Open University : The Role of the University Library and the Shifting in Scholarly Communication Paradigm
Abstract
Establishment of the so-called Open University, i.e. the open access to the results of R&D is a key aspect to increase the transparency of the university environment, to increase the prestige and reputation and competitiveness of the institution as well as of all individual researchers in domestic and international environment. The scenario of the Open University development is built upon the institutional repository (IR) as the key platform for communicating scholarly information.
The Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) appoints the Central Library to take the coordinating role in the repository establishment and in all related activities. The long-term goal of the open access initiative at the CTU is to integrate the already existing IR software platform into the information structure of the university and into the everyday information work flow - the interconnection of individual components of the university information system with the IR.
The particular steps, which are necessary to take, include the detailed analyses of publishers' policies towards Open Access (OA), and analyses of publication outputs of CTU researchers in green and gold OA. Knowing these results, CTU then contacts authors and CTU journal editors who are allowed to self-archive a copy of their paper to form a basic set of data in the IR and lead the university OA campaign.
On top of these activities and in close cooperation with IT department, a software solution is being prepared to connect individual components of the information system and the IR in order to establish automatic data flow into the IR. The future job for the library is to implement further value-added elements to the IR (e.g. automatic data control against DOAJ, Sherpa/RoMEO, etc.) and to prepare university rules for the data and full text input into the information system.