IDRC Program Officers may facilitate a peer review process for selected outputs of their partners in order to assist them in developing their papers for formal publication.  Even without peer-review, pre-prints can be a useful means of disseminating research results and informing scholarly debate quickly and of claiming prior intellectual property rights.[4]

Q : Some journals are called Open Access.  What are these and what are the advantages of publishing in them? [#9]

A : Open Access journals differ from subscription-based journals in that they are free to the reader.  Evidence is accumulating that papers published in Open Access journals are more widely read and cited than papers published in equivalent traditional journals. To see a recent study on the citation rates for OA literature see http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html.

Open Access journals are often referred to as the gold route to Open Access. The green route involves depositing in a repository in parallel with publishing in a conventional or Open Access journal. For an up-to-date list of Open Access journals, go to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Q : How can the repository protect authors against plagiarism? [#10]

A : It is easier to detect simple plagiarism with electronic than with printed text by using search engines or other services to find identical texts. For more subtle forms of misuse, the difficulties of detection are no greater than with traditional journal articles. Indeed, metadata tagging, including new ways of tracking the provenance of electronic data and text, promise to make it easier.[5]

Q : Do Open Access and repositories mean the demise of the scholarly journal as we know it? [#11]

A : No.  Journals perform peer-review, which will still form the backbone of the scholarly communication system, along with other services such as editorial, layout and marketing. Journals are also entities in themselves.  Each has its own character, represents a community and develops its own hallmark of quality which reveals the leading edge in a field.  So it is unlikely that the scholarly journal will disappear.  However, the way in which they are published and used is changing.  Publishers are experimenting with new economic models of journal publishing, for example the author-pays model, or hybrid models in which authors can choose whether or not to pay for their papers to be open access.  Some journals may fall by the wayside, but others will adapt. Already, many are adapting by allowing articles to be made available in a repository at the time they are published. The evidence from libraries and publishers shows that journal subscriptions or viability have not been affected. [6]

Further Information

See Open Access Overview and The Budapest Open Access Initiative: Frequently Asked Questions by Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, USA.