7 Scholarly Communication and Open Access :Creating Knowledge without Borders

Rupak Chakravarty

epgp books

 

 

 

1.  Scholarly communication: Definition

 

Scholarly communication is the life-blood of the university’s teaching and research mission. With the advent of new technologies, the nature of scholarship and scholarly communication has expanded beyond traditional print formats to include other means of dissemination: email, pre-print servers, e-journals, e-books, e-reserves, distance learning, etc. In an online environment, issues of copyright, intellectual property rights, and the long-term preservation of digital assets are posing new challenges to faculty, administrators, and librarians.

 

Scholarly communication is the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community (such as university academics) and beyond.

 

(Association of College and Research Libraries) ACRL definition:

 

Scholarly communication can be defined as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs.”

 

Another definition of scholarly communications is the creation, transformation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research and scholarly endeavours. Among the many scholarly communications issues include author rights, the peer review process, the economics of scholarly resources, new models of publishing (including open access and institutional repositories), rights and access to federally funded research, and preservation of intellectual assets.

 

2.  Scholarly Communication Process

 

 

Scholarly communication creates knowledge capital as public good to facilitate inquiry and knowledge. Scholarly communication is publicly supported, either directly through funded research projects or indirectly through higher-education institutions. In addition, the vast majority of scholars develop and disseminate their research with no expectation of direct financial reward.

 

3.  Scholarly Communication in Crisis

 

Main areas of the crisis:

v  Journal costs have consistently risen above inflation.

v  Many-fold rise in number of journals being published both print and online.

v  Funders and tax payers not having access to the research they pay for.

v  Those not associated with universities have no access to current research

v  More journals converting to ‘online’ only causing preservation is a major issue.

v  Producing a research paper may require years of work and require a lot of money, however publishers, who will often do little more than copy edit articles ready for publication, normally require that they become the copyright holder.

 

 

The crisis deepens:

Ø  Commercialization and internationalization of scholarly publishing with increasing control over the scholarly journals market, particularly in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) fields.

Ø  Consolidation of the journal publishing industry

Ø  Dominance of a small number of international conglomerates.

Ø  Prices well above general inflation in the economy

Ø Also above the rate of increase of library budgets leading to subscription cuts and reductions in monographic purchases.

Ø  The net effect of these changes has been a significant reduction in access to scholarship.

Ø  E-documents put undesirable limits on use, eliminating forms of access that would have been permitted in the print environment under principles of fair use.

Ø  Challenges for long-term preservation of, and access to, information. Changes in technology platforms also pose other serious preservation challenges.

Ø  changes in copyright law limit the public domain and significantly reduce principles of fair use of information in digital form.

Ø  Academic reward system emphasizes quantity of publication leading to a superficial demand by scholars for peer-reviewed publication outlets

 

The proliferation of new journals and the “twigging” of established journals into smaller sub-specialities, combined with rising prices, especially in the sciences, have dramatically reduced the capacity of research libraries to purchase resources required by their scholarly communities. All disciplines and formats are affected, the humanities and social sciences as well as the sciences, books as well as journals. The proliferation of electronic journals and the various pricing models for this information has further complicated the acquisitions issue, both for libraries and for publishers. Commercial publishers have established a highly profitable niche for themselves in the scholarly communication chain.

 

These issues and trends have reduced access to scholarship. They will continue to adversely affect the system of scholarly communication, unless they are successfully addressed by the higher education community. Developments such as open access and institutional repositories at universities are seen as vehicles for changing or improving the scholarly communication process.

 

4. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Initiative

 

The purpose of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ scholarly communications initiative is to work in partnership with other library and higher education organizations to encourage reform in the system of scholarly communication and to broaden the engagement of academic libraries in scholarly communications issues. Goals of the initiative are to create a system of scholarly communication that is more responsive to the needs of the academy, reflecting the nature of scholarship and research as a public good.

 

Principles Supported

ACRL supports the following principles for reform in the system of scholarly communication:

    Ø  the broadest possible access to published research and other scholarly writings

Ø  increased control by scholars and the academy over the system of scholarly publishing

Ø  fair and reasonable prices for scholarly information

Ø  competitive markets for scholarly information

Ø  a diversified publishing industry

Ø  open access (OA) to scholarship

Ø  innovations in publishing that reduce distribution costs, speed delivery, and extend access to scholarly research

Ø  quality assurance in publishing through peer review

Ø  fair use of copyrighted information for educational and research purposes

Ø  extension of public domain information

Ø  preservation of scholarly information for long-term future use

Ø  the right to privacy in the use of scholarly information.

