Analysis & Policy Observatory (more commonly known as APO) is a not-for-profit open access repository or digital library, specialising in public policy grey literature, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, with some coverage of other countries. Formerly known as Australian Policy Online, the organisation underwent a name change to Analysis & Policy Observatory (APO) in 2017.
APO was established in 2002 at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. It was intended as a way to collate and disseminate academic research reports and other grey literature that was increasingly proliferating online. It has since established itself as a notable resource for people involved in policy research in Australia and New Zealand. [1] APO is a not-for-profit organisation supported by partnerships with academic institutions and government agencies, and advertising and services revenue. [2] APO has also been awarded a number of Australian Research Council grants. In late 2023 APO was closed at Swinburne University and reopened at the Susan McKinnon Foundation [3] in January 2024.
APO was established to address the transformation of production for publications brought about by the internet. Frustrations with the limitations of the academic publishing system – long delays, lack of access or a limited audience – were causing producers of academic and other content to move online and increasingly produce grey literature (informally published material, such as reports, that may be difficult to trace via conventional channels). The informal channels used to disseminate digital grey literature have meant that libraries and other services have only been able to collect it in an ad hoc manner. APO aims to make digital research content that is relevant to Australian policy debates more easily accessible and usable to promote more evidence-informed decision-making. [4]
APO specialises in cataloguing grey literature on public policy from academic research centres, think tanks, government and non-government organisations. As well as research, the site includes a smaller collection of opinion and commentary pieces, video, audio and web resources focused on policy issues. [5] APO's open access digital repository is searchable and APO provides a free email newsletter service that notifies subscribers of the latest additions to the repository.
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal process to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable in the long term. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the United States Department of Education.
Grey literature is materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports, working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organizations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.
The European University Institute (EUI) is an international postgraduate and post-doctoral research-intensive university and an intergovernmental organisation with juridical personality, established by its founding member states to contribute to cultural and scientific development in the social sciences, in a European perspective. Its main campus is located in the hills above Florence in Fiesole, Italy.
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
The Systemic Infrastructure Initiative was announced by the Government of Australia in January 2001 as part of Backing Australia's Ability – An Innovation Action Plan for the Future.
Research data archiving is the long-term storage of scholarly research data, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and life sciences. The various academic journals have differing policies regarding how much of their data and methods researchers are required to store in a public archive, and what is actually archived varies widely between different disciplines. Similarly, the major grant-giving institutions have varying attitudes towards public archival of data. In general, the tradition of science has been for publications to contain sufficient information to allow fellow researchers to replicate and therefore test the research. In recent years this approach has become increasingly strained as research in some areas depends on large datasets which cannot easily be replicated independently.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose." Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
A digital library is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.
GreyNet International, the Grey Literature Network Service, is an independent organization founded in 1992. It is dedicated to research, publication, open acess, education, and bringing public awareness to grey literature. Grey literature is often defined as "Information produced and distributed on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body."
An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) was an Australian research centre that undertook research in media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, law, education, economics, business technology, and information technology, related to the creative economy, between 2005 and 2013.
The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies is a public health observatory established through an intergovernmental partnership, hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, which specialises in the development of health systems within Europe.
Open access (OA) to academic publications has seen extensive growth in Australia since the first open access university repository was established in 2001 and OA is a fundamental part of the scholarly publishing and research landscape in Australia. There are open access policies at the two major research funders: The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) and around half of Australian Universities have an OA policy or statement. Open Access Australasia, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) are advocates for Open Access and related issues in Australia.
The Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) is an international non-governmental institution, created in 1967 from an initiative of UNESCO, an institution in which it has Associative status. Currently, it brings together 680 research centers and postgraduate programs in various fields of the social sciences and humanities, located in 51 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in the United States, Africa and Europe. Its headquarters are in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The current executive secretary of the organization is Karina Batthyány.