Date: July 8, 2009

Presenter: Sely M.S. Costa, University of Brasilia

• Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Science

• Chief Librarian, Central University Library, University of Brasilia-DF

Interests: scholarly communication, open access, electronic publishing, institutional repositories, organisation communication, and information science theory.

Abstract

Session Overview

Sely Costa PKP2009, with permission

Presentation:

Sely Costa Pkp2009

Powerpoint provided by Sely Costa

As Chief Librarian, she has started many projects to use a number of different programs to support research dissemination. Repositories now offer a simple step in the publishing process for librarians. The role of librarian has changed to become a more active participant in scholarly publication process. She works with journals, books, conferences, learning, articles, proceedings, and learning objects. They use OJS and have begun publishing. They have a project with a repository that is still in development. They have tested the use of OCS for conferences. It is under discussion for inclusion in the library system of Information Policies, Information Units and Information Services and Products. The draft of their Open Access policy is also under discussion.

PKP offers help in Conference Organizing and Proceedings, as well as e-books and e-journal publishing. They will update to the OJS Suite when it is possible. OCS has been used for both international and national conferences, has worked well and has been well received.

As librarian, her role is to highlight the new roles of these technologies. Librarians are major actors in the scholarly communication process. The University library is an essential element in the scholarly communication system.

They are the first academic library to be able to help others run conferences, etc. There is some resistance to OJS in Brazil, but the researchers at her university are in full support of it. Understanding the process makes all the difference. The activities done by the libraries now make them essential in the process.

Concluding Discussion and Questions:

(shared between Sely Costa, Brazil and the preceding workshop presenter Alberto Apollaro, Argentina)

1. <Question not heard> Sely: We are doing a project investigating over 700 uses of OJS use. People are not aware of the business models that need to be defined, nor are they aware of defining the strategic access policies to consider before creating a journal. You work with journals that already exist…but, who looks after this for CONICET? Sely: CONICET itself. We are thinking of using OJS to create journals from scratch, but we do not have clear policies of access and we need to define these policies. (See blogger’s Links of Interest near the bottom of the page)

2. (To Alberto Apollaro, Argentina ) Have you had 10 journals that have gone through the review process? Not yet. We are in the information stage with the journals. But there are journals interested in this? Yes. Comment from attendees: Libraries have lost a lot of their power, but with technologies, they are gaining new popularity. The universities are very fond of PKP software. I assume SciELO was a digital library and not a publishing agent. Sely: Yes. We think not all our publications will be in SciELO, so we need to create another collection. In the end, we need to create a bridge between SciELO and this website.

3. Sely, how do you work with your University Press, because it sounds like there could be some synergies there. (Answer summarized) We just changed our administrator. I offered to create a digital journal. He is concerned about losing subscribers. I need to talk to him about this. We have 6 or 7 African countries who speak Portugese, so if we can have these journals available for access, it is great for our university. We have Master’s dissertations that have had many, many downloads. I am a researcher and a librarian and I know what a researcher needs from the library. PKP has really helped me.

4. How do you see this playing out at other university libraries in Brazil? There are already some libraries doing it. I call myself the Open Access Evangelist. I feel so good that I have been able to influence people in my country.

Links of Interest:

CONICET is the Argentinian government agency established to organize and direct research that is publicly funded.

CONICET also has been listed on an open source portfolio (OSP) site, called OpenEd Practices, that uses SAKAI, an environment that complements the OSP software. No contributions appear from CONICET to date.

SciELO is a scientific, electronic, online library containing selected Brazilian journals.