The following is from Peter Suber's Open Access News:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_04_29_fosblogarchive.html#5931097067404812219
Kwame van Eijndhoven and Maurits van der Graaf, Inventory study into
the present type and level of OAI compliant Digital Repository
activities in the EU, SURF Foundation. The document is dated March
2007 but was apparently not released until late April.
http://www.driver-support.eu/documents/DRIVER%20Inventory%20study%202007.pdf
Excerpt:
An inventory study into the current type and level of digital
repository activity in the countries of the European Union has been
carried out as part of the DRIVER project DRIVER project from June
2006 until February 2007. The study was carried out by a combination
of a web survey, publication of results on a wiki and telephone
interviews. The main results of this inventory study are as follows:
http://www.driver-repository.eu/
Digital repositories for research output have already been
established in Europe over the last few years
* There are an estimated 230 institutions with one or more
digital repositories for research output in the European Union, of
which about 50% participated in this study.
* The situation per country differs:
o In 7 EU countries there appear to be no research
institutions with a digital repository for research output.
o 5 EU countries seem to be in a starting phase, where a
few institutions have set up such a repository.
o In 15 EU countries a sizeable proportion of the
research universities have implemented a digital repository for
research output: in seven of these countries it is estimated that more
than half of the research universities have done so.
These digital repositories contain mostly records related to
textual materials, covering more than a third of the recent research
output of the institution....
* More than half of the respondents gave estimates about the
coverage of their digital repository:
o On average, the estimated percentage of academics
delivering material to the digital repositories is 38%.
o On average, the estimated percentage of research
output of 2005 deposited in the digital repositories is 37%....
The participants in this study were asked various questions about
their views on the importance of a number of factors with regard to
the setting up and maintenance of digital repositories. The following
seven factors came out as the most important:
* The increased visibility of academics? publications
* A simple and user-friendly depositing process
* A mandatory policy for the depositing of the research output
by the institute
* An improvement in the situation with regard to the copyright
of published materials
* Requirements by research funding organisations for the
depositing of research output in repositories
* Awareness campaigns among academics
* Interest from decision-makers
It is clear from this study that digital research repositories are
already strongly established in Europe. The further deployment and
development of the digital repositories will follow a two-tier
approach:
* Deployment of digital repositories at research institutions
that do not have one yet.
* Increasing the coverage of the existing digital repositories
of published and unpublished textual research output, with a possible
future expansion of the coverage of digital repositories to other,
non-textual types of research output (e.g. images, video, and research
datasets).
The above-mentioned seven most important factors for developing
and maintaining digital repositories with research output can be used
to set a European action agenda, such as envisaged by the DRIVER
project, in the following way:
1. Increase the visibility of the research output in the
digital repositories by improving retrieval via further development of
search engines and subject indexing.
2. Harmonise the work processes behind the depositing in order
to facilitate an increase in the delivery of contents to the digital
repositories.
3. Advocacy for mandatory depositing policies: mandatory
policies for the depositing of research output by the institution and
- in line with this - requirements by research funding organisations
for the depositing of research output in repositories, should be
important goals for advocacy efforts according to the results of this
study....
Excerpted by Peter Suber, Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_04_29_fosblogarchive.html#5931097067404812219
Received on Wed May 02 2007 - 23:28:59 BST