Networked Information Resources SPARC, E-prints & Open Access initiatives

SPARC SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) SPARC An ARL initiative since 1997ARL Goal : stimulate expansion of the non-profit sector's share of overall scholarly publishing activity

Main activities Create and develop competitive alternatives to commercial journals Promote fundamental changes in the system and the culture of scholarly communication. Enhance awareness of scholarly communication issues Examples of open access journals Open Access Journal Directory HighWire Press at Stanford

Other major advocacy efforts Public Library of Science publication charge on authors progressive copyright policy Open Letter eprints.org Coalition for Networked Information Berlin Declaration

E-print & Institutional repository Began as informal mechanisms to disseminate preliminary results or grey literature Gradually evolve into legitimate vehicles of scholarly communication Examples of e-print LIS e-print archive Academia Sinica PubMed Central

Open Archive initiatives (OAi) From individual archive to interoperable network An initiative to develop and promote interoperability standards that aims to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content previously deposited in individual archives

Interoperability “…as disciplinary e-print servers proliferated, often with overlapping disciplinary coverage and geographical affinity, there was a need to develop services that permitted searching across papers housed at multiple repositories. Repositories also need capabilities to automatically identify and copy papers that has been deposited in other repositories” Lynch, C. (2001) Metadata harvesting and the Open Archives Initiative. Available at

Santa Fe Convention The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives initiative of 1999 Propose a technical solution for federate search function OAi-MHP (Metadata Harvesting Protocol)

Distributed searching vs. metadata harvesting approach A low-barrier interoperability solution

Components of OAi Data providers (institutional repository) adopt the OAi-MHP as a means of exposing metadata about their content. Service providers harvest metadata from data providers and use the metadata as the basis for valued federated search function

Not just a matter of time Social and Cognitive:  trust and authority; academic reward system  information seeking behaviors (effective integration of disperse literature) Legal: intellectual property right Economic: sharing of the publishing cost

Diversity of resources Intellectual division of labor Types of scholarly information resources: Individual journal titles Information service providers/vendors/aggregators Indexing and abstracting services E-print; institutional archives/repositories Library catalogs Websites (personal/institutional)…

Integration of literature Author names Citations Journals Review articles, meta-analysis (e.g. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics ) Special issues (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research annual database issue; JASIS&T bioinformatics issue) Indexing (I&A services) Knowledge discovery systems (e.g. collaborative filtering, federated search engine) New disciplines (e.g. Bioinformatics; Computers & Chemistry) Adapted from (MacMullen, 2002)

Bradford’s law of subject dispersion If scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given subject, they may be divided into a nucleus of periodicals more particularly devoted to the subject and several groups or zones containing the same number of articles as the nucleus, when the numbers of periodicals in the nucleus and succeeding zones will be as 1:n:n 2 … (Bradford, 1984)

Implication on information seeking Exponentially diminishing return of extending a library searching Information foraging: reward and cost

Registry for Open Access Repository

Creative Common To address the access barrier currently created by copyright laws Enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes Creative Common, Taiwan MIT's OpenCourses 中華民國圖書館學會