Paper Presentation for the Forth Coming African Digital Scholarship & Curation 2009

Transcription

1 African Marine Science Repository for Electronic Publications (OceanDocs): Experience of the Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Paper Presentation for the Forth Coming African Digital Scholarship & Curation 2009 BY Edna A. Nyika Information Manager Institute of Marine Science, University of Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Tanzania Abstract In the evolution of scientific publication it is important to have a management and control tool for individual and institutional scientific output. A repository can be such a tool too. That is why in 2003 the Ocean Data and Information Network for Africa (ODINAFRICA) a project that involves 25 African countries aiming at managing ocean data and information in Africa decided to develop a repository to archive scientific output both published and unpublished. The repository has been developed to basically provide this service by collecting the scientific output of ODINAFRICA institutes on an open-access webserver using DSpace. Each country is an input center and the server is at IODE Headquarters in Oostend, Belgium. The paper is about how the Institute of Marine Sciences through the ODINAFRICA Project embarked on the development of e-repository of scientific output. Furthermore the paper discusses successes and problems encountered in the process of developing the repository. Introduction An institutional repository is a publicly accessible repository where the work published by authors affiliated with an institution is posted online, using special software known as Open Archives Initiative (OAI). In OceanDocs the software used is DSAPCE due to its ability of metadata exchange capability with the Odinafrica catalogue. The works can be searched and harvested; examples of harvesters in OceanDocs are Google scholar, OAIster, AVANO. Repositories are becoming one of the promising ways of archiving and protecting documents via the Internet. They also make widely available via the open access initiative documents to a larger audience. This new technology, which provides free online access to digital documents, is constantly changing and new information on building and running such service is emerging all the time. The service offers to the members of the African community, the management and dissemination of digital materials created by an institution. The project proposal to develop an e-repository project for Africa was submitted to the government of Flanders in 2003 by IOC of UNESCO. The project commenced in August The development of the technical infrastructure of the OdinPubAfrica repository was done by the Limburg University (now University of Hasselt). It was at different stages adapted so as to meet the regional requirements. Objective of the OdinPubAfrica Project The ultimate objective of the project is to make available material that cannot be obtained through the traditional printing process. The mission is also to support the research community in Africa in providing free and better access to materials produced by the African community. The main goals are;

2 Creation of a repository for marine science and oceanography in Africa Collecting publications in electronic format from different partners in Africa Enhancing the visibility of the authors and institutes Making scientific publications of ODINAFRICA institutes more easily and freely accessible Facilitate publishing of research findings and hereby promoting research and increasing access by African scientists to the international research forum. Provide long term preservation of the digital publications. Partners in the project The success of the project depends on the participation of various institutions. Fifteen marine centres (as listed below) within the ODINAFRICA participating institutes are partners in the project. The participants have all been trained on the different aspects of the project and on specific skills in order to further develop and train others at their local centres. Seychelles Fishing Authority Seychelles Albion Fisheries Research Centre Mauritius Nigerian Institute for Oceanography & marine Research - Nigeria Institut Halieutique et des Sciences Marines- Madagascar Instituto Nacional de Hidreografia e Navegacao - Mozambique Institute of Marine Sciences Library - Tanzania Bibliothèque de l INSTM -Tunisia Centre de Gestion Intégrée du Littoral et de l'environnement Marin et Côtier de l'université de Lomé -Togo Service de la Documentation et de l Information Scientifique - Mauritania National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries - Egypt National Marine Information and Research Centre - Namibia Bureau de documentation et des statistiques - Sénégal Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute - Kenya Université Mohammed V Agdal, Faculté des Sciences - Morocco Marine Fisheries Research Division Ghana. Amongst them two regional coordinators (one from French speaking the other from English speaking countries) are represented with their role to manage, supervise, support the development of the collection and promote the services of OceanDocs. The role of each partner has been to provide a service that may change the way communication is perpetuated thus leading to new services offered alongside the traditional library chores. Targeted Results A repository enhances the image of an Information Centre by strengthening the status of its research output. The service will in the long term help an organisation cut the high cost of printing and mailing of publications and contribute to the economic development in Africa. The process of degradation is often accelerated by poor environmental conditions such as excessive light, fluctuations in relative humidity and temperature, dust, both gaseous and particulate. Others are biological enemies, which are fungus and various animal and insect species. Digital introduction will help store the memory of an organisation for future generations. The authors will benefit from the enhancement the repository will have on their research and thus enhance their professional visibility. It will make their research work more accessible to a wider audience and hence generate more citations.

