Institutional Repositories - Science topic

In my Institution, we properly utilize our repository (TERAS). The TERAS was developed by TETFund which allows Federal University Libraries to collect, preserve and disseminate their resources with ease. It features

Include; EBSCOHost, Eagle Scan, Thesis Repository, and BIMS.

Google Scholar is the best place to search for your item. If it is open access, it should appear. Repositories don't contain everything you expect them to.

Wolfgang R. Dick Thank you Sir for your response.

I have gone through previous discussions, and it seems RG changed its design recently in November, then onwards, RG contents are not indexed on Google Scholar. It seems to be a "crawlers" issue with the new design, misconfiguration, or maybe a metadata issue within the new RG.

Yes, technically RG can resolve this issue by allowing Google Robots exclusion protocol.

Hi,

The gray literature are reports, pre prints, and a lot of other informal materials. The publication process of gray literature is often faster than in formal journals, and therefore, it is preferred when authors would like to establish authorship to a discovery or an original paper of some sort. Gray literature receives citations, in many cases, so it is visible to the scientific community. Publishing in a formal journal, though, is considered more valuable for academic promotion, since, the paper goes through reviewers judgements. Comparing the two publication routes resembles comparing the formal and informal education.

Dear Cecilia-Irene Loeza-Mejía

I think you should have a look at the site «re3data: Registry of Research Data Repositories» (https://www.re3data.org).

There you will find the following search/browsing options: Browse by content type Browse by subject Browse by country

When you choose "Browse by content type", you will get "Raw data" or "Scientific and statistical data formats" (among others): https://www.re3data.org/browse/by-content-type/.

With best regards Anne-Katharina

University under which you study should be having a repository. Most of them have it already. But they do include mostly unpublished thesis. Check yourself before adding.

In Mexico and in particular at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, we have worked data repositories for research with DSpace and we put both pure data and worked data, that is, both data for research and research data having good acceptance by users . In this sense, we think that institutional repositories are adequate to include all types of data.

Yes I would say not all systems are great that way and it’s certainly a good idea to bring it up to RG though I suspect their interest is to have you upload full text. Personally I wouldn’t worry - if people want the paper, they will ask the author if the full text isn’t loaded/obvious link. Plus if they google it should find it in your IR anyway.

Hi,

I think that the same factors that are taken in account in creating the repository will be later counted as factor affecting its usage, namely, content management, submission, ingest, archiving, publishing, discovery, access, and preservation .

It is really interesting to know that plagiarized work can not be consider by turnit in. But turnitin should detect the similarities from the original work directly and this did not happen. Also notice that the documents are born digital.

Dear George.

Awareness of the concept Intellectual property right in Africa, specifically in Nigeria and presently Uganda is gaining momentum in the sence that before now plagiarism testing was overlooked, right now publications have to go through arrays of test to certify its authenticity or originality.

However have full right to your Phd work even after being declared authentic by various examining bodies of the particular school depends on the extant laws of the school, as each university or college have laws establishing them and also laws guiding the publication and publicizing of such research.

However, from my brief experience and based on advice which i have proffered in different occasions, it is expedient that schools hold on to the finished research for some number of years (Published via institutional repositories as a read only document), after which the research is released to its owner,

I have further opined that the researcher also MAY decide to allow the institution have full authority over the work.

These agreements should be in written form.

Dear Eduardo Goncalves Paterson Fox

now I see your point.

However scientific data repositories are designed to store raw data. They guarantee durability, versioning etc. but not manipulating that data. Even the preview functions of PDF or JPG are only additional features and every PDF reader will do it better. So the intention of such repositories is to store raw data that everybody can download and manipulate it locally in its own way.

Sure! that is what I did for my PhD work. You can create an IR if you know how to programme with languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascripts, PHP, MySQL. You must have a dedicated server to hold the database with internet connection.

Hi Menouar,

You may want to look into Dryad Digital Repository, FigShare, or Zenodo. All three of these data repositories are recommended by high-profile journals such as Nature https://www.nature.com/sdata/policies/repositories#general

Before creating an institutional repository, we must must consider several things. some of them are as follows:

1. Think what you want to store/upload- the content. creating a repository is nothing more than installing a software, but contents are the important components of the repository.  

2. selection of a software- there are a number of open source software, but may choose one that suited your requirement.

3. policies- One of the important steps in creating IR, is formulation of policies related to content creation, deposition and archiving.