 

Strategies Supported

 

ACRL supports the following strategies for reform in the system of scholarly communication:

 

Ø  the development of competitive journals, including the creation of low cost and open access journals (OA Journals) that provide direct alternatives to high priced commercial titles.

Ø  increased control by editorial boards over the business practices of their journals, which may include negotiating reductions in subscription prices, converting to open access business models, or moving journals to non-profit publishers, such as university presses, in instances where continued commercial publication does not serve the needs of their scholarly communities.

Ø  challenges to journal publisher mergers to prevent increased industry consolidation, especially among publishers of journals in scientific, technical and medical fields, where mergers have resulted in documented opportunistic price increases.

Ø  the development of peer-reviewed open access journals, which follow business models that obviate the need for subscriptions or other economic restrictions on access.

Ø  federal and private funding of authors’ fees for publishing in open access journals, incorporated as an integral part of the process through which research is funded.

Ø  Funded research (UGC & other funding agencies) published in subscription-based journals be made openly accessible within a specific period of time (e.g. six months) after publication.

Ø  the development of institutional repositories (defined as open access sites which capture the research output of a given institution) that are created either by single institutions or by groups of institutions working under a cooperative framework.

Ø  the development of disciplinary repositories (open access sites that archive research in a discipline according to principles of open access)

Ø  self-archiving by scholars of their research and writings in open access repositories.

Ø  publishing and copyright agreements that allow authors to retain the right to self-archive their peer-reviewed publications in open access repositories

Ø  maintenance of interoperability standards that facilitate efficient access to content in open repositories.

Ø  the development of new models and practices that will preserve scholarly information in electronic form for future use.

Ø  implementation of public policies that ensure fair use of scholarly information in electronic form.

Ø  implementation of public policies that protect the rights and capacities of libraries to provide acceptable terms of user access and reach reasonable economic terms in licensing electronic information.

Ø  licensing agreements by library consortia and other groups of libraries that maximize their collective buying and negotiating power.

Ø  use of innovative and cost-effective electronic information technologies in publishing, including publication of journals in electronic form and the creation of scholarly electronic communities that serve the needs of scholars in a discipline in flexible ways.

Ø  campus advocacy by librarians, faculty, and administrators to create greater awareness for the need for change in the system of scholarly communication.

Ø  vigorous national advocacy, in cooperation with other groups, in support of the public policy principles enumerated in this document.

 

5.  Open Access (OA)

 

Open access calls for the free availability of scholarly literature on the Internet. According to Peter Suber has defined open access as immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital scholarly material primarily peer-reviewed research articles in journals. It facilitates completely free and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed academic content written by scientists, scholars, teachers and students and the likes. Such academic content may also include conference papers, technical reports, theses and working papers. Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing defines an open access publication as the one that meets the following two conditions:

 

(1)“The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

 

(2) A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving”.

 

 

 

Open Access (OA) is now a global phenomenon and initiatives are springing up across the world. Open Access Map provides a single window access to discover OA initiatives globally. The OA Map allows users to conduct searches or obtain overviews of Open Access developments around the world. This will help to prevent duplication, enhance collaboration and generally enable an approach where new projects properly build upon existing or completed ones.

 

The Map displays the locations of all types of OA-related initiatives, including funding policies, government documents, university mandates and so on. Much of this information already exists but it is scattered across domains. The Map can be used for OA education training and advocacy and should be extremely valuable in informing different constituencies, including policymakers and legislators, about the progress of OA in simple, clear and easily usable ways.

 

5.1 Open Access Implementation Strategies:

 

OA can be achieved either by following gold route or green route. The gold route requires that the authors publish their work in an open access journal. A journal may be completely OA i.e., all its content are freely accessible or it may have partial OA content. The OA publishers may or may not charge a publishing fee. In case, publishing fee has to be paid, it may be is the author’s employer or research funder who pays on behalf of the author. Some examples of open access publishers include BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Another way of accomplishing OA is green open access which involves self-archiving wherein authors deposit their articles in an institutional repository or a subject repository such as arXiv. Green open access journal publishers endorse immediate open access self-archiving by their authors. Self-archive can be either a preprint, or the peer-reviewed postprint which further my belong to the category of either the author’s refereed, revised final draft or the final publisher’s version of article. The know the submission rights or self-archiving rights authors can access Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving list on the SHERPA RoMEO web site. Some organizations have used additional colours to describe the categories or variations in open access the other colours being Blue, Yellow, White colours apart from Green & Gold. The colours of the OA rainbow have been summarized below:

 