3 The target is also to help those publications especially what is known as grey literature that cannot make it to commercial printers to find a place for their accessibility. It also contributes to the creation of extra services through electronic journals. Status of OdinPubAfrica (OceanDocs) The collection process commenced rather slowly due to certain constraints faced within the local administration. There are however certain constraints that the project is still facing. Some countries are constantly changing their information staff and thus delaying their participation. There is a insufficient of support from both scientists and management. Scientists are sometime hesitant to hand in their documents. In other institutions the Internet capacity is either too slow or constantly breaking down OceanDocs: Repository Network on Oceanography and Marine Science The OdinPubAfrica project developed a repository 1 for scientific literature of African marine science. During the project other Odin groups, in the first place OdinCarsa were interested to develop a similar repository project for their region. As a result the OdinPubAfrica repository was extended to accept other Odin groups and was renamed to OceanDocs ( - Partners: - IODE/IOC - Odins: OdinAfrica,OdinCarsa, OdinCindio, OdinECET, OdinPimris, OdinWESTPAC - Institutes in Odins GENERAL OBJECTIVES OceanDocs has the following objective: - Development of a network of OAI-compliant repositories (Institutional, regional and IOC repository) providing access to full-text publications created by scientists affiliated to oceanographic and marine institutes and managed by their libraries and information centres. - Development of OceanDocs Central, hosted by IOC Project Office for IODE: Many institutes do not have the capacity to set up their own repository, surely institutes in developing countries - Integration in AVANO: = IOC/IODE harvester OceanDocs will become a distributed network with OceanDocs Central on one side and institutional and regional repositories on the other side. The user is interested in a unique access point to the publication: AVANO. The creation of the OceanDocs network will have the following immediate and direct advantages: 1 A repository deals with the scientific production of a(n) (group of) institution only. In the first place it is a way to make the own scientific publications available to the own community and to other interested scientists. A repository is not an electronic library. In an e-library all material relevant to a community is collected. The storage of all these documents on a library server cannot be realized as a result of the limitation enforced by copyright and author right laws. An electronic library will use search tools for electronic accessible documents (commercial publishers and open access document collections). Through the repository the own scientific output can be managed and made electronically available. Universities and research centres all over the world creates their repository to manage and present their scientific output in Open Access (see In the field of oceanography and marine science the number of repositories is growing (see

4 - Make scientific publications of oceanographic and marine institutes more easily and freely accessible to the research and management community, - Make local and regional grey literature available on a worldwide scale, - Enhance the internal scientific communication; - Facilitate publishing of research findings (e-journal as well as e-archive), specifically for scientists in developing countries thereby promoting their research and increasing their access to the international research forum. The interest of the project is to have as wide a scope as possible. Different sort of documents, grey literature and commercially published papers can be collected as long as they have a scientific significance. - Articles: an article evolves in his lifecycle from the author s version (preprint) to a journal version (refereed) to a postprint version (adapted author s version). The journal version is not available most of the time, because of copyright limitations. Therefore pre- or postprint versions of an article will be archived in the repository in the first place. If possible a journal version can also be included. Institutional journals can be integrated as a separate collection in the repository, if they are free of any copyright restriction. - Scientific reports (annual, regular) - project reports - Theses - Technical progress notes (unrefereed) - Conference papers The sort of documents which have to be excluded are administrative reports, PowerPoint presentations, etc. The goal of the project is to make the documents in the repository freely available for the general public. Only in specific cases a limitation of access can be installed. TARGETS The objective of OceanDocs is to create a network of marine repositories 2 with a common approach about policy and standards. : - Policy On every level it is important to develop a policy: on the OceanDocs network, on the participating Odin groups and finally on the institute level. The policy will contain information about responsibilities, collection definition, submission procedures, quality control, copyright, o Copyright: Open Access Published documents: limited by publisher s self-archiving policy (see Sherpa) Unpublished documents: adoption of creative commons license. - Standards metadata Software: Metadata: The OAI protocol makes an exchange of metadata possible, but only defines a basic metadata standard, Dublin Core unqualified. For OceanDocs, a metadata structure based on DC qualified compatible with the Agris AP and MODS has been worked out. We propose this as a standard for the OceanDocs network. The IOC Project Office for IODE provides support for technical development and capacitoy building: - Technical development: IOC/IODE has adapted DSpace as the preferential software for OceanDocs. The actual OceanDocs repository is developed by the Hasselt University Library on DSpace software, with major adaptations. Support is available: e.g. Easy-to-install version of OceanDocs DSpace. Other software packages (EPrints, Fedora, CDSWare) are also OAI-compliant and can be used by partners for their institutional repository. But the OceanDocs program can not give support for all these different software. 2 An institute who prefers not to set up his own repository can use the OceanDocs Central infrastructure to create their homepage for their institute and identify the major collections. It is always possible later on to copy/merge the collections and their documents to a local repository.other institutes are invited to set up their own repository which can be harvested by AVANO and integrated in OceanDocs Central. Therefore they have to be OAI-compliant and implement the OceanDocs standards as much as possible

