Presentation on Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Agricultural Sciences: The Case of Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA) made at the 2nd IAALD Africa Chapter Conference, 15 - 17