Keith G Jeffery, in his article titled “Open Access: An Introduction” has pointed that the ‘green’ route makes publications available freely in parallel with any publication system but is not, itself, publishing. The ‘gold’ route is one example of electronic publishing. At present it is much more common to have non-OA electronic access to publications in a publisher’s database for a subscription fee. The second dimension to be distinguished is the timing and quality aspect: preprints are pre-peer-review articles, postprints are post-peer-review and post-publication articles while eprints can be either but in electronic form. A third dimension is white/grey literature. White literature is peer-reviewed, published articles while grey is preprints or internal ‘know-how’ material. According to him there exits many interesting relationships between grey and white articles

 

 

5.2 Institutional Repositories: The Greener, the Faster

 

Both the approaches of achieving OA are complementary although the green road is being considered faster and surest way to reach immediate 100% OA. In this approach authors are required to submit or archive their papers in Institutional Repository (IR). Institutional repositories are digital collections of the outputs created within a university or research institution. It is an online information system for acquiring, storing, disseminating and preserving digital versions of the intellectual output of an institution like research institutions, universities, etc.

An IR offers a well-defined set of scholarly services through community created digital content including monographs, academic journal articles, both before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, as well as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). It may also include other digital assets such as administrative documents, course notes, learning objects, or conference proceedings. Deposit of material in an institutional repository is sometimes mandated by that institution. IRs provides open access to institutional research output to create global visibility for an institution’s scholarly research, and to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost (“grey”) literature such as theses or technical reports.

 

5.3 Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH):

 

IRs adhere to an internationally-agreed set of technical standards for interoperability. By following these standards IRs can share metadata which include bibliographic information like author names, institutional affiliation, date, titles of the article, abstract, etc. This common protocol is called the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAI-PMH facilitates cross-talk amongst IRs as well as indexing by search engines such as Google and Google Scholar. It is considered as low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata.

 

5.4 Features and benefits

 

According to the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) data the majority of institutional repositories are built using free open-source software (FOSS). On the other hand, some institutions opt for outsourced commercial solutions. Irrespective of the type of software being deployed (paid or FOSS), Alma Swan in her briefing paper on open access repositories, the following as the benefits that repositories bring to institutions:

Ø  Opening up outputs of the institution to a worldwide audience;

Ø  Maximizing the visibility and impact of these outputs as a result;

Ø  Showcasing the institution to interested constituencies – prospective staff, prospective students and other stakeholders;

Ø  Collecting and curating digital output;

Ø  Managing and measuring research and teaching activities;

Ø  Providing a workspace for work-in-progress, and for collaborative or large-scale projects;

Ø  Enabling and encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to research;

Ø  Facilitating the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids, and

Ø Supporting student endeavours, providing access to theses and dissertations and a location for the development of e-portfolios.

A repository has the following purposes and benefits for an institution:

 

Ø  Opens up the outputs of the university to the world

Ø  Maximises the visibility and impact of these outputs as a result

Ø Showcases the university to interested constituencies – prospective staff, prospective students and other stakeholders

Ø  Collects and curates digital outputs

Ø  Manages and measures research and teaching activities

Ø  Provides a workspace for work-in-progress, and for collaborative or large-scale projects

Ø  Enables and encourages interdisciplinary approaches to research

Ø  Facilitates the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids

Ø  Supports student endeavours, providing access to theses and dissertations and a location for the development of e-portfolios

 

5.5 IR Softwares:

 

There are a number of open-source software packages for running a repository including DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, Invenio, SobekCM, Greenstone, etc. There are also hosted (proprietary) software services like Digital Commons, a full-service commercial platform from the Berkeley Electronic Press and SimpleDL

 

5.6 IR Directories:

 

Now that academic and research institutions have developed their own IRs on account of the global open access movement, it is highly required to have consolidated list or directory of IRs along with content search functionality.

 

ROAR’s companion database, the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) (http://roarmap.eprints.org/), is a searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders that require their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an open access repository.

 

5.7 Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

 

ROAR is a searchable international Registry of Open Access Repositories indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southampton in 2003. To date, 3924 institutional and cross-institutional repositories have been registered in ROAR. The aim of ROAR is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. Open access to research maximises research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective

 

6.Self Vs Mediated Archiving:

 

Just like any library, collection development is very crucial aspect for IRs where it is carried out through archiving. Archiving basically means submission or deposit. If archiving is not done systematically and regularly, the IRs may remain starving and hungry. There are two principal approaches to submitting material to an IR:

Each method has its pros and cons. In author self-archiving it is expected that the submission rate would be high and there would be less administrative engagements keeping in view less staff strength. It will also ensure automatic inflow of articles making the IR rich in collection development. On the other hand, it may also discourage authors as they may develop disinterest on account of time investment in tasks like checking publishers permission level, metadata creation, file conversions, PDF-making, or even making deposits. Also they may make mistakes while self-deposit.

