The word is getting around from places like Library Journal that the recently formed  Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI)  will meet in person for the first time at a pre-conference meeting at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference in Washington, DC, in early November 2011.   Just as SPARC fostered a vibrant and participatory Open Access Week site that substitutes for in-person meetings, SPARC is also promising to lend its advocacy expertise and even support a COAPI meeting at their own first North American OA meeting, to be held next March in Kansas City, MO.

It would be useful for me to provide something to describe the participants before their own web site becomes available at SPARC or elsewhere.  This chart will show the COAPI institutional library, a link to their campus open access policy, and a link to their institutional repository:

The ROARMAP directory project continues to be the site to track the growth of open access repositories with  mandated archiving policies.  Here is the ROARMAP global growth tracker:

ROARMAP Quarterly Growth February 2011

The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) is one of the partners in the Medical Heritage Library, a collaboration of major research libraries supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and administered by the Open Knowledge Commons, which itself is located at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  The Internet archive provides the storage and gateway up to this point for the Medical Heritage Library.

On May 23rd NLM announced the release of Medicine in the Americas,   over 300 digital reproductions of early American printed books, now freely available,  which showcases the early development of American medicine.  Up to this point, most of the works contributed from universities for inclusion in the Medical Heritage Library have been works from a variety of western European cultures.  NLM’s contribution of American heritage is a welcome addition.

According to the introduction,  a broad range of areas are represented:

• Popular & Clinical Works
• Epidemiology & Public Health
• Allopathic & Alternative Approaches
• The Diversity of Specializations
• Ethnic & Racial Diversity
• Women’s Health & Women Physicians
• Milestones in Medical Publishing
• Allied Healthcare Professions

Here is the starting  place to browse the titles in this new open access resource located in the NLM’s institutional repository.

The University’s web site announcement also refers to their future development of an OA repository for JKUAT to allow staff and students to share and disseminate research findings more effectively

The HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) Library Alliance was launched 10 years ago, in 2001.

According to a 2005 project overview of the Cornell University collaboration with the HBCU Alliance,

In 2003 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Cornell University Library (CUL) a planning grant to investigate the development of a collaborative digital librarianship program for the Clark Atlanta University School of Library and Information Studies (CAU SLIS). After the announcement by the CAU Board of Trustees of the plan to close the SLIS by May 2005, and Cornell’s decision not to pursue the program with the North Carolina Central School of Library and Information Science, CUL applied the results of the planning grant to lay the foundation for the development of a HBCU Library Alliance initiative.

After more than five years, the initial HBCU Alliance targets for digitization (African American Studies, the American South, American Democracy, cultural pluralism, and the founding of HBCU’s) remain important and still in their early stages of production.  Yet there is also evolving history of institutional repositories that share scientific knowledge openly, and I began to wonder if any HBCU Libraries have decided to promote the benefits of green open access or decide to host and manage theses and dissertations in scientific disciplines in a repository.

The Bluford Library at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T) has created a page to ingest faculty publications, but the Institutional Repository where these go is impossible to easily find on the Library’s web site, and I guess even faculty would hesitate to drop something in without knowing where it is going.

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A different cluster of universities in North Carolina have already launched a cooperative effort to make the scholarly output of their faculty and studentes available to the world. Appalachian State University, East Carolina University, UNC Greensboro, UNC Pembroke, and UNC Wilmington have formed the North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship (NC DOCKS).

NC DOCKS includes many full text articles, audio recordings, dissertations, and other formats. While the collection is overwhelmingly thesis and dissertation based, there is also stated desire to support faculty publications. Faculty Benefits from NC DOCKS include:

• Permanent archiving with a stable server and URL .
• A larger community of readers outside the university
• International readership with access to the NC DOCKS repository.
• Potential for content discovery through  search engines like Google.
• Across all disciplines, open-access articles have greater research impact than traditional publications: read by more  and cited more frequently.
• Within their academic system,  a useful way of demonstrating the value of the university’s faculty to society outside the classroom.

The HBCU Library Alliance has an opportunity to observe and learn from the NC DOCKS collaboration to see an example of an effective multi-campus institutional repository for dissertations and faculty publications.

The most significant scholarly re-focus on persistent, neglected illness in tropical areas was the support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided to help launch in 2007  the open access journal PLos Neglected Tropical Diseases (PloSNTDS), now the leading  Tropical Medicine journal in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) impact factor ranking.  For 2009, PloSNTDS has an Impact Factor of 4.693 and also ranks in the top three paracitology journals.(sorry, this link will work only if your institution subscribes to JCR)

Many of you know that  my nuclear family is a bi-cultural unification of Japanese and U.S. humanity, culture and interests, as well as a weaving of both academic and business professions and Buddhist values.  So there was some amount of  affirmation I felt on seeing a tweet and link about ”hita-hita — Institutional OA Advocacy in Japan”  and finding a soft power open access movement alive and well in the country of eight islands:

“The term “hita-hita” was employed to signify something that penetrates gently and smoothly. As of 2011, a total of 760,000 research papers are accessible through IRs across Japan. Open Access (OA) is not politically forced at state level or institution level. Instead, we have built repository manager-level lateral solidarity to share experience, exchange various creative ideas, add improvements and disseminate our ideas, thereby highly developing respective IRs.”

This description is accompanied by a link to an English-language 2011 Digital Repository Foundation report titled hita-hita: Institutional OA Advocacy in Japan.

With the publication of this English-language history of the Japanese institutional repository movement, a natural barrier to understanding falls.  The timeline (below) credits Stevan Harnad as an early inspiration, and the text indicates that with 135 IRs launched in the last five years, Japan now has the second largest number of IRs in the world.