Hi Racquel, I wonder why you would aim for exclusivity? If properly licensed, ie ideally CC0 or CC-BY, that would not matter. Moreover, a consideration will certainly be why the data is published in the first place (e.g. you'd like to submit a paper and the journal requires that the underlying data is published - a repository that is easy to use and immediately provides a DOI would certainly be a in a good position to be selected).  

Hi Uwe,

Another option for you might be Zenodo.org. It is developed by CERN under the EU FP7 project OpenAIREplus. The portal allows to publish any kind of dataset with an upper limit of 2GB at the moment. According to the project, the limit might be extended to 10GB in the future. All uploads get a DOI.

It might be worth taking a look at it.

Cheers,

Henning

Generally I think the difference between a repository and an archive is one of emphasis. Both serve access and preservation functions, but repositories normally emphasize access, while archives normally emphasize preservation. At the institutional level it is entirely possible for one system to fulfill both the digital archive and repository functions, though there are a lot of decisions to be made about how best to do this.

In a lot of ways this is similar to the distinction made in some institutions between an institutional repository and a current research information system, repositories normally emphasize provision of access to the full-text of scholarly outputs, while CRIS systems normally emphasize providing comprehensive information about all scholarly output regardless of the availability of related files. Still, many institutions use one system to fulfill both functions.

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Interoperability Between Institutional and Data Repositories -- a bit dated (2007) but still on target.

Perhaps the UNESCO guidelines can help you.

A heavy-handed approach is to find a way to require it at the institutional level, for promotion, tenure, and funded research. But that's not going to happen any time soon at most institutions.

If we want researchers to use our repositories, we need to offer a value proposition that is stronger than "there will be a copy of your research preserved forever"--not much immediate gratification in that for many people. What things do researchers need to do? What motivates them? 

One thing researchers want to do is to become known--to be cited, to be contacted by the media as an expert, to have my grad students familiar with my work, etc. So that brings some ideas to mind:

You get the idea. Help researchers do things that matter to them instead of trying to convince them to validate the existence of the IR and those who support it.

Beyond these things,

In addition to the excellent examples which Stacey has provided, I would add that currently in Australia altmetrics is a very hot topic. And not just because Heather Piwowar (Impactstory)is doing a national speaking tour ;-) Many of our university libraries are discussing how to add value to our institutional repositories by providing statistics based on altmetrics. Some, such as Queensland University of Technology, provide these: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46920/

This is a very open question but one approach might be understanding the differences in approaches between formal and informal knowledge repositories within an institution. Most institutional come with a considerable amount of governance that creates a high degree of consistency within the information architecture and content being organized. Social media has little or no governance but may still contain a lot of valuable information about what people are saying about a topic or institution. You might be able to query both sources of information for answers to questions but you would have to use different methodologies to design your inquiry and understand the semantic incompatibilities with the type of information you gather.

In physics, it has long been a tradition that papers uploaded to the arXiv preprint servers are citable, which is how they work around the long journal peer-review+publication times and can gather citations before publication date.arXiv identifiers are more prevalent than DOIs within physics. Other fields are not as uniform (pubmed are quite popular within the biomedical community, but only list articles post publication).

This however means you have to later "merge" the citations when/if the article is actually published, for arXiv this is easy as you can later fill in DOI and journal references. However, when you have a multitude of such repositories, and in particular institutional repositories with variable quality of availability and metadata entries, it gets much trickier.

Also there is the question of what is a "single unit of publication" - if I upload an 8 page preprint that I submitted, got rejected, then added 5 more pages and got accepted somewhere else - is that all the same unit? Which one of them did you cite?

Can also non-peer-reviewed documents, reports and white papers be published and cited in the same way? I think you should be able to - but with a clear indication of their provenance.

A repository and a digital library are 2 different things. A repository makes the intellectual output of an organisation (or multiple organisations or just one department) freely and openly available. A digital library on the other hand, is a gateway to electronic resources including but not limited to: an OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue), ebooks, ejournals (usually subscription based), bibliographic databases (e.g. CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science - depending on your subject areas) and citation management tools. It should also include access to online referencing and to a live librarian (real qualified person is good). I manage both a digital library and a repository so if you need more info, please contact me. It might be wise to start with a needs analysis of your clients.

I reccomend to you this book: How to Build a Digital Library (Second Edition) Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Author(s): Ian H. Witten, David Bainbridge and David M. Nichols

ISBN: 978-0-12-374857-7