 

In case of mediated deposit the author is freed from performing all associated tasks pertaining to self-archiving as same has to be performed by some trained IR staff. For that, the institution will have to employ additional staff and even outsourcing may incur cost to the institution.

 

Best approach would be to encourage self-archiving, arranging self-archiving training sessions and demos for scholars while also engaging students (library and information science, computer science – depending upon the availability) for mediated deposit along with verifying the self-archived data. In this case also, training would be very crucial.

 

7. Sustainability of Repositories

 

Repositories represent a certain basic cost to an institution but there are ways of minimising this. The sustainability of a repository depends in large amount on how much effort is needed to fill it. A repository that is filled by self-archiving – that is, by researchers depositing their own articles – is far less costly to an institution than one where the library does all the depositing work. Ideally, deposit activity should show a reasonably steady pattern throughout the year. The way to ensure that researchers deposit their work regularly is to have a proper Open Access policy which requires them to make their work Open Access and explains why this is important for them and the institution.

 

8. Publisher Copyright Policies:

 

Another very comprehensive database is RoMEO for searching publisher’s policies regarding the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories. RoMEO contains publishers’ general policies on self-archiving of journal articles and certain conference series. RoMEO is updated regularly. Some publishers prohibit authors from putting their full-text articles on their personal/institutional websites while many allow it under certain conditions. Even several publishers give complete freedom regarding self-archiving. Authors can be left confused in ascertaining the correct publisher policy. Databases like ROARMAP and RoMEO help to clarify the situation.

 

9.  OpenDOAR:

 

OpenDOAR is a quality-assured, authoritative directory for listing and categorising of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here.

 

The aim is to provide a comprehensive and authoritative list of such repositories for end-users who wish to find particular archives or who wish to break down repositories by locale, content or other measures. In a networked environment, Information Discovery and Retrieval are the keys to the successful delivery of services. It provides in-depth information on each repository that can be used for search, analysis, or underpinning services like text-mining. Apart from comprehensive IR listing, it also provides the facility of searching the repository content basically comprising of the full-text scholarly documents.

 

9.1 Aims of OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR aims to:

Ø  Survey the growing field of academic open access research repositories and categorise them in terms of locale, content and other measures.

Ø  Produce a descriptive list of open access repositories of relevance to academic research.

Ø  Provide a comprehensive & authoritative list for end users wishing to find particular types of, or specific repositories.

Ø  Deliver a comprehensive, structured and maintained list with clear update and self-regulation protocols to enable development of the list.

Ø  Play a prominent international role in the organisation of and access to open access repository services.

Ø  Support Open Access outreach and advocacy endeavours within institutions and globally.

 

OpenDOAR is one of the SHERPA Services including RoMEO and JULIET, run by the Centre for Research Communcations (CRC). Current development work is currently funded by JISC, with contributions from the CRC host organisation, the University of Nottingham.

9.2 Repository map

Repository map is a mashup which indicates the worldwide locations of open access IRs. It is based on data provided by ROAR and the OpenDOAR service developed by SHERPA. Not only it displays the IRs on a world map, but it also classify them based upon the software used in creating those repositories like DSpace, EPrints, etc. A screenshot of the geographical distribution of IRs worldwide is given below.

 

 

9.3 Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): The Shining Gold

 

The (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is a service that indexes high quality, peer reviewed Open Access research journals, periodicals and their articles’ metadata. It covers all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system (see the section below) and is not limited to particular languages or subject areas. The Directory aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals—regardless of size and country of origin— thereby promoting their visibility, usage and impact.

 

Major Criteria for Acceptance:

  • That the journal’s Open Access policy is clearly stated on the journal’s web site and is easily findable;
  • That the journal is Open Access according to the BOAI definition. By this we mean that the journal’s articles have “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.”
  • That the full text of articles is free, without embargo period, upon publication;
  • That the journal has an editor or an editor and an editorial board with identifiable members.
  • Quality: peer-review system.
  • That any fees for publishing in the journal are clearly displayed in a place that is easy to find; if there are no charges to authors this should also be highlighted.
  • That if the journal has any other kind of author charges, they are clearly stated and easily findable on the web site;
  • Types of resource: scientific and scholarly periodicals that publish research or review papers in full text.
  • Acceptable sources: academic, government, commercial, non-profit and private sources are all acceptable.
  • Level: the primary target group should be researchers.
  • Content: a substantive part of the journal should consist of research papers.
  • Languages: All languages are accepted.
  • Privacy Policy & Data Protection: user data will never be distributed without the explicit permission of the user.
  • A journal must have an editor and an editorial board.
  • The journal must have at least one ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) registered at issn.org.
  • If a journal exists in print and online, then it should have both an ISSN for the print version and an ISSN for the electronic version.