5 - Capacity building Capacity building is necessary to support the development of the repository network technically and organizationally. The target group is the group of information managers and librarians. The idea of repositories for scientific publications is rather new. New ideas have to be introduced through an information and promotion campaign, not only on the level of the information services but also on the level of the institute management and directly to the researchers. o Training session of trainers (for Odin coordinators on IOC level) o Regional training sessions (By Odin coordinators in the Odin) o Development of training material (in OceanTeacher) The Institute of Marine Sciences experience: Development of electronic repository at IMS went through three phases. This was to make the whole process of document uploading smooth. The roles of each player i.e. information manager, scientists and the IMS management was defined. Phase I: Training and Identification of communities One person trained to man the e-repository, the training was held in Limburg, Hasselt, Belgium and the trained staff returned home and trained other members of staff so that they can populate the repository. Five communities were identified and are included in the repository these are Journal articles, Technical reports, IMS reports, Thesis and Conference papers Phase II: Working modalities Action Plan Copyright Issues Phase III: Mobilization and Sensitization of authors Seminars Brochures and leaflets Phase IV: Uploading of documents Advocacy Status of IMS Repository The collection process commenced rather slowly due to certain constraints faced within the local administration. There are however certain constraints that we are still facing. There is an insufficient of support from both scientists and management. Scientists are sometime hesitant to hand in their documents The collection process commenced rather slowly due to certain constraints faced within the local administration. There are however certain constraints that we are still facing. There is an insufficient of support from both scientists and management. Scientists are sometime hesitant to hand in their documents. Achievements Wide dissemination of IMS research finding Scientists get to know who is doing what Increase in citation index Enhanced access to journal articles published by other scientists in the region Increased research cooperation among scientists in the region Shortcomings Unwillingness by some of the scientists to submit journal articles for uploading onto the repository IMS Future Plans and Expectations Increase efforts on advocacy Include an Intellectual Property Right in the agreement signed by authors so that they are aware of their rights Persuade authors to consider more carefully the copyright agreements they sign and in addition to let them talk to their publishers about retaining rights.

6 Work with authors and encourage them to keep their own copy of the final version of their articles Conclusion The creation of an African repository for an institute and for each researcher is a very important task in the present world of scientific communication. Materials are permanently preserved and available. It has been proven that materials in an open access environment are cited more thus are of great importance to the visibility of scientific work of an individual, institution and hence an entire country. Information resources are expensive and demanding in terms of management, space and expertise. In line with this, the project offers the benefit of sharing the resources which is a cost-effective component in the provision of information. Librarians play a critical role in helping to facilitate the development of digital services by applying special acquired skills as well as making effective use of available resources. This presents an opportunity for librarians to move from the traditional services to new digital publishing technology. In a rapidly evolving electronic environment, collecting and preserving the African memory will surely add positive bonuses to the future generations of our continent. In all new initiatives there is an element of education, awareness, marketing and keeping in touch with new developments. In this context, it is essential that librarians get the motivation they deserve as they are the key partners in making the digital technology work. As an essential tool for research and development, IMS repository will enhance research in the field of marine sciences in Tanzania and Africa as a whole by: Minimize duplication of research activities by scientists working on the same subject or research problem because of not being aware that another scientists within the country has worked on the same problem. This will also save research funds from being given to two different scientists working on the same problem and probably be coming from the same institution; Increase hit counts on papers - personalised publications lists - citation analyses; Contribute to national and global initiatives which will ensure an international audience for Institution s latest research; Make institutional research more visible; Raise the profile of the Institution; Identify Institutions value to funding sources; Reference: Wilkinson, S.; Collins, J. Information in support of responsible fisheries and aquaculture. Guidelines on digital publishing: a practical approach for small organizations with limited resources. FAO/FishCode Review. No. 20. Rome, FAO p.