So, our five day countdown of UTAS Library’s favourite Open Access initiatives draws to a close.

For the last day, we’ve chose to highlight Flickr Commons, a nice way to finish the week, by browsing through a fascinating collection of thousands of images from the world’s great libraries and museums, all of which are available under creative commons licensing.

This image titled Hobart, Tasmania is from the collection of Oregon State University, available through Flickr Commons.

As well as browsing through these amazing images, you can contribute by ‘tagging’ images and adding comments if you know more about the image and want to share it.

Access Flickr Commons here: http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Also, please share your favourite Open Access initiatives in the comments of this week’s posts, there are so many amazing things going on with Open Acess, it has been hard to narrow down the choices.

Open Access to Research Data is an area that doesn’t always get as much attention as other areas where Open Access is having an impact. This is partly because the data that is available is limited, and it is generally of interest only to specialists in the field. But, it is important and has the potential to have a huge, positive impact. One of the major benefits to sharing research data is to allow it to be repurposed.

Typically resarch projects have a specific focus and will generate data that may be of interest to other researchers but if this is not made available, research efforts may be duplicated. If researchers can access datasets they can use this data to assist in their own efforts. Open Access to reserach data also allows critique of research findings, which cna be important where interpretation of data can be important. In medical research the re-use of data has the potential to be an important tool for researchers, to avoid duplication of effort and to strengthen research outcomes.

IMOS, the Integrated Marine Observation System generates huge amounts of data about ocean systems. The image below is from the IMOS Ocean Portal website, which allows you to access data from around the world from various datasets just by clicking on the icons representing locations of sensors. Click the image to access the service. IMOS is a UTAS led collaborative research effort funded by the Australian Government.

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is building a research data commons service which will be a portal for openly available data for Australian research.

Historically, it has been hard to get copies of theses produced by Masters and PhD candidates. Generally only a few copies were printed and bound,  and they were kept under lock and key at the university where they were produced. Sometimes they were published, or small parts of them were adapted to conference papers of journal articles and made available.

Increasingly however the research output of Universities is becoming publicly available and this includes theses. When it costs close to nothing to distribute an electronic copy and you’re wanting to share your research with the world it makes sense to make your thesis available for free.

At UTAS the policy is that a thesis must be submitted electronically and it will be available for open access unless there is a good reason for it to be kept under a two year embargo, for instance if the author wanted to commercialise their research or was going to publish it. As with published research there are lots of advantages to making a thesis available openly, you’re more likely to have people read it and use the work and this will improve your reputation as a researcher.

There’s more information about accessing theses from Australia and around the world on the UTAS Library Theses Subject Guide: http://utas.libguides.com/theses

Our second item in the Open Access Week countdown is our very own ePrints repository.

UTAS ePrints hold a great variety of content, from theses and scholarly articles to historical photographs and letters in digital form. Universities around the world are increasingly making content openly available through digital repositories, there are advantages for authors and universities in having their articles or theses more widely available, and obvious benefits to anybody interested in reading them.

Here is a top five list of the most downloaded items from UTAS ePrints (click the link to see the record for that item):

1. Download of Psychiatry, a text book, with 423, 366 downloads! By far the most downloads in ePrints.
2. A Quarterly Publication of the Australian Association of Glass Artists, the publication of a specialist society, with 28, 662 downloads.
3. Photographs of Quaker bonnets belonging to Sarah Benson Walker 1812-1893, images of historical interest, has been downloaded 22, 471 times.
4. Lewis (W.L.) May (1861-1925) is a collection of paintings by William Lewis May, who among other things painted Tasmanian wild flowers. This page has had  19, 446 downloads.

These first four may benefit from the fact that they are multi-part works, so somebody will likely download more than one part, and increase the statistics, but even so, those are impressive numbers.

5. Teenage Pregnancy : An Adolescent Health Issue in Australia is an article from a nursing journal which has been downloaded 16, 329 times so far.  This is a huge number for any journal article, and must be far more than would have read it if it was only available through the journal subscription.

The benefits to authors of having their research published more widely include increased citations and better sharing of their work. For the public it means that publicly funded research is available for those who funded it, and for libraries it means that more content can be made available to staff and students without extra cost.

UTAS ePrints is ranked 157^th in the world for institutional repositories, accordig to the Ranking Web of World Repositories, which is not bad considering that UTAS usually ranks between 300-500 in most international university rankings.

Next week is International Open Access Week, “…an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. ”

UTAS Library will be publishing a five day countdown of our favourite Open Access initiatives, from Australia and around the world, here on the Library News Blog.

If you’d like to know more about what Open Access is all about, click on the banner image above to visit the Open Access Week website, or type www.openaccessweek.org into your web browser.

The Library recently announced the trial of a new service called Summon, to allow quick and easy searching across almost all of our resources, print and electronic.

As a result of feedback from staff and students, Summon will now take a more prominent position on the library website. We have modified the library homepage to allow clients to search using either Summon or the traditional catalogue through a single search box. Summon is the default search, but if you prefer the old catalogue search, click on the Library Catalogue tab.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback through the trial of Summon.

If you do have any problems with Summon please check out the known issues at http://www.library.utas.edu.au/home/known-issues-with-summon/ or send feedback using the feedback link.