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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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OA Academia in Repose
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · Sep 04th, 2008 5:42 pm · 22 votes · no comments made
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Seven Academic Open-Access Repositories Compared
Scientists and academics in general are more and more becoming convinced that research results should be shared rapidly and made easily accessible in order to allow for fruitful exchange of ideas and collaboration. Only this way can modern scholarly disciplines thrive. What's the lay of the field in practice however? I made a quick study of a sample of seven established open-access (OA) repositories (or like systems) of academic articles and materials:
• arXiv, maintained by Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, US: offers "e-prints" in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics; started in 1991, currently 489,000 items.
• arXiv Math, the math section of arXiv: included separately because I was able to obtain better statistical data than for the overall site; currently 86,000 items.
• CERN Document Server (CDS), maintained by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), Geneva, Switzerland: 100,000s of bibliographic entries of particle physics research, close to half of them with full text included; started in 2000, currently 360,000 items.
• CDL eScholarship Repository, maintained by the California Digital Library, Oakland, CA, US: research materials and academic articles of University of California scholars; started in 2002, currently over 20,000 items.
• Connexions, maintained by Rice University, Houston, TX, US: an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly modules ("knowledge chunks") in order to create, rip, mix and burn textbooks, courses, and learning materials; started in 1999, currently 6,000 items.
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), maintained by Lund University, Lund, Sweden: allowing search for and location of articles of all open-access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content; started in 2003, currently 194,000 items.
• Dspace@Cambridge, maintained by the University of Cambridge, UK: institutional repository of the University of Cambridge's scholars; started in 2003, currently 188,000 items.
• Trance Project, maintained by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, US: P2P system facilitating publication of all data relating to proteomics experiments (biochemistry); started in 2004, currently 11,447,000 items.
Date versus number
I looked for the number of full-text OA documents and the like available in the repositories, and the date for the numbers in question. This information was gleaned from the official websites as well as using the Internet Archive's "time traveling" feature. In graph 1 of the slideshow, plotting number (log) against date (month) allows us to see both when the different systems came online and how they grew. (The trend lines are linear "averages" so-to-speak, although not linear in this graph due to the log scale which affords us to compare repositories of different scale) The oldest is arXiv which started in April 1999 but we don't have a lot of numbers early on so we also plot the math section (started December 1994) of this archive for which we have better data. The second oldest is Connexions, begun in October 1999 but of much smaller scale and scope than arXiv. DOAJ and the Trance Project are the youngest: 2004. On average, the projects have been online 8 years 9 months (max. arXiv 16 yr. 10 mo., min. Trance Project 3 yr. 10 mo.). The largest repository as of July 2008 is the Trance Project with 11,447,000 items, the smallest Connexions with 6,000. Of course, the Trance Project's holdings are research data rather than articles/documents which explains the high number. The largest "normal" one is the CDL eScholarship Repository which passed the 5 million mark in January.
Start date versus growth rate
The repositories' slope, a measure of how fast they have grown on average over their lifespan, is plotted against the start dates (month) in graph 2 of the slideshow. I added an exponential "average" trend line here as that type fitted the data the best. It is abundantly clear that the Trance Project had the largest growth rate while also being the most recently started (there is a caveat: there are only 4 data points, start date included). Is there a possible correlation between the growth rate and start date? It would seem so: the younger the project, the faster it has grown. ArXiv, for instance, ends up on the far left: oldest and second-slowest growing. The only exception is Connexions which is both a slow-growing repository and exactly as old as the average of all projects.
Resources
Obviously, these graphs provide a rough comparison within a limited sample. Nevertheless, I think this information points in the direction of academic OA repositories becoming more common and maybe benefitting from their predecessors' having worked out many of the problems of implementation and maintenance of this type of online resources. Resources however remain a big issue, e.g., in 2006, after the initially-funded three years, DSpace@Cambridge's growth rate slowed down due to underestimation of the expenses and difficulty of scaling up.
tags: international science-research local-context-global-commons open-access academic research
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