MyOpenArchive – an Open Access repository

MyOpenArchive, founded in September 2007, is an international Non-Profit Organization that advocates Open Access for never-before-published research papers on the web and provides Self-Archiving platform to enable better knowledge sharing in a way that’s easy to publish. The following article is the courtesy of  Keita Bando,  Digital Repository Librarian and Coordinator for Scholarly Communication and is a source of OpenRepositories2011. You can also take a look at the poster version.

Open Access Week [1] indicated the potential of the Open Access Movement by reaching a large number of current users of Open Access Journals and Institutional Repositories (IRs). [2] The main focus of this study is to highlight the importance of self-archiving as a form of “iR” for individuals as opposed to IR for institutions. Thus, we focus on MyOpenArchive, [3] which has been developed through the efforts of several individuals. MyOpenArchive is an Open Access Repository for researchers who need to undertake selfarchiving. Within the first 3 years of its launch, MyOpenArchive has attracted 393 users and received 210 posts from individuals. First, we should note that different types of research have been archived using MyOpenArchive. Among these posts, as many as 95% are private studies (so-called gray literature). Moreover, 83% of these posts are licensed under a Creative Commons License. [4] Users of MyOpenArchive thus seem to understand the usefulness of the degital right management. Based on these facts, we can safely assume that iR can meet the demands of a large number of users who need open resources and licenses.

Introduction

MyOpenArchive was voluntarily created by a university staff member who wished to set up an iR for himself, because his institution did not have an IR at that time. The service since been developed through the efforts of three Japanese men who had initially no professional knowledge of IR inventory. Officially, 1,851 IRs have now been launched around the world. And Japan has 129/7% IRs,
which makes its academic repository the fourth largest in the world after those of the US (383/20%), UK (186/10%), and Germany (142/8%). [5] Japan has 125 university IRs [6]; which means that only 16% of Japanese universities (773) have their own IRs. [7] Given that 84% of Japanese universities do not have their own IRs, we can conclude that over 144,000 researchers at Japanese institutions still require access to the “green road”—namely, self-archiving. Therefore, we founded MyOpenArchive in September 2007. We have mainly drawn on the principles of Open Access Repository for individuals, especially researchers who lack the
assistance of institutions or library staff. Among the literature available on the web, we especially advocate the use of Open Access for gray literature, which has recently started to receive general acceptance as a term that refers to academic resources without repositories. Gray literature may Open Repository 2011 / Poster Session Proposal 2 include technical reports, conference papers, and theses, and can be defined as “documents that are difficult to access because they have not received large-scale publication or circulation”. Because they tend to be buried in personal stocks, we have paid special attention to the use of Open Access for gray literature through volunteer efforts, attendance at seminars [8], and organization of conferences [9] for researchers.

Initial Results

Within the first 3 years of its launch, MyOpenArchive have attracted 393 users and received 210 posts from individuals. Of the total posts on MyOpenArchive, 95% consist of gray literature. On the basis of these initial results, we can safely claim that the project has been a success. In the process, we have accumulated a vast variety of research including some “gray” materials such as faculty papers and final drafts. We have also claimed our success because a few related studies have been quoted, for instance, by some theses.
Finally, 83% of our users embraced Creative Commons License to post research. Users of MyOpenArchive therefore understand the usefulness of the degital right management. Besides, CC BY-NC [10] has been embraced by 50% of the posts. These results reveal increasing public awareness of the importance of a medium for sharing academic studies.

Conclusions

As mentioned above, we advocate MyOpenArchive as an iR for researchers with or without an IR. We promote MyOpenArchive because it has fulfilled researchers the potential needs of not only in Japan but also around the world. Its infrastructure and user experience can enhance and expand the global academic community. Believing in its importance, we further launched an English version of MyOpenArchive in November 2011. [11] Twitter, Facebook, and other social media API have been utilized to advertise it, as these social media are popular among researchers around the world. [12] Such advertisement has been basically carried out by volunteers because it is both cost- and timeeffective. We hope that this new method of self-archiving revolutionizes scholarly
communication although we also need to implement more initiatives to facilitate scholarly communication.

Reference
[1] Open Access Week http://openaccessweek.org/
[2] The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/12/2010-dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html
[3] MyOpenArchive http://season1.myopenarchive.org/toppage
[4] About the Licenses – Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
[5] OpenDOAR Chart – Proportion of Repositories by Country – Worldwide http://goo.gl/Sghcb
[6] NII Institutional Repositories Program | Current IRs http://www.nii.ac.jp/irp/en/list/
[7] Preliminary Report on School Basic Survey Summary of Results for FY2009: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (PDF:94KB) Open Repository 2011 / Poster Session Proposal 3
http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/other/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2009/08/06/1282571_1.pdf
[8] Asia: Open Access Day 2008 – OADhttp://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Asia:_Open_Access_Day_2008#National_Institute_of_Informatics.2C_Japan
[9] Asia: Open Access Week 2009 – OAD http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Asia:_Open_Access_Week_2009#Open_Access_.E2.80.9CFriday_.26_Night.E2.80.9D_2009
[10] Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported — CC BY-NC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
[11] MyOpenArchive launched New Digital Repository for Open Access | MyOpenArchive Blog
http://blog.myopenarchive.org/2011/01/23/myopenarchive-launched-new-digital-repository-foropen-
access/
[12] Social media: A guide for researchers | Research Information Network
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/social-media-guideresearchers

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