Online "open access" libraries of freely available scholarly articles are transforming academic publishing, writes Karlin Lillington

For decades, the world of scholarly journal publishing has been something of a closed book. The journals have tightly controlled the publishing system.

Most are expensive, in effect limiting access to articles to those institutions that can afford the subscriptions or the individuals with the budget to buy reprints.

But researchers and academics need the peer-reviewed journals to publish their work, on which grants and jobs often depend. They also need them as a resource, for following research and remaining on top of their disciplines.

For many, publication in a single renowned journal can establish a reputation. All hope their published work will in turn be cited by other researchers. Citations elevate the reputation of an individual and their institution - journal citations are even increasingly used to gauge a country's R&D output.

Enter publishing's version of the open source movement, the digital repository - online "open access" libraries of freely available scholarly articles by the researchers and faculty and, increasingly, graduate students within individual universities and institutions.

According to Niamh Brennan, research support system administrator at TCD Library, open access repositories are challenging and transforming the established publishing industry in much the same way as the open source movement has fundamentally changed the software industry. The move towards open access, starting about 2000, has paralleled the take-off of open source software and "it's linked very, very strongly to open source", she says.

Many digital repositories use open source programmes for managing the articles, images, theses and other items which find their way into such data stores, though there are some proprietary packages as well. Both TCD and UCD are using the open source archive management programme DSpace, implemented for them by Dublin company Enovation. HP and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) jointly developed the programme, says Gary Mahon, sales director at Enovation.

DSpace is freely available, which cuts costs for education and research institutions, usually operating on tight budgets. A key attraction is that such software uses open standards and isn't linked to licensing costs or required upgrades.

The programme allows a range of "metadata", or defining information, to be entered about any object stored in the database, says Gavin Henrick, service delivery manager at Enovation. The contents are then presented so that the objects can be easily picked up by search engines on the internet.

While open access repository development in Ireland has lagged countries like the United States and Britain, a new national initiative for Irish universities, complete with major funding, has changed the situation, says Rosalind Pan, head of electronic service development at UCD Library.

A three-year project to get Irish repositories online started last April, directed by the Irish Universities Association and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group. The goal is to have a national portal linking all the repositories.

Maynooth built the first repository and TCD is mid-roll-out, with UCD just starting. The University of Limerick is also creating a repository, with most Irish institutions expected to have one eventually.

The Government and the Higher Education Authority - which is funding the initiative - see such repositories as being in the national interest as the more available and searchable scholarly output from Ireland is, the higher the R&D profile for the State.

Journals initially saw the repositories as a threat, but that attitude has changed, says Brennan. While they do each have different strict rules on how articles, and which versions, can be made freely available, they recognise that their own visibility and reputation is increased by the "Google effect" of easy searchability and increased citations.

The challenge is to get academics and researchers to populate the repositories with their publications and other work, says SeáPhillips, head librarian at UCD. "It's the biggest of the problems in creating a repository. Changing academic patterns of behaviour is hard - what we're doing really is missionary work, talking to deans of research, spreading the word."

Buy-in from a head of department "had an incredible effect" at UCD, he says - if departments lead from the top, faculty will follow and notify the library of new material for the repository.

"We tell our researchers this is about maximising your effect on the web, and it's all legal," says Brennan. She cites a study that showed citations go up 25-250 per cent when papers are catalogued by the main search engines - a compelling argument for most faculties.

TCD already has more than 3,000 items in its repository but Brennan considers that only a start. At UCD, Pan says the library is at the development phase of a DSpace trial with the economics department. UCD is proceeding more slowly as it needs its repository to tie in to an internal management system of academic profiles, the national initiative and a pan-European economics project.

Over the next three months, the library will start to populate the database, says Phillips.

Like most professional librarians, Brennan is excited about the prospects for open access repositories and their ability to transform the research landscape for a wide array of institutions.

"We're all putting our heads together on the same issue: how can we best preserve our data."