Open Access 101

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

To deposit your research in an Institutional Repository in an Irish university (or in DIT, WIT, RCSI or HSE) go to the IREL-Open website and scroll down to find your institution's repository.

Open Access for the Humanities?

This is International Open Access week (19-23 October 2009) with many events taking place to raise awareness of this mode of scholarly communication. However, to date, Open Access has achieved most success in the science and technology fields where the dissemination of written knowledge has traditionally taken place via journal articles and conference proceedings.

If you are interested in finding out how this model of publishing can be applied to the Humanities, where the monograph is the preferred method of scholarly communication, take a look at the OAPEN project. A new resources page has recently been added covering the latest new in Open Access book publishing.

Problems with Online Research

The act of finding and reading published research has changed so much in the last 10-20 years. Ask any old-timer - anyone over 30 ;) - and they'll tell you how literature searches used to involve looking up abstracts in hardback paper indexes and CD-ROMs; trying to find missing print journal issues from library shelves and waiting weeks for interlibrary loans from the British Library.

Now you can do everything from your desktop in your office or at home. We can search online databases, read tens of thousand of journal online and save papers to our own personal digital libraries in EndNote or RefWorks, which also automate our citing and referencing.

But things are far from perfect. Endnote, RefWorks and many databases arent intuitive and don't work as smoothly as we'd like. Advanced tools like RSS search alerts can be difficult to set up and manage. For even the most organised, technophile researcher its difficult to find all the important papers in your field and still have time for your own work.

A recent paper, Defrosting the Digital Library, offers a good, accesible review of this and looks to a future where our digital libraries will be more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places.

Hull, D., Pettifer, S.R. & Kell, D.B., 2008. Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10).