Open access and Institutional Repositories was the words of the day. Open access was not so new to me but the Institutional Repositories was a brand new word for me.
Open Access (OA)
Open Access is the free, immediate, permanent, full text online access to research and scholarly material for any user over the entire world at any time. Two ways of publishing Open Access material exist today. The green road and the gold road. It all depends on how the information is made available to be used in open access. An Open Access rainbow also helps to organize the various articles - take a look at this URL for a detailed layout of how the Open Access rainbow works. There are several benefits of Open access but also several challenges.
Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and spreading the intellectual output of an institution in a virtual form. Institutional Repositories includes articles, lectures, conference papers, digitized special collections, technical reports, data sets and many more. Images, Audio files and Audio-visual material is also included in Institutional Repositories. IR can be used to store learning material, manage knowledge, assess research, house digitized collections etc. Several impacts of Institutional Repositories have been recorded and legal issues are also addressed regularly due to the copyright on research material.
It is so interesting learning these new words and all the online functions that I never knew existed. Don't know if I will ever use all of them but some I will definitely try out.
Yes, a very relevant academic lecture we had. Some of the terminology used was also very new to me. One would think that the idea would be to share knowledge and by doing so empower other students/academics. Open Access is definitely the way to go by making this information available to all anywhere anytime.
ReplyDeleteInstitutional Repository, also very useful for academic institutions to have to ensure the legacy of thier academics lives on. The other good part about it as you mentioned is that different forms of media can be held in this repository.
It is true that we are learning new words and new technology as well. The only thing in this course, we have to practice a lot.
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