Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of institutional repositories in New Zealand, exploring factors affecting the adoption and success of institutional repositories from the perspective of the library managers who established them, and from the perspective of the academic community. Design/methodology/approach -Data from a series of interviews with library managers are compared with the findings from a randomised national survey of academics. Findings -The responses of the library managers suggest that they are positive about the value of their institutional repository, and the progress made towards recruiting content for it. Data from the survey of academics indicate that academics have been slow to embrace the concept of institutional repositories, and show little interest in using repositories for increasing the accessibility of their own work, or to access the work of others. The number of deposits remains low, mirroring patterns throughout the world, and subject or disciplinary repositories appear to have greater value to the academic community. Practical implications -The future long-term sustainability of institutional repositories depends on gaining a stronger commitment from the academic community, or developing different goals, against which their success might be measured. Originality/value -The study is the first random survey of academic staff across all disciplines, and an entire country, and the findings have a very high level of generalisability. IntroductionWith the growth of research and scholarly activity in the last decades of the twentieth century, existing channels for scholarly communication, particularly in the sciences and medicine, suffered from time lags in refereeing articles and publishing journals. Systems for distributing paper pre-prints by mail or facsimile were clumsy and slow, and researchers found it difficult to keep up with new developments in their fields. In the early 1990s, the rise of the internet made other communication and publishing options possible, starting with e-mail distribution, and then moving to the world wide web. The first web-based preprint server, arXiv, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991, was initially used for physics pre-preprints, and has subsequently been extended to include aspects of mathematics, computational linguistics, and neuroscience. Other disciplines subsequently adopted the arXiv model, the best-known examples of which are economics (EconPapers), and cognitive psychology (CogPrints).At the same time, journal subscription costs were increasing significantly, particularly in science and medicine (White and Creaser, 2004). Many libraries responded by cancelling subscriptions, and, as a result, researchers were losing access to
BackgroundThe problem of access to medical information, particularly in low-income countries, has been under discussion for many years. Although a number of developments have occurred in the last decade (e.g., the open access (OA) movement and the website Sci-Hub), everyone agrees that these difficulties still persist very widely, mainly due to the fact that paywalls still limit access to approximately 75% of scholarly documents. In this study, we compare the accessibility of recent full text articles in the field of ophthalmology in 27 established institutions located worldwide.MethodsA total of 200 references from articles were retrieved using the PubMed database. Each article was individually checked for OA. Full texts of non-OA (i.e., “paywalled articles”) were examined to determine whether they were available using institutional and Hinari access in each institution studied, using “alternative ways” (i.e., PubMed Central, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Online Reprint Request), and using the website Sci-Hub.ResultsThe number of full texts of “paywalled articles” available using institutional and Hinari access showed strong heterogeneity, scattered between 0% full texts to 94.8% (mean = 46.8%; SD = 31.5; median = 51.3%). We found that complementary use of “alternative ways” and Sci-Hub leads to 95.5% of full text “paywalled articles,” and also divides by 14 the average extra costs needed to obtain all full texts on publishers’ websites using pay-per-view.ConclusionsThe scant number of available full text “paywalled articles” in most institutions studied encourages researchers in the field of ophthalmology to use Sci-Hub to search for scientific information. The scientific community and decision-makers must unite and strengthen their efforts to find solutions to improve access to scientific literature worldwide and avoid an implosion of the scientific publishing model. This study is not an endorsement for using Sci-Hub. The authors, their institutions, and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers.
<span>This paper introduces WikiWikiWeb software, also known as Wiki, for use in library and information management contexts. Wikis provide an environment for Web-based collaboration and can also be used for Web site content management. The article includes an overview of the history and development of Wiki, as well as discussing basic and advanced Wiki features. It compares three Wiki engines and describes seven case studies of real-world library and library-related Wiki applications. The paper concludes with a discussion of factors that can contribute to a successful Wiki project.</span>
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