Open Knowledge Repository

Last updated

The Open Knowledge Repository is the official open-access repository of the World Bank and features research content about development. [1] It was launched in 2012, [1] alongside the World Bank's Open Access Policy and its adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for all research and knowledge products that it publishes, which collectively made the World Bank the first international organization to completely embrace open access. [2] [3] [4] The repository collects the intellectual output of the World Bank in digital form, disseminates it, and preserves it long-term. [2] [5]

Contents

Contents

The Open Knowledge Repository features books, reports, serials, technical papers, working papers, and work studies. [2] [6] Among its contents are World Bank Group Annual Reports and Independent Evaluation Studies, books published by the World Bank Group, World Development Reports , and articles published in the journals World Bank Economic Review and World Bank Research Observer. [1] [5] [6] The repository also receives articles by World Bank researchers published by third-party publishers as part of the World Bank's Open Access Policy, which allows such articles to be embargoed but discourages publishers from the practice. [7]

The Open Knowledge Repository is regularly updated. [6] At its launch in April 2012, it held over 2,000 documents. [4] By August 2013, the repository held over 12,000 publications, mostly in English. [2] As of October 2021, the repository contains over 32,000 publications. [8]

Purpose

The goal of the Open Knowledge Repository is to support innovation and allow anyone to turn the intellectual output of the World Bank "into solutions to development problems that will help improve the lives of poor people around the world". [7] World Bank Group senior publishing officer José De Buerba described it as endeavoring "to be the world’s most complete research and knowledge repository related to international development". [3] The repository was designed to serve a wide variety of users, including governments, civil society organizations, students, and the general public. [9]

Use

In its first two months of its existence, the Open Knowledge Repository accumulated 325,000 page views and 50,000 downloads. [10] Between its launch in 2012 and August 2013, there were over 1.8 million downloads from the repository, 45% of which were from developing countries. At the time, China, India, and Vietnam were three of the top five countries by number of downloads, while 12 of the top 20 countries by downloads were developing countries. [2] By April 2015, there had been over 6.3 million cumulative downloads, over 50% of which originated in the developing world. [3] As of October 2021, over 70 million files had been downloaded from the repository. [11]

Through its use of Altmetrics, the Open Knowledge Repository has determined that, as of April 2015, its content had been used over 42,000 times in policy documents, by the press, in blogs and on social media, and on Wikipedia. [3]

Technical details

The Open Knowledge Repository is built on the open-source platform DSpace. It complies with Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) standards and its metadata is exposed by the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). [1] [2] [9] In the words of Diane Peters, the repository's adherence to DCMI and OAI-PMH demonstrate it was "built with an eye toward maximizing interoperability, discoverability, and reusability". [4] Among its features are publicly available usage statistics, custom OAI metadata fields, author profiles, citation information for every work, and links to citations on Google Scholar and Scopus. [2] [3] The repository is also fully interoperable with other major repositories, such as Economists Online, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). [4]

Most content on the Open Knowledge Repository is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. [1] The repository's user interface is available in English, French, and Spanish. [1] [9] English was initially the only language offered, [2] but French and Spanish were added in 2016. [3] In January 2014, the repository's website was relaunched with a new responsive web design, enabling better access on mobile devices. The relaunch also enhanced the site's search capabilities, recommendations for related titles, and author profiles. [12]

Awards and recognition

The Open Knowledge Repository was honored as a SPARC Innovator in June 2012 by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and named one of the Best Free Reference Web Sites for 2013 by the American Library Association. [2] [10] Creative Commons called the OKR "one of the most important hubs for economic scholarship in the world". [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dublin Core</span> Standardized set of metadata elements

The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen main metadata items for describing digital or physical resources. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for formulating the Dublin Core; DCMI is a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a non-profit organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Archives Initiative</span>

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata). The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content to allow people harvest metadata. Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders As a result Academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fedora Commons</span>

Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) content repository architecture upon which institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital library systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application. It is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility are best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules.

ScientificCommons was a project of the University of St. Gallen Institute for Media and Communications Management. The major aim of the project was to develop the world’s largest archive of scientific knowledge with fulltexts freely accessible to the public. The project was closed down in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public Knowledge Project</span> Metadata reservation project for e-journals

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASE (search engine)</span> Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

Nature Precedings was an open access electronic preprint repository of scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences. It ceased accepting new submissions as of April 3, 2012.

EPrints is a free and open-source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It shares many of the features commonly seen in document management systems, but is primarily used for institutional repositories and scientific journals. EPrints has been developed at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science and released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license.

The Redalyc project is a bibliographic database and a digital library of Open Access journals, supported by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México with the help of numerous other higher education institutions and information systems.

PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is the de facto digital preservation metadata standard.

The Agrega project is a federation of learning Digital repository which is to be used by 19 educational authorities in Spain. Each educational authority will have its own repository loaded with curricular learning objects created according to standards, and each single repository will be able to integrate and interoperate with other learning systems locally and worldwide.

AGRIS is a global public domain database with more than 12 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. It became operational in 1975 and the database was maintained by Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions from 65 countries. The AGRIS Search system, allows scientists, researchers and students to perform sophisticated searches using keywords from the AGROVOC thesaurus, specific journal titles or names of countries, institutions, and authors.

An open repository or open-access repository is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such repositories must be interoperable according to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Search engines harvest the content of open access repositories, constructing a database of worldwide, free of charge available research.

Islandora is a free and open-source software digital repository system based on Drupal and integrating with additional applications, including Fedora Commons. It is open source software. Islandora was originally developed at the University of Prince Edward Island by the Robertson Library and is now maintained by the Islandora Foundation, which has a mission to, "promote collaboration through transparency and consensus building among Islandora community members, and to steward their shared vision for digital curation features through a body of software and knowledge."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OPUS (software)</span>

OPUS is an open-source software package under the GNU General Public License used for creating Open Access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It provides tools for creating collections of digital resources, as well as for their storage and dissemination. It is usually used at universities, libraries and research institutes as a platform for institutional repositories.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Germany</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Germany

Open access to scholarly communication in Germany has evolved rapidly since the early 2000s. Publishers Beilstein-Institut, Copernicus Publications, De Gruyter, Knowledge Unlatched, Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information, ScienceOpen, Springer Nature, and Universitätsverlag Göttingen belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "About The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository". World Bank Group . Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository" (PDF). Confederation of Open Access Repositories. August 2013. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "An Overview of the Open Knowledge Repository". Agricultural Information Management Standards Portal. Food and Agriculture Organization. April 27, 2015. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Peters, Diane (April 10, 2012). "World Bank stakes leadership position by announcing Open Access Policy and launching Open Knowledge Repository under Creative Commons". Creative Commons . Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  5. 1 2 "World Bank Open Knowledge Repository". MacOdrum Library. September 23, 2021. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  6. 1 2 3 "Open Knowledge Repository (World Bank)". Rutgers University Libraries . Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  7. 1 2 "Frequently Asked Questions: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository". World Bank Group. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  8. ↑ "Collections". Open Knowledge Repository. World Bank Group. Retrieved October 28, 2021.
  9. 1 2 3 "World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR)". United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification . Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  10. 1 2 "The World Bank". Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition . Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  11. ↑ "Site Statistics: Countries". Open Knowledge Repository. World Bank Group. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  12. ↑ "World Bank Open Knowledge Repository Introduces Mobile-Friendly Design". World Bank Group. January 23, 2014. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
  13. ↑ "Carlos Rossel: How the World Bank opened its resources to the world". Team Open. Creative Commons. Retrieved October 26, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.