13 Open Access and Digital Library
H G Hosmani and Kruti Trivedi
I. Objectives
The objectives of this module are to discuss and impart knowledge on the following aspects of open access and digital library:
• Introduce and define the concept of digital library and open access publishing;
• Introduces the philosophy of open access and its association with digital library;
• Defines characteristics of open access;
• Methods of publishing open access research;
• Catalyst to the open access movement and major open access declarations;
• Describes world-wide open access digital library initiatives;
• Open access and copyright
• Discusses recent developments in digital library technologies
II. Learning Outcomes
After completion of this module, the students will have the knowledge on various aspects of open access and its movement. Further, they will get to know about the worldwide development and initiatives working towards open access.
III. Structure
1. Introduction
2. Digital Library
3. Open Access
4. Open Access and Digital Libraries
5. Characteristics of Open Access
6. Major Open Access Declarations
7. Major Open Access Initiatives
7.1 Open Access Journals
7.2 Institutional Repositories
7.3 Electronic Books
7.4 Open Courseware
7.5 Metadata Harvesting Services
8. Copyright and Open Access
9. Cloud Computing and Open Access Digital Libraries
10. Summary
1. Introduction
Open access has emerged as an alternative model of scholarly publishing essentially in response to the phenomenon called “serials crisis” that refers to exponential and continuing increase in cost of subscription of scholarly journals as well as to the advent of the Internet and proliferation of the resources, new e-publishing models and development of open standards and protocols. The open access movement, primarily launched to break the monopoly of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medical (STEM) publishers, turn out as an inventive mode of scholarly communication. Continuing growth and development in open access publishing is a big contributor to digital library collections as well as digital library technology. With several commercial publishers committing to open access to a large number of their journals and a large number of open access publishing initiatives, presence of open access publications are expanding leading to realization of the idea of a digital library using different channels of open access publishing (Tsakonas 2007).
Open access provides universal access to public funded research publications, scholarly works, traditional knowledge and documentary heritage collections through institutional repositories and open access journals. Institutional repositories and open access journals are two primary routes to provide open access to scholarly literature. While the institutional repositories are generally set up by research institutions, universities and other organizations where in institution’s publications, including pre-prints and post-prints of journal articles, research reports, conference papers, theses, dissertations, seminar presentations, annual reports and other publications are deposited by researchers and staff members of the institute. These publications, are made available in open access to the academic community world-wide. The open access journals make their articles freely accessible to the user without any subscription fee. However, the charges for publishing an article are generally charged from the authors, their institutions or sponsoring organizations. The ontent available in open access journals and institutional repositories can generally be used freely for a production and distribution. There are no legal or technical barriers for further distribution of the content.
This module briefly introduces the philosophy of open access and its association with the digital library. It also describes world-wide digital library initiatives to provide open access to scholarly research. The module discusses recent developments in technologies that can help to build digital libraries which facilitate better access to and dissemination of knowledge.
2. Digital Library
Digital library is one of the most complex and advanced form of information systems that can serve as a rich resource to its user community. It collects, manages and preserves rich digital content, and provides its access to user communities. Clifford Lynch (1995), a well-know expert on digital libraries and new technologies, defined digital library as “digital library is a system providing a community of users with coherent access to a large, organized repository of digital information and knowledge. The digital library is not just one entity, but multiple sources seamlessly integrated.”
Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities [DLFS99].
The learners are advised to see the Module-1 on introduction to digital library for further information.
3. Open Access
Open access is a new and evolving scholarly publication model that provides unrestricted, free, immediate and online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research along with the rights to use it. Users are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full-texts of scholarly literature available through open access platform. The only role of copyright is to control over the integrity of author’s work.
According to Peter Suber (2004), the Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003) and the Berlin (October 2003) (collectively referred to as “BBB”) definition of open access are most central and influential for the OA movement.” He defines open access literature simply as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”
The American Research Libraries Association (ARL) Task Force defines open access as “a cost effective way to disseminate and use information. It is an alternative to the traditional subscription-based publishing model made possible by new digital technologies and networked communication”.
