World landscape of repositories and repository networks: achievements, challenges, opportunities

Editor's Notes

1. Presentation by CLACSO, academic network of 616 social science research institutions in 47 countries, about the world landscape of repositories and regional repositories networks, its achievements and challenges, and the importance of open access being managed as a commons by the scholarly community. Introduction: A few years after the Web browser was generously released outside of CERN, open access gave the world, including us in developing regions, the possibility to access and share all kind of publications in regions where the cost of postal service to send a printed publication from one country to another is higher than printing the publication, where interlibrary loan is nearly non-existent and where subscriptions to journals are very scarce. Today, 25 years later, in Latin America, the region of the world where open access has the highest adoption rate, this transition to open access is managed and funded by the scholarly community as part of the cost of research, with no APCs, with no outsourcing to commercial publishers. With these results in our region we naively thought that this was a possible way forward also to build a collaborative worldwide OA system managed by the scholarly community. But our perception today is that open access is on sale, because open access became gold OA, and gold OA became APC OA. And several excellent platforms started by entrepreneurs with contents provided for free by academics and research money are now sold to one of the big for-profit companies whose business models where one of the main reasons why we all started the OA movement. Why would it be different this time? It is not clear to us, because commercialisation of open access, for little or big money, invites abuse. The good news of open access is that slowly but steadily over the past 15 years open access repositories and all kind of collaborative and cooperative platforms managed by the scholarly community have become increasingly important components when thinking of regional and global research infrastructures. In this presentation, after describing the landscape of repositories and main challenges, I will focus on three of the many challenges that need attention and action.
2. For those not familiar with repositories, they represent a distributed and participatory model of managing open access   
3. Even if 3 years old, this mashup of data from ROAR and OpenDOAR shows the location of 3.000 repositories
4. This is the current geographic distribution of repositories, it shows important presence in Europe, Asia, and North America.
5. With steady growth of repositories since 2007
6. Most repositories provide visibility and open access to all kinds of contents, not only journal articles, in support of research, education, open science and information needs of diverse audiences. Research data needs special metadata so repositories are slowly adapting to these contents and learning how to handle data
7. So we find many data repositories which are described in re3data.org, a global registry of 1859 research data repositories
8. This 2014 summary from Pinfield and other authors is still valid today. We have in the world a small number of very large repositories and a large number of small repositories. Early adoption in North America, Western Europe and Australasia, has been followed by development in other regions Africa and Central Asia have comparatively low levels of repository development 85% of repositories worldwide are institutional And 44% use Dspace Still high percentage of repositories do not yet define reuse policies for contents.
9. Today, open access interoperable repositories are managed by universities and other institutions, with a trend toward national and regional networking of repositories to align with open access policies and legislation. The Global Research Council, which gathers the heads of the resesearch councils and research funding agencies worlwide, in its 2013 Action Plan towards Open Access, states that “funding for the repository infrastructure needs to be regarded as essential capacity building. (and) there is a need to access the content across all repositories around the world”. For this to happen
10. COAR-Confederation of Open Access Repositories, is working together with Regional networks of repositories to build a worldwide collaborative and distributed infrastructure of repositories. The leading case in regional repositories is OpenAIRE in Europe that has a very robust repository landscape with about 45% percent of the world’s repositories. SHARE in North America, is a partnership between the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Center for Open Science (COS) that is building an aggregated, open data set of research outputs across their life cycle The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) is planning to develop an aggregator with Canadian repositories, and a federated research data repository. The Australasian Open Access Strategy Group, supported by eleven Australian and eight New Zealand Institutions, is listing repositories, and representing this area. Japan has an extremely well developed repository network. A joint activity by The Digital Repository Federation, the Japan Consortium for Open Access Repository and the Japanese Institutional Repositories Online cloud services for repositories with a centralized search service in all repositories for 2 M full-texts. In China repositories networking is supported by the China Institutional Repository Implementation Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences which contributes with a Repository Grid and the Confederation of China Academic Institutional Repository The Asia OA Forum sponsored by COAR gathers initiatives from countries in that region In Latin America, La Referencia is a federation of national networks of repositories from 9 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Peru). Its central harvester started with 1,5M OA full-texts No formal network of repositories in Africa yet, where nearly half of repositories are located in South Africa, where the National Research Foundation is very active promoting OA and will launch an African Open Science Platform. All these regional networks are participating in inter-regional networking initiatives promoted by COAR-Confederation of Open Access Repositories, working together to build next generation repositories and a worldwide collaborative and distributed infrastructure of repositories, adopting common approaches to policies, practices and technologies. Last month these regional initiatives have signed The Aligning Repository Networks International Accord promoted by The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). The aim of the accord is to foster greater cooperation between regional repository networks by identifying common principles and areas of collaboration that can lead to concrete actions and the development of global value added services. This will also contribute to the objectives of several international initivatives also by UNESCO and by the Global Research Council’s for strengthening open access repositories
