the OdinAfrica e-Print Service
Research literature from Marine Science and
What
is OdinPubAfrica ?
ODINPubAFRICA is an e-repository of
publications in marine science and oceanography developed by Odinafrica and IOC.
The repository will cover ONLY content of African authors working in an marine
or oceanographic institution in
Goals of OdinPubAfrica
Make publications of marine science and oceanography
in Africa more easily and freely accessible to the
o Facilitate publishing of research findings by African scientists (e-journal as well as e-archive) thereby promoting African research and increasing access by African scientists to the international research forum.
o Archiving in a secure way the electronic version of the publications
OdinPubAfrica is a basically service for enabling researchers to deposit the full text of their works: articles, conference papers, technical reports, working papers, thesis and more. The information managers and librarians of the participating institutes will help the researchers in the submission of their publications.
OdinPubAfrica
is a new service to enhance scientific communication in marine science and
oceanography in
(*) Nearly 90% of the international scientific
journals accept the posting of the author’s version of an article on a personal
or institutional website even after it is accepted for publication. It is the
task of the information manager to control the publisher’s policy at http://romeo.eprints.org/.
Repositories:
A new way of access to scientific publications
In a few years time, thanks to the internet, international scientific journals are becoming electronic journals. At the same time the internet creates alternatives to these commercial scientific journals. Research institutes can set up their own journal. The open access journals are growing steadily. The Directory of Open Acces Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) contains 2145 titles.
Another way to enhance the accessibility of
scientific publications is the creation of a repository. Since the development
of a specific standard in 1999-2001, the OAI-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, 600 repositories were
created by universities and research centers all over the world. Most of these
repositories are institutional repositories. They contain the publication
output of universities like MIT,
In the field of
marine science and oceanography important collections are being created.
Examples:
Archimer,
Archive Institutionnelle de
l'Ifremer - http://www.ifremer.fr/docelec/
Woods Hole Open
Access Server - https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/
E-Prints Soton (
OdinPubAfrica is a
part of this innovative approach in scientific publishing. Other Odin groups
are interested in starting their own repository under the umbrella of IOC.
Specifically, an OdinCarsa repository will be started in 2006.
Other new projects
are announced. The most important is Aquatic Commons, a project of IAMSLIC. The
main goal is to create a search engine covering the collections of marine science
publications in repositories.
In the meantime, a few general search engines are already covering repository content. OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/) is a new search engine specifically devised for repositories and OAI-compliant websites. Google Scholar and Scirus also include repositories in their database. Major research databases like the Web of Science or ASFA still not include repositories in their data, but are already evaluating their importance for scientific communication. In the future, relevant repository documents will find their way in these databases.