4. Open access and Digital Libraries
Open access publishing is considered as a part of the universal digital library system consisting of open access journals and institutional repositories distributed across research institutions and universities all over the world. Metadata (bibliographic details) of each of these distributed IRs as well as OA journals is harvested by the indexing services (called service providers or specialized search engines like ARC, OAISTER, Google Scholar, etc.) so as to provide unified and organized access to digital content distributed across OA journals and IRs the world over. With interoperability built into the OAI-compliant IR software and open access journal publishing system (such as OJS), individual institutions can participate in the process of building a distributed global digital library through their repositories and OA journals. IRs are also linked to the notion of a digital library, since IRs have the same functions and services that a digital library offers, i.e. collecting, storing, classifying, cataloguing, preserving and providing access to digital content.
5. Characteristics of Open Access
The characteristics associated with open access are as follows:
• Pay to publish, not to access. Cost of publication and distribution of the articles is borne by from the producers of scholarship (authors or institutions), or funding organizations, rather than by users / readers;
• Access to publication in open access is more democratic. Web-based open access repositories are accessible to all users without any restrictions;
• The author rather than the publisher owns copyright in the open access model. Users are granted permission for unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, etc. Authors may choose to block commercial re-use of the contents;
• Open access journals, like traditional journals, conduct peer review of submitted articles; and
• Most of the publishers of open access journal are non-profit (e.g. Public Library of Science or PLoS) while a few are for-profit (e.g. BioMed Central or BMC).
6. Major Open Access Declarations
Three major international statements made on open access are: i) The Budapest Open Access Initiative Statement in the Meeting of the Open Society in 2002, ii) The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in 2003, and iii) The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003. Other major statements, declaration or commitment of open access made by several societies, national and international institutions, universities, library associations and other organizations are as follows:
• ACRL Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication, August 2003
• Australian Group of Eight Statement on open access to scholarly information, May 2004
• OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding, January 2004; (Signed by more than thirty nations)
• UN World Summit on the Information Society Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, December 2003
• The Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science, March 2004
• Wellcome Trust Position Statement on Open Access, October 2003.
• Alhambra Declaration on OA. Policies for the development of OA in South European countries, May 2010
• IFLA Statement on open access – clarifying IFLA’s position and strategy, April 2011. IFLA Statement on Open Access, December 2003
• Ghent Declaration, February 2011
• LERU Roadmap towards OA. Advice Paper, June 2011
• SPARC Europe Statement on Open Access for EC Public Hearing on Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information, Luxembourg, May 2011
• The Joint Declaration on Open Science for the 21st Century from ALLEA, April 2012
• The Paris OER (Open Educational Resources) Declaration from UNESCO World OER Congress, June 2012.
• ERCIM Statement on Open Access (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics)
• NKC Statements on Open Access (National Knowledge Commission, India)
7. Major Open Access Initiatives
Major open access initiatives taken world over are as follows.