11. Here we see where are located the 50 partner institutioins of OpenAIRE. With nearly 3 thousand data providers, OpenAIRE search facility provides open access to more than 20M open access publications of which 5M in full-text. Zenodo is a research data repository. It was created by OpenAIRE and CERN to provide a place for researchers to deposit datasets
12. It is difficult to assess the total volume of full-text open access items in the repositories around the world, however, aggregators as CORE (which aggregates more than 76 M open access article references, of which 8 M in full-text) and BASE (with more than 100 M open access references of which 44 M in full-text) are two examples of repository aggregators that provide the possibility to search across repositories
13. In addition to aligning institutional repositories, all these other different type of repositories can contribute to the global ecosystem of repositories. We have a full range of disciplinary repositories based on the United Nation cooperative information systems, eg in agriculture and health which are very rich sources of information from developing regions and are slowly adding open access full-texts to the bibliographic information And we have the more recent and user-friendly thematic preprint (based in the success of Arxiv) and also data repositories built with contents uploaded by individual researchers and institutions. For OA journals, the International Directory of OA and several journal portals as Latindex, SciELO, Redalyc and DIALNET for iberoamerican countries, Africa Journals Online, and many national and institutional collections of OA journals in OJS platforms. All these type of repositories have research and scholarly outputs
14. There are so many challenges for repositories to be more research-centric: from developing functionalities for ongoing publication of research outputs, improving visibility of repository contents in search engines, improving user interfaces, creating group experiences, developing peer-review and other overlay services, providing digital object level metrics I will refer to three of the many challenges repositories have, before Petr Knoth deals with the technological innovations and challenges, and Leslie Chan with the social interoperability and governance issues
15. Even with millions of full-text open access publications in repositories, the scholarly output in repositories is still low. To Increase research output in repositories and position them in the scholarly and research lyfecycle, we need policies and funding that support repositories
16. While institutional mandates are growing faster and have a role to play changing scholarly communications within institutions, funder and governmental mandates are more likely to have a greater impact in the way open access in repositories is implemented. There is a growing number of funding agencies adopting policies that rely on repository infrastructure. Examples are The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and The US federal government that requires agencies spending each year over $100 million in research to provide public access to research results, and two of the world largest medical-research charities, Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, in their open access policies require deposit in its own repository. Those are only examples.
17.  Research output gets published where it receives reward for promotion and tenure. Today promotion and tenure reward who publishes in high IF journals because the evaluation system is linked to journal indicators, a service provided by companies which have strong ties to the research evaluation systems. Using JIFs for research evaluation has been strongly critized by the DORA and Leiden declarations, and it also automatically excludes publications in journals not covered by WoS, whatever their impact on their fields or impact in solving local needs. This is particularly damaging for developing regions researchers. With a growing number of repositories for all kind of research and scholarly outputs one of COAR next generation repositories priority areas is to define and adopt reliable and interoperable impact metrics for repository content. This will contribute building links with evaluation systems. The fact that national funders, and also international funders as Wellcome and Gates Foundation are starting their repositories will accelerate innovation in the development of metrics and indicators based on repositories.
18.  During the lifecycle of research and scholarly work, digital objects are produced but only in journals we find a description of the review process used by the journal. For other scholarly outputs (working papers, preprints, conference presentations, monographs, books and book chapters, datasets) we can also, within the lifecycle of research and scholarly activities, inform if quality assessment has taken place, and describe the type of quality assessment of each research output so this data is available when metadata are produced, establishing trust in these collections of digital objects
19. Before I close this presentation, in this event where we are invited to share innovations, if we look back at the past 50 years of scholarly communications with strong presence of commercial publishers, one could consider innovative to think of scholarly communications being managed as a commons by the scholarly community, as a collaborative or cooperative enterprise, sharing costs to build a global ecosystem of scholarly communications, enabling stakeholders to regain some influence over the scholarly communication system. Ten years ago, Nobel Prize in economics Elinor Ostrom, published with MIT press her collective book on Understanding Knowledge as a Commons More recently the
20. Force11 Scholarly Commons WG issued the principles of scholarly commons. And repositories align with these principles As well as many scholarly cooperative and collaborative business models which are explored and implemented in the world
21. Another example of promoting knowledge and open access as a commons is the Latin American Council of Social Sciences-CLACSO, academic network of 616 social science research institutions in 47 countries, whose Working Group on Commons has a sub-group on open access managed by the scholarly community as a commons (coordinated by Eduardo Aguado-López, REDALYC-UAEM, México).
22. Last month the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network-OCSDNet issued its Manifesto for Open and Collaborative Science to enlable a knowledge commons governed and managed to address needs in each community as a pathway to sustainable development.
23. All these initiatives will help our repositories and platforms walk towards more inclusive open science and open access to meet not only global needs, but also local needs for sustainable development in all regions of the world