Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This report offers a quick environmental scan of the repository landscape and then focuses on disciplinary repositories—those subject-based, often researcher-initiated loci for research information.

Written by Senior Program Officer Ricky Erway, Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories is intended to help librarians support researchers in accessing and disseminating research information. The report includes profiles of seven repositories with a focus on their varied business models. It concludes with a discussion of sustainability, including funding models, factors that contribute to a repository's success, and ways to bring in additional revenue.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Simons Foundation, which is based in New York City, has provided a $60,000 planning grant to support the development of a governance model that will guide the online repository's transition from interim to long-term governance. . . .

arXiv—a free scientific repository of research in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines—allows scientists to share their research before publication. The repository now boasts 700,000 "preprint" articles, a million downloads a week and hundreds of thousands of contributors.

The work proposed in the planning grant has already begun, and it will continue through April 2012. The grant supports multiple goals:

• Developing a set of arXiv operating principles and seeking input from key stakeholders;
• Refining the institutional fee model and revenue projection;
• Delineating a governance model and bylaws that clearly define roles and responsibilities for the Library and its partners; and
• Establishing an initial governing board that reflects the financial contribution levels of major stakeholders and the scientific community.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

On arXiv, we have seen some of the unintended effects of an entire global research community ingesting the same information from the same interface on a daily basis. The order in which new preprint submissions are displayed in the daily alert, if only for a single day, strongly affects the readership on that day and leaves a measurable trace in the citation record fully six years later.

| Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

It has been 15 months since we announced the collaborative arXiv business model. As we reported in our previous update, for 2010 we were pleased to receive support from 123 institutions, totaling to $360,000 in contributions and representing 11 countries. We are encouraged with the contributions for 2011 as we already have support from 101 institutions, totaling to $275,000 in pledges from 8 countries.

We are grateful for the coordinated international support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Collections in the UK, SPARC-Japan, German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), Helmholtz-Alliance Physics (Germany), and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF). We are currently contacting additional international library consortia for their possible leadership in coordinating support within some other countries. . . .

As part of our sustainability planning, we took a critical look at arXiv's technology infrastructure and prepared a high-level plan, which includes a major change to the discovery and access component of the platform. After having the proposal reviewed by four external colleagues with expertise in repository architectures, we decided to implement Invenio as the basis of a new display and access system. The move to Invenio will facilitate improved collaboration with our partners at NASA ADS and INSPIRE, and reduce the maintenance burden of in-house code. We anticipate the transition, which will include a number of user interface enhancements, to be completed by mid-2012. . . .

In collaboration with the NSF Data Conservancy project we have launched a pilot data upload interface for data associated with arXiv articles. Submission is unified through small extensions to arXiv's submission interface. While the article is announced and stored on arXiv, data is automatically deposited in the Data Conservancy repository and linked from the article (see http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy for more information). This is a pilot project, which will be re-evaluated in collaboration with the Data Conservancy by the end of this year.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has announced it will host a new discussion forum dedicated to the unique needs of the subject-based digital repository community. As repositories continue to grow as an engine for driving Open Access worldwide, new challenges and opportunities emerge and the demand for more focused conversations grows.

The SPARC Subject Repositories Forum ("SPARC-SR") will enable subject repository managers, both inside and outside libraries, to share procedures and best practices, discuss possible joint projects, and support each other in providing access to an important realm of scholarly literature. The email discussion list will aim to build on the momentum of recent meetings – including SPARC’s digital repositories meeting as well as those focused on subject repositories – and will be the first formal electronic platform for subject repository advocates to collaborate. The founders and community managers of the forum include:

• Jessica Adamick, Ethics Clearinghouse Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• Julie Kelly, librarian at the University of Minnesota and a coordinator of AgEcon Search, a repository for agricultural and applied economics.
• Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Science Librarian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Project Manager for InterNano, an information portal and subject repository for nanomanufacturing.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

RePEc has reached over the last week-end a historic mark: one million works in Economics and neighboring sciences are now indexed, of which 87.5% are available for download. The bibliographic database is comprised by 59.2% of journal articles, 38.5% of working papers, 1.3% of book chapters, 0.8% of books, and 0.2% of software components. All this material has been indexed by volunteers maintaining close to 1300 archives.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

2010 is our 16th year and it is off to a great start. Our eLibrary (http://ssrn.com/search) has delivered over 37.4 million downloads to date and grown to 290,000 documents and 138,000 authors—increases over the last year of 53,000 and 22,000 respectively. Our CiteReader technology, developed with ITX Corp, has captured over 6 million references, 5.7 million footnotes, and close to 3.9 million citation links.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The PEER Behavioural Research Team from Loughborough University (Department of Information Science & LISU) has completed its behavioural baseline report, which is based on an electronic survey of authors (and authors as users) with more than 3000 European researchers and a series of focus groups covering the Medical sciences; Social sciences, humanities & arts; Life sciences; and Physical sciences & mathematics. The objectives of the Behavioural Research within PEER are to:

• Track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour in the context of so called Green Open Access.
• Understand the role repositories play for authors in the context of journal publishing.
• Understand the role repositories play for users in context of accessing journal articles.

The baseline report outlines findings from the first phase of the research and identifies the key themes to emerge. It also identifies priorities for further analysis and future work. Some interesting points to emerge from the first phase of research that may be of interest to a number of stakeholders in the scholarly communication system include:

• An individual's attitude towards open access repositories may change dependant on whether they are an author or a reader; readers being interested in the quality of the articles but authors also focused on the reputation of the repository itself
• Reaching the target audience is the overwhelming motivation for scholars to disseminate their research results and this strongly influences their choice of journal and/or repository
• Researchers in certain disciplines may lack confidence in making preprints available, and to some extent this is not only a matter of confidence in the quality of a text but also due to differences in work organisation across research cultures (e.g. strong internal peer review of manuscripts versus reliance on journals for peer review). Other factors are likely to include career stage and centrality of research to the parent discipline
• Value-added services, such as download statistics and alert services, would contribute to the perceived usefulness of repositories and could help them gain popularity in what is an increasingly competitive information landscape
• Readers often need to go through a variety of processes to access all the articles that they require and widespread open access may reduce the need for this time consuming practice.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv.

"Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution's resources," said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list."

The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions, and most of the top 25 have already committed to helping arXiv.

Institutions that have already pledged support include:

• California Institute of Technology
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Cambridge (UK)
• CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland)
• CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
• Columbia University
• DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany)
• Durham University (UK)
• ETH Zurich – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland)
• Fermilab
• Harvard University
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Imperial College London (UK)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Max Planck Society (Germany)
• University of Michigan
• University of Oxford (UK)
• University of Pennsylvania
• Princeton University
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Texas A&M University . . .

The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university's collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv's original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.

Here's an excerpt from the grant award :

This project proposes to investigate and implement a variety of tools for enhancing the very widely used and popular Arxiv.org infrastructure, based on information filters for assisted service discovery and selection, text-mining, information genealogy, automated classification and identification of composite resources, data-mining, usage analyses, matching and ranking heuristics, support for next-generation document formats, and semantic markup.

Read more about it at "Stimulus Grant to Enhance arXiv E-Preprints for Scientists."

Here's an excerpt:

Four types of publication repository may be distinguished, namely the subject-based repository, research repository, national repository system and institutional repository.

Two important shifts in the role of repositories may be noted. With regard to content, a well-defined and high quality corpus is essential. This implies that repository services are likely to be most successful when constructed with the user and reader uppermost in mind. With regard to service, high value to specific scholarly communities is essential. This implies that repositories are likely to be most useful to scholars when they offer dedicated services supporting the production of new knowledge.

Along these lines, challenges and barriers to repository development may be identified in three key dimensions: a) identification and deposit of content; b) access and use of services; and c) preservation of content and sustainability of service. An indicative comparison of challenges and barriers in some major world regions such as Europe, North America and East Asia plus Australia is offered in conclusion.

Here's the abstract:

By combining data from the text, citation, and reference databases with data from the ADS readership logs we have been able to create Second Order Bibliometric Operators, a customizable class of collaborative filters which permits substantially improved accuracy in literature queries. Using the ADS usage logs along with membership statistics from the International Astronomical Union and data on the population and gross domestic product (GDP) we develop an accurate model for world-wide basic research where the number of scientists in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, and the amount of basic research done by a country is proportional to the number of scientists in that country times that country's per capita GDP.

We introduce the concept of utility time to measure the impact of the ADS/URANIA and the electronic astronomical library on astronomical research. We find that in 2002 it amounted to the equivalent of 736 FTE researchers, or $250 Million, or the astronomical research done in France. Subject headings: digital libraries; bibliometrics; sociology of science; information retrieval

Here's an excerpt:

Summary: The total number of articles published in the 4-month interval (April 7 to August 7, 2008) and contributed to PMC was 23960. The four subtypes of articles in PMC, and their estimated proportions during this 4-month interval, are: 1) Author manuscripts that are publicly accessible (7346/23960=30.7%); 2) Articles that are embargoed (378/23960=1.6%); 3) Articles that are Libre OA (3635/23960=15.2%); 4) Other articles that are publicly accessible, via Gratis OA (12601/23960=52.5%). These proportions are probably not very different for the subset of NIH-supported articles, if it's assumed that, during this 4-month interval, about 50-60% of the articles contributed to PMC were NIH-supported.

Here's an excerpt:

arXiv.org mediates contact with the literature for entire scholarly communities, both through provision of archival access and through daily email and web announcements of new materials, potentially many screenlengths long. We confirm and extend a surprising correlation between article position in these initial announcements, ordered by submission time, and later citation impact, due primarily to intentional "self-promotion" on the part of authors. A pure "visibility" effect was also present: the subset of articles accidentally in early positions fared measurably better in the long-term citation record than those lower down. Astrophysics articles announced in position 1, for example, overall received a median number of citations 83% higher, while those there accidentally had a 44% visibility boost. For two large subcommunities of theoretical high energy physics, hep-th and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 had median numbers of citations 50% and 100% larger than for positions 5-15, and the subsets there accidentally had visibility boosts of 38% and 71%.

We also consider the positional effects on early readership. The median numbers of early full text downloads for astro-ph, hep-th, and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 were 82%, 61%, and 58% higher than for lower positions, respectively, and those there accidentally had medians visibility-boosted by 53%, 44%, and 46%. Finally, we correlate a variety of readership features with long-term citations, using machine learning methods, thereby extending previous results on the predictive power of early readership in a broader context. We conclude with some observations on impact metrics and dangers of recommender mechanisms.

Here's an excerpt:

The Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) project developed the mechanisms that could support both a new on-line Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open-Access Repository for documents related to the meteorological sciences. The project had three fundamental aims:

• Creation of overlay journal mechanics.
• Creation of an open access subject based repository for Meteorology and atmospheric sciences.
• Construction and evaluation of business models for potential overlay journals. . . .

• The proposal for the Journal of Meteorological Data is that it would be an on-line, peer-reviewed data journal. It would extend the scientific discipline of peer review to data, providing recognition for the work of creating data. The rigorous, but manageable, standards for metadata and documentation prescribed will facilitate re-use of the data, encourage appropriate application of the data to scientific problems and enable experiments to be repeated. A review process was proposed which encompasses three elements: a data description document, metadata and the data themselves. All three elements would be reviewed, but citation would be of the text article

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