7.1 Open Access Journals
Open-access journals are considered as golden route for providing access to peer-reviewed literature in electronic format free of charge without any restrictions of access over the Web. Major open journals initiatives are as follows:
| Sl No | Initiatives | URL | No. of Journals |
| 1 | BioMed Central | http://www.biomedcentral.com/ | 258 |
| PubMed Central | http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed | 1445+ | |
| 3 | PLoS | http://www.plos.org/ | 7 |
| 4 | Bioline International | http://www.bioline.org.br/ | 36 |
| Indian Initiatives | |||
| 5 | Indian Academy of Science | http://www.ias.ac.in/ | 11 |
| 6 | Indian National Science
Academy |
http://www.insa.ac.in/ | 4 |
| 7 | The National Academy of Science, India | http://www.nasi.org.in/abst.htm | 3 |
| 8 | MedIND | http://medind.nic.in/ | 66 |
| 9 | NISCAIR Research Journals | http://www.niscair.res.in/sciencecommuni cation/researchjournals/rejour/rejour1.htm | 17 |
| 10 | Indianjournals.com | http://www.indianjournals.com/ijor.aspx?t
arget=open_access_publications_list |
10 |
| 11 | Medknow Publications | http://www.medknow.com/ | 41 |
| 12 | Kamla-Raj Enterprises | http://www.krepublishers.com/KRE-Inf/index.html | 21 |
| 13 | OJAS@INFLIBNET Centre | http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/ | 14 |
Directories of Open Access Journals
| Sl No | Initiatives | URL | No. of Journa ls |
| 1 | Directory of Open Access Journals | http://www.doaj.org/ | 9744 |
7.2 Institutional Repositories (IR)
Institutional repositories are a web-based archive of scholarly material designed to organize and provide seamless access to scholarly publications produced by faculty or researchers of an institution in all subject disciplines. It is also define as institution-based digital-asset management system. Institutional Repository is a cost-effective and immediate route to provide access to scholarly literature such as research papers and electronic versions of documents, theses and dissertations as well as digital assets generated by an institution such as annual reports, course notes, or learning objects, etc. There are total 3594 world-wide repositories indexed by Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) which includes 99 repositories in India. Directory of Open Access Repositories has indexed total 2500 world-wide repositories, including 62 Indian repositories. Top ten world-wide and repositories in India, indexed in webometrics, are as follow.
| Sl No. | Institutional Repositories-World | URL |
| 1 | Arxiv.org e-Print Archive | http://arxiv.org/ |
| 2 | Social Science Research Network | http://ssrn.com/en/ |
| 3 | Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System | http://adsabs.harvard.edu/ |
| 4 | Europe PubMed Central | http://europepmc.org/ |
| 5 | Research Papers in Economics | http://repec.org/ |
| 6 | CiteSeerX | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index |
| 7 | HAL Institute National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique Archive Ouverte | http://hal.inria.fr/ |
| 8 | University of California eScholarship Repository | http://escholarship.org/ |
| 9 | CERN Document Server | http://cds.cern.ch/ |
| 10 | Virginia Tech University Digital Library and Archives | http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ |
| Indian Initiatives | ||
| 11 | Open Access Repository Publications of Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences | http://repository.ias.ac.in/ |
| 12 | Indian Institute of Science Bangalore Institutional Repository | http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/ |
| 13 | Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute Institutional Repository | http://eprints.cmfri.org.in/ |
| 14 | National Institute of Oceanography India Digital Repository | http://drs.nio.org/drs/index.jsp |
| 15 | Information and Library Network Centre Institutional Repository | http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in/ |
| 16 | National Institute of Technology Rourkela eThesis | http://ethesis.nitrkl.ac.in/ |
| 17 | OpenMed National Informatics Centre India | http://openmed.nic.in/ |
| 18 | International Crops Research Institute for the Semi- Arid Tropics Open Access Repository | http://oar.icrisat.org/ |
| 19 | Indian Institute of Astrophysics Institutional Repository | http://prints.iiap.res.in/ |
| 20 | National Aerospace Laboratories Institutional Repository | http://nal-ir.nal.res.in/ |
Source: http://repositories.webometrics.info/
7.3 Electronic Books
An Ebook is an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a computer or a specifically designed handheld device. Major open access electronic books initiatives are as follows:
| Sl No. | Name of Resources | URL | No. of E-books |
| 1 | Project Gutenberg | http://www.gutenberg.org/ | 42000 |
| 2 | HathiTrust Digital Library | http://www.hathitrust.org/ | 5712433 |
| 3 | OAPEN | http://www.oapen.org | 2045 |
| Indian Initiatives | |||
| 4 | Digital Library of India | http://www.dli.ernet.in/ | 480335 |
Directory of Ebooks
| Sl No. | Name of Resources | URL | No. of E- books |
| 1 | Directory of Open Access Books | http://www.doabooks.org/ | 1806 |