Figure 10 DOAJ Subject Hierarchy

 

Other Features:

 

§  DOAJ adheres to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, a joint statement published by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), DOAJ, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

 

§  All journals in DOAJ are classified according to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system.

 

§  The updated Search functionality in DOAJ combines the traditional functions of search and browse into one.

 

§  Adheres to Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which provides a common framework to gain access to content in a standard manner by means of metadata harvesting.

 

§  The data in DOAJ is licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC BY-SA).

 

10 Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

 

The Directory of Open Access Books is a service of OAPEN Foundation. The OAPEN Foundation is an international initiative dedicated to Open Access monograph publishing, based at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN Foundation is a member of OASPA (http://oaspa.org), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. OAPEN works closely with OASPA to establish membership guidelines for OA book publishers. As of 15 May 2015, DOAB contains 2842 academic peer-reviewed books from 102 publishers.

 

DOAB is being developed in close cooperation with Lars Bjornshauge and Salam Baker Shanawa, who were also responsible for the development of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

 

The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.

 

DOAB supports the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). Service providers and libraries can use the protocol to harvest the metadata of the records from DOAB for inclusion in their collections and catalogues.

 

Requirements

 

The current requirements to take part in DOAB are twofold:

 

1.Academic books in DOAB shall be available under an Open Access license (such as a Creative Commons license)

2.Academic books in DOAB shall be subjected to independent and external peer review prior to publication

 

11. Conclusion:

 

As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention”, the academic community has found an answer to the scholarly communication crisis in the form of open access. It can bring a revolutionary change in the traditional scenario of scholarly communications where everything was in control of the publishers and the authors’ were deprived of their basic rights. The libraries were loosing their purchasing power as the publishers had raised subscription charges steeply. The worst sufferers being the readers who were unable to access the knowledge they needed. With the advent of open access, the grim situation has gradually started to improve as more and more scholarly works in the form of journal articles, open courseware, theses and dissertations, conference papers, presentations, reports, etc. are freely available online. A number of initiatives are being undertaken by various academic institutions, discipline oriented research organizations, learned societies, governments of various countries and many international LIS associations like IFLA, ALA, SPARC, etc. These initiatives have also led to an impact on the commercial publishers to think alternative publishing model to help the authors who want their scholarly work to be in public domain without harming their commercial interests. The authors are now getting the freedom to publish in open access journals and/or submit their works in the open access institutional repositories. If the author’s organization does not have an institutional repository, they can deposit the article in a disciplinary archive. But these initiatives are not sufficient to bail out the budget starving libraries. Hence, more efforts have to be made to create free and conducive environment encouraging knowledge creation, rapid dissemination and maximum sharing leading to advancement of global knowledge and ultimate progress of the world which is possible only through strengthening the scholarly communication process involving OA journals and OA repositories.

you can view video on GScholarly Communication and Open Access :Creating Knowledge without Borders

References:

  • BARTLETT, J. A. (2015). INTERNET REVIEWS: OPEN ACCESS INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES. Kentucky Libraries, 79(1), 24-27.
  • Jeffery, K. (2006). Open Access: An Introduction. ERCIM News 64. Retrieved April 8, 2015 from http://www.ercim.eu/publication/Ercim_News/enw64/jeffery.html
  • Lal, K. (2008). Open Access: Major Issues and Global Initiatives. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 28(1), 67-71.
  • Maloy, F. (2006). SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION—IT IS OUR PROBLEM! ARL/ACRL INSTITUTE ON SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES ASSUMPTIONS AND SHIFTS PERSPECTIVES. ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues & Actions, (248), 8-10.
  • Open access research. (2015). Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Retrieved April 3, 2015 from http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/oa/oa/
  • Pinfield, S. (2005). A mandate to self archive? The role of open access institutional repositories. Serials, 18(1), 30-34.
  • Scholarly communication. (2015, January 26). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 1, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scholarly_communication&oldid=644205952
  • http://www.carl-abrc.ca/en/scholarly-communications/carl-institutional-repository-program/a-guide-to-setting-up-an-institutional-repository.html
  • http://roar.eprints.org/
  • http://www.opendoar.org/
  • http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
  • http://maps.repository66.org/
  • http://www.openaccessmap.org/
  • http://www.doabooks.org/
  • http://roarmap.eprints.org/