Analytical study of open access health and medical repositories
| Pages | 419-434 |
| Date | 06 June 2016 |
| Published date | 06 June 2016 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-01-2015-0012 |
| Author | Fayaz Ahmad Loan,Shueb Sheikh |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Analytical study of open access
health and medical repositories
Fayaz Ahmad Loan
Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir,
Srinagar, India, and
Shueb Sheikh
Central Library, Central University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India
Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to assess open access (OA) repositories in the eld of the health and
medicine (H&M) available in the Directory of the Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) by analysing
their various facets like geographical distribution, language diversity, collection size, content types,
operational status, interoperability, updating policy and software used for content management.
Design/methodology/approach – To achieve the objectives of the study, the OpenDOAR was
selected as a source for identifying the H&M repositories. The required data were manually collected
from 1 to 30 April 2014 and analysed using various quantitative techniques to reveal the ndings.
Findings – The results reveal that the OpenDOAR lists 254 repositories in the eld of the H&M
contributed by the 62 countries of the world, topped by the USA (15.4 per cent), followed by Japan (7.9
per cent) and the UK (7.5 per cent). The majority of the repositories are institutional (187, 73.6 per cent)
in nature, having less than 5,000 items (161, 63.4 per cent) in the collection and mostly consisting of
articles (76.0 per cent), theses (49.6 per cent), unpublished documents (33.1 per cent) and books (31.9 per
cent). The linguistic assessment shows that the majority of the H&M repositories accept content written
in English language (71.3 per cent), followed by Spanish (16.1 per cent) and Japanese (7.5 per cent). The
updating policy of these repositories is not up to the mark, as only 67.0 per cent of the H&M repositories
have been updated from 2008-2012, but the majority are still operational (91.7 per cent) and are
compatible (67.3 per cent) with the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH). About 30 software brands, both commercial and open source, have been used by
administrators for creating these repositories and managing their content. DSpace is the most popular
software used by 88 (34.7 per cent) repositories, followed by EPrints (43, 16.9 per cent) and Digital
Commons (18, 7.1 per cent).
Research limitations/implications – The scope of this study is limited to the health and medical
repositories listed in OpenDOAR, and hence the generalisation is to be cautioned.
Practical implications – This study is useful for library and information professionals and health
and medical professionals across the globe.
Originality/value – This study is the rst attempt to analyse the health and medical repositories in
OA sites.
Keywords Open access, Health and medicine, Digital archives, Digital repositories,
Medical information systems
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Brand (1987) stated that “Information wants to be free”, and Falk (2003) reported that
virtually all scholars want free online access to the full text of information resources.
Traditional publishing models have prevented information from being freely available;
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
Health and
medical
repositories
419
Received 19 January 2015
Revised 20 April 2015
Accepted 10 June 2015
TheElectronic Library
Vol.34 No. 3, 2016
pp.419-434
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-01-2015-0012
however, with the development of open access (OA), more information is becoming
freely available. OA has literally opened doors to scholarly information. The basic aim
of OA is to make the intellectual output of researchers and their institutions more visible,
accessible, harvestable, searchable and useable by any user. OA provides a barrier-free
platform for accessing recorded knowledge. Although OA has been dened from
different perspectives by different authors, they all stress that it provides a barrier-free
access to scholarly content.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) described OA as:
[…] literature, freely available on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download,
copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing,
pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without nancial,
legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet
itself (Suber, 2013).
OA to scientic and medical literature allows anyone, anywhere, with a connection to
the internet to nd and read published research articles online, and to use their contents
in the course of scholarship, teaching and personal inquiry (Public Library of Science,
2003). Presently, OA is a global endeavour to provide free online access to the scholarly
research output in any form, format and language. It is a global platform for sharing
research output freely from the east to the west, to the north and to the south (Fayaz and
Rather, 2007).
There are two primary roads to OA: the “golden” road (publish in an OA journal) and
the “green” road (publish in a non-OA journal and also self-archive in an OA repository
[OAR]) (Harnad et al., 2004). OA digital repositories (green road) have attracted great
attention from academic and research communities worldwide over the past several
years. According to Hayes (2005), “A digital repository is where digital contents and
assets are stored and can be searched and retrieved for later use”. The term “digital
repository” represents an online archive of digital information which makes its contents
freely and immediately available to information seekers without any restrictions. OARs
have been created by almost all the leading academic institutes, research centres,
government agencies, industrial organisations, documentation centres, libraries and
information networks. Mellon (2006) identied various types of repositories, including
institutional, government, disciplinary, publisher, document-specic and personal.
Institutional repositories, administered by universities or research institutes for
members of their community, are the fastest growing form of OA archives (Chan and
Costa, 2005).
To monitor the mushrooming growth of OARs across disciplines worldwide, the
Registry of Open Access Repositories was developed by Tim Brody at the University of
Southampton (UK), while the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) was
initiated by the University of Nottingham (UK). The OpenDOAR is an authoritative
directory of OARs, presently having over 2,600 repositories. This service has been
awarded the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly
Communications, as it maintains a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional-
and subject-based repositories. It also encompasses archives set up by funding agencies,
such as the National Institutes of Health (USA) and the Wellcome Trust (UK and
Europe). Funding agencies include the Open Society Institute (OSI); Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC); Consortium of Research Libraries; and SPARC Europe, an
alliance of European research libraries, library organisations and research institutions
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