7.4 Open Courseware
Open Courseware is the name given to open educational resources that are presented in course format, often including course planning materials, such as syllabi and course calendars, along with content, such as textbooks, lectures, presentations, notes and simulations. Open Educational Resources are materials developed by experienced educators that are available for use, repurposing, and modification, in whole or in part, by everyone, everywhere in the world. Major open courseware initiatives are as follows:
| Sl No. | Open Courseware Initiatives | URL |
| 1 | Open Yale Courseware | http://oyc.yale.edu/ |
| 2 | MIT Open Courseware | http://ocw.mit.edu/about/ |
| 3 | U-Now | http://unow.nottingham.ac.uk/ |
| 4 | Open Courseware Consortium | http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ |
| 5 | Coursera | https://www.coursera.org/ |
| 6 | Udacity | https://www.udacity.com/ |
| Indian Initiatives | ||
| 1 | ePG Pathshala | http://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/ |
| 2 | NPTEL | www.nptel.iitm.ac.in |
| 3 | e-Gyankosh | www.egyankosh.ac.in |
| 4 | Learning Object Repository CEC | www.cec-lor.edu.in |
7.5 Metadata Harvesting Services
Harvesting refers to the activity of searching and collecting metadata from Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Institutional Repositories and OAI journals whose content is indexed and posted for open use from a World Wide Web server. A metadata harvesting service harvests or indexes metadata from open access initiative (OAI) compliant archives or repositories or journals through harvesting software that supports a protocol known as the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Major metadata harvesting service providers are as follows:
The learners are advised to see the Module -23 on digital library protocol and standards for further information on metadata harvesting standard OAI-PMH.
Major metadata harvesting service providers are as follows:
| Sl No. | Name | URL |
| 1 | Google Scholar | http://scholar.google.co.in/ |
| 2 | OaISTER | http://www.oclc.org/oaister |
| 3 | OARiNZ | http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/mi/project/te-pane- takiao/resources/pages/open-access-repositories-nz- oarinz |
| 4 | NCSTRL | http://www.ncstrl.org/ |
| Indian Initiatives | ||
| 5 | Search Digital Libraries | http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/sdl |
| 6 | MetaMED | http://indmeddb.nic.in/metamed.html |
| 7 | Open Index Initiative | http://oii.igidr.ac.in |
8. Copyright and Open Access
Copyright has been called the “single most vexing barrier to digital library development” (Chepesuik, 1997). It is the principle issue faced by authors, publishers and readers of open access publications. The work published in open access journal can be made available to the public under Creative Commons Attribution License. CCAL gives right to authors to retain their ownership of the copyright for their article. Users are allowed to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and copy the article as long as the original authors and source are credited. Readers are also free to make commercial use of works on the condition that the user gives credit to the original author. This broad license was developed to facilitate free use of original works.
9. Cloud Computing and Open Access Digital Libraries
Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. (Armbrust et al 2009). It creates, manage and use information without requiring individual users or institutions to invest in a massive ICT infrastructure. Digital libraries based on cloud computing architecture can facilitate shared use of computing and networking resources. There is no need for individual institutions to make large investments for setting up the ICT infrastructure to set up the repositories. Cloud-based service of open access repositories, linking with other specific cloud research and content services, provides better access to research and scholarly literature. Moreover, Cost of OA digital library services can be reduced by amortizing the overall cost of building the data centres for institutional repositories. Cloud computing technologies can significantly improve the economic and environmental sustainability of open access resources and institutional repositories.
10. Summary
The module introduces the philosophy of open access and its association with the digital library. The module elaborates on characteristics of open access, publishing open access research: methods, major open access declarations, open archive initiatives. It also describes world-wide digital library initiatives to provide open access to scholarly research that can be grouped into three distinct categories, namely: i) Open access Journals, ii) Institutional Repositories, iii) Ebooks, iv) Open Courseware and v) Metadata Harvesting Services.. The module then discusses issues on copyright and open access. Lastly, the module discusses recent developments in technologies that can help to build digital libraries which facilitate better access to and dissemination of knowledge.
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