The Digital Repository Foundation community is clearly ready to interact with the rest of the repository and open access community, and I hope to have an opportunity to congratulate them in person. Please don’t wait to contact them for more details on how their local advocacy has generated impressive growth and results.

I kept looking at the home page for the Ranking Web of World Repositories, maintained by the Cybermetrics Lab (CSIC), with both admiration and confusion.  Repositories are the backbone of the green open access movement, and here were comparative statistics for institutional efforts all over the world.  There is even a banner across the top of the home page saying “Supporting Open Access Initiatives Worldwide“.

So what was my confusion?  In the third paragraph there is a reference to scholarly paper describing the ranking system and the note to request a copy from the corresponding author:

Aguillo, I.F., Ortega, J.L., Fernández, M., Utrilla, A.M. (2010). Indicators for a webometric Ranking of Open Access Repositories. Scientometrics, 82 (3): 477-486.

Scientometrics is not an open access journal, but a Springer subscription publication.  If you didn’t request a copy from the authors and went to the publisher’s web site without an institutional subscription, you could purchase a copy of the article for $34US.

I have already written recently about Springer’s apparent interest in supporting open access as part of their diverse publishing portfolio.  Springer also maintains a page for authors that provides detailed advice on self-archiving and Springer’s status as a “green publisher”.

Getting back to my confusion… Why don’t the authors, who have access to an institutional repository at CSIC,  place a peer-reviewed manuscript copy of their paper in their own instutional repository and point to that copy? That would be a demonstration of support for the repository movement and Springer’s own green publisher status.

Then I had a realization.  I had seen the tweet  earlier last week about the  ”Quandary: Scientists Prefer Reading Over Publishing ‘Open Access’ Papers.” In a nutshell, one analysis of survey data from the recent SOAP Project symposium report was that about 53% of respondents said they had published at least one open-access article, but overall only about 10% of papers are published in open-access journals.

This evidence provided the rationale for the irony I felt: these faculty scholars of repositories (you can tell they are faculty, given the tone they use addressing librarians on the home page), when presented with an opportunity to demonstrate their open access principles,  preferred to direct readers of their scholarship to ask for a copy or to a non-open source and a  potential $34 payout.

Oh, well, I can only hope that they forgot to deposit that green post-print manuscript copy or perhaps didn’t know they could do it with their publisher’s support.

Many readers know I am a medical librarian, and many readers have met me at Medical Library Association (MLA) activities.  Medical libraries are valued for making health information accessible, organized, and useful,  and one prominent role for academic and hospital libraries is the collection management role:  providing campus-wide institutional access that can tempt and often succeed in influencing clinicians or researchers to drop their individual print or electronic subscriptions.

During the last decade, on a large campus like mine, there might be hundreds of individual personal and department journal titles that were cancelled  in favor of a single, library managed  electronic subscription.  It is no secret that the centralized role that medical libraries have played as the institutional subscription of record has also produced an ongoing  serials crisis as costs for institutional library subscriptions have expanded exponentially, as publishers struggle to adopt their business model to the reality of fewer individual subscriptions .

As the serials crisis looms for library budgets,  researchers around the world have increasingly recognized that in the environment of electronic publishing and knowledge distribution,  the frequency that other researchers can access and cite your work depends on the consistency of access to your published research.  If  libraries trim their subscriptions in the process of the cost cutting demanded, institutional repositories and open access journals become attractive alternatives for authors.

Eventually, medical libraries themselves recognize the role that open access journals might play in their subscription and budgeting process.  Last spring , an MLA Ad Hoc Committee for Advocating Scholarly Communications developed a survey focusing on the impact of open access initiatives on journal collection development decisions. The survey gathered data about cancellations of journals that have open or public access content. Results could serve as a basis for future study. When the widely distributed survey closed on June 18, 2010, a total of 222 respondents had participated. As the survey was not limited to MLA members, the results present a broader statement about medical library opinion in general.

The results of this survey have just been published in MLA News November/December 2010, Volume 50, Issue 10 (available to MLA membership with MLA ID login).   Fortunately, you can read the report and analysis on MLAnet.

The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), Kochi, India, has launched an institutional repository with nearly 7,000 scientific papers of their staff members published since 1953, using eprints repository software. This collection includes publication of the Institute’s staff members in journals, conference prsentations, seminars, symposia, technical reports, theses, patents and related publications.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched a new digital repository, Digital Collections. which allows  searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM’s History of Medicine Division.  The first release of Digital Collections includes a newly expanded set of Cholera Online monographs, a portion of which NLM first published online in PDF format in 2007.  Each book was scanned into high-quality TIFF images, which underwent optical character recognition to generate corresponding text files.

Edith Cowan University in Western Australia  has launched Research Online, a publicly accessible digital repository of research output produced by staff, postgraduate students and affiliated authors, managed by the Library Services Centre. Research and scholarly output included in the respository has been selected according to the open access policy of their University.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Thailand Institutional Repository hosts material on communicable disease, health systems development, emergency and humanitarian assistance, and other topics.

Just in case some publisher thinks my well of  ideas has dried up, I am actually teaching an online library science class that concludes in December, including  reading and critiquing a large number of semester papers and final grading.   I should be back to regular persistent blogging about open access and biomedicine by December 15th.    This blog has been visited by readers in over 112 countries in just 10 months of existence, and I am happy to have chosen such a internationally relevant set of issues.

One quick note:   The Digital Library of Information Science & Technology (DLIST) at the University of Arizona’s Institutional Repository is back online, and I hope some of my students deposit their papers (after absorbing and adjusting for my comments, of  course).