Open Access Repositories – Choosing the Content is Very Important

The most common type of content in OA repositories is the peer-reviewed journal literature. Their authors benefit from increased visibility of their work and accompanying citation impact.

The institutions can, through Open Access repositories, make their research programmes visible worldwide and increase their impact. These repositories collect journal articles because a great number of them permits authors to archive their post-prints in an institutional or disciplinary repository. They are used by major commercial publishers and many large scholarly society publishers. Some services monitor publishers and their “self-archiving” policies and shows that that the majority of publishers allow authors to deposit a copy of their published paper into a repository.

Since we live in the digital age, the research data is also created in digital form and repositories are developing ways of collecting these data. An increasing number of those who fund the research, make requirements that their grant holders make their data available through Open Access after their research has been published. In this way the other researchers can use the data to verify results, compare them with their own or make other use of it in order to introduce new data and knowledge.

The material included in these repositories can be of many types

• video and audio files
• photographs
• diagrams and charts
• spreadsheets
• artwork

In some cases, they can be a combination of several types of data, for example, a weather chart with accompanying satellite images.

Some institutional repositories also contain books or book chapters. Sometimes the authors are not so keen on sharing their material with others for free since they were written for monetary gain. However, in such situations it is essential that the book deposited with information about the title, the author, a short abstract, while the body of the text is blocked for viewing.

If these details are visible, it means that the book is marked in the institution’s assessment procedures and it could be found on the Internet.

Nonetheless, if the entire content is available in a repository, the numbers show that the sales of the book rise very often. This is thanks to the fact that the repositories are raising the awareness of the book and marketing it to an audience where there is a likelihood that they will eventually buy it if they consider it relevant for their work.

Apart from the types of content mentioned above, other material is often contained by institutional repositories, such as theses, dissertations and other research-related outputs.

Advertisement