Turitea Library currently has a display highlighting Open Access Week, 24-30 October. “Open Access” to information refers to the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research.

Massey contributes to open access content with Massey Research Online. This is a digital archive of the research and scholarship of Massey University and is jointly managed by the Library and Information Technology Services.

Massey Research Online contains theses and published work by Massey University students and academic staff as well as peer-reviewed material not published elsewhere.

To submit material to Massey Research Online please email the Library.

The higher citation pattern of journal articles that are freely accessible to all internet users (Open Access or OA) comparative to those whose use is restricted to members of institutions who pay a subscription is well known and even has its own name - the OA Advantage. It has often been suggested, however, that this was largely the result of selection bias, the tendency of authors to place their best work in institutional repositories. Now a study from the University of Quebec at Montreal has tested this theory by comparing "self-archived" articles with those that have been placed in repositories as a result of institutional mandate - the Queensland University of Technology, for example, requires all its research staff to place their published articles in QUT ePrints and a high rate of compliance is achieved.

The authors conclude that "the OA advantage is a statistically significant, independent positive in citations, even when we control the independent contributions of many other salient variables" and that this advantage is just as great for the mandated articles as those they are voluntarily contributed in institutions where this is not a requirement. Internationally about 15-20% of articles are being self-archived by their authors although this figure is much lower at Massey. Some confusion exists about the ability of authors to archive articles after they have assigned the copyright to publishers, but in fact most publishers allow for a version of the peer-reviewed item to be placed in a university repository like Massey Research Online.

Any citations of your work in 2011 will count towards its assessment in the 2012 PBRF round so there's no better time than now to submit your published articles. Email the library today to find out more. Read the full article here - Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

The most downloaded items from Massey Research Online during October are predominantly masters theses.

Top honour goes to Jingjing Jiang for her 2008 masters thesis, Evaluation of the potential of ecotourism to contribute to local sustainable development : a case study of Tengtou Village, China, with nearly 600 downloads just for the month of October.

The only doctoral thesis to make the top five items this month belongs to Matthew Aladesaye, also 2008, Application of predictive maintenance to industry including Cepstrum analysis of a gearbox, with 471 downloads. This is one of the theses recently digitised due to the Doctoral Theses Digitisation Project currently underway.

While theses are the most downloaded items due to the comparatively high number of theses in the repository, we do accept journal articles and conference papers. If you would like to submit a paper, please email the library on library@massey.ac.nz or view more information on submitting articles.

We'll continue to give you updates each month of the most popular items in Massey Research Online.

October's top five downloads are:

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The use of Massey's older doctoral theses has shot up as the Library works towards making them publicly available online. All Massey doctoral theses going back 50 years are being digitised and added to Massey Research Online. So far about 300 out of the 1300 theses are online and are already being very well used.

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Massey Research Online (MRO) is the University’s Institutional Repository of digital copies of published research such as theses, journal articles, conference papers, reports and other peer-reviewed documents. All items in the repository are “full-text” and are publicly available – that is, accessible to all Internet users. An open repository like MRO affords a major opportunity to place academic work in the public domain and to draw attention to it beyond the conventional commercial channels. It may be necessary for you to have a copy of the final version of the article as it was sent to the editor for publication – this is known as the Accepted Manuscript and all authors of articles should get into the habit of holding onto these precious documents.

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