Research Using Open
Access Resources and
Search Systems
Ben Hockenberry
St. John Fisher College
Delivered at Rochester Regional Library Council, Fairport, NY
Monday, Oct. 29, 2012 2-4PM
Licensed for re-use under CC-BY
First, what are we talking about when we say “Open
Access Resources?”
DEFINITIONS
Definitions
Open Access
"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it
possible is the internet and the consent of the author or
copyright-holder." (Suber 2004)
Practical consensus on this definition is elusive, though
formalized OA definitions mostly agree
e.g. the Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda statements
Definitions
Gold OA
Publisher-managed OA Journals or OA option for authors
submitting to otherwise non-OA journals
Green OA
Author-initiated archiving in a repository
These definitions are different from the colors used in
SHERPA/RoMEO to define publishers’ policies regarding author
self-archiving in repositories.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html
Definitions
Repository
Digital space for deposit of pre- and post-prints of journal articles
and other scholarly output.
Some are oriented to:
• discipline
• country of origin
• institution (or department)
The last are often called Institutional Repositories, or IRs.
Sample Repositories
•
•
•
•
•
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/library/research/eprints/
http://trace.tennessee.edu/
http://dspace.mit.edu/
https://urresearch.rochester.edu/
http://arxiv.org
Definitions
OA Mandate
Many funders of research, particularly in government, now
require that funded research be archived in a publicly accessible
form, usually without embargo.
• NIH, Harvard, MIT, Research Councils UK, U. of Southampton.
OA Mandates have led to significant expansions in the OA
“market” as a whole.
Embargo
A period of time before access is “opened.” Many publishers
require an embargo on post-prints or finalized publications.
What About Peer Review?
Some OA materials are peer-reviewed, and some are not. Users
need to be aware of what they're looking at:
• Indicators like "Refereed" or "Reviewed"
• Pre-Print vs. Post-Print
Pre-Prints
Characteristics
• Original submitted manuscripts
• May or may not be accepted for publication
• Pre-peer-review
• Lack journal formatting
• Published for timeliness, particularly in the hard sciences
Examples
• http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6892
• http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=106495981542537
32513&hl=en&as_sdt=0,33
Post-Prints
Characteristics
• Post-peer-review
• Post-acceptance for publication
• Lacks finalized journal formatting (page numbering may be
different; in-text citations may require adjustment)
• Largely the same text as the final published version, but there
may be slight differences
Examples
• http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1003/1/bst-92-postprint-jan2003.pdf
• http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=h
tml&identifier=ADA458969
Finalized Publications
The version formatted for publication in the journal.
Some publications publish exclusively for OA – i.e. “Gold OA.”
http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal
.pone.0039998
Search engines may display a full-text link from a journal that
provides older articles for free and paid access to new research.
At other times, an author (or someone else) will post finalized
articles to a personal site, which is picked up by search engines.
Very few publications allow upload of finalized papers to the
web or to an IR – so the version you see may not be there long!
Conference Proceedings
Some institutions publish locally-held conference proceedings
through repositories:
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/humtraffconf/22/
A faculty member may also post a copy of their conference
presentation, transcript or research findings to a repository:
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58999
You may also find poster presentations in repositories:
http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/nursing_facpub/1
Conference papers may or may not be refereed – check main
conference website if you need to know peer review status
Dissertations
• Dissertations may be found in many repositories, expanding
access to these documents that are often otherwise locked in
archives or available only through paid outlets like ProQuest
Dissertations.
http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/education_etd/1/
There are a lot of ways to search for open access articles, but the
simplest way is using Google. Per Norris, Oppenheim and Roland
(2008), searching with Google and Google Scholar was more than
7 times more likely to retrieve an open access article than using
OAIster or OpenDOAR. I’ll demonstrate them, but recommend
Google Scholar for most searchers.
SEARCH SYSTEMS
OpenDOAR
http://www.opendoar.org/search.php
A directory of repositories.
Contains a search interface to find repositories, and another
search interface (using Google Custom Search) to find items in
those repositories.
OAIster
http://oaister.worldcat.org/
Powered by WorldCat
Contains other types of digital collections, i.e. photos and other
archive documents
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
http://www.doaj.org/
• Searches exclusively journals that are OA
• Not a repository search
• Some journals are less stable; your mileage may vary
Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
• Links together published and OA versions of documents
• Keyword indexing of documents results in far more results
with more capacity to narrow a search
• Sheer size delivers added bonuses: cited-by functions and
bibliography linking
• Customizable for libraries/institutions with link resolvers
• It just works
This is just a taste of the literature out there on Open
Access. Check out the Digital Scholarship bibliographies:
http://digital-scholarship.org/about/overview.htm
REFERENCES
References
Finding OA Articles
• Norris, M., Oppenheim, C., & Rowland, F. (2008). Finding open
access articles using Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and
OpenDOAR. Online Information Review, 32(6), 709–715.
doi:10.1108/14684520810923881
http://hdl.handle.net/2134/4084
• Baldwin, V. (2009). Using Google Scholar to search for online
availability of a cited article in engineering disciplines. Issues in
Science and Technology Librarianship, 56.
doi:10.5062/F4WM1BBC
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/182/
References
General Background on OA
• Suber, P. (2004). A very brief introduction to open access.
Retrieved from
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read
• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge
http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berlinererklarung/
References
Further Reading
• Björk, B.-C., & Paetau, P. (2012). Open access to the scientific
journal literature: Status and challenges for the information
systems community. Bulletin of the American Society for
Information Science & Technology, 38(5), 39–44.
http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun12/JunJul12_Bjork_Paetau.pdf
• Cassella, M. (2010). Institutional repositories: An internal and
external perspective on the value of IRs for researchers’
communities. LIBER Quarterly, 20(2), 210–225.
http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/URN%3AN
BN%3ANL%3AUI%3A10-1-113593
References
Further Reading
• Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., & Harnad, S.
(2012). Green and gold open access percentages and growth,
by discipline. 17th International Conference on Science and
Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada, Montréal, CA (p. 11). Presented at the 17th
International Conference on Science and Technology
Indicators (STI), Montréal, Québec: Social Science and
Humanities Research Council (Canada). Retrieved from
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/
• Royster, P. (2012). Up from Under the “Open Access” Bus.
Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 1(2).
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1045
http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss2/3