Polar information sources : shining stars or black holes in the global open access network?

Abstract

Open repositories holding scholarly documents are increasingly used for dissemination. These repositories commonly comply with the OAI-PMH standard, making it possible to automatically harvest the repositories, and build discovery services on top of scholarly repositories throughout the world. This is what Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) has done. In BASE, any record is easily searched and discovered, irrespective of how small or remotely located the repository is where the document is archived. High North Research Documents (HNRD) is an overlay service of BASE. The entire set of more than 100 million metadata records in BASE is subject to a filtering process, returning more than 700 000 records with relevance to the polar regions. We have analyzed the sources harvested by BASE, and the sources present in our HNRD service. This shows us from where the polar related scholarly outputs originates. Our analysis also reveals institution and regions that are more poorly represented in HNRD, compared to what should be expected. We believe there are several very interesting sources not following OAI-PMH and thus not present in BASE nor in HNRD. We invite PLC members to join us in an international cooperation to identify sources that are still not harvestable and thus not part of the global OA network. The next move would be to guide these sources and their mother institutions to migrate their sources to OAI-PMH enabled platforms. We further call on PLC members to cooperate in improving the dissemination, accessibility and discovery of polar related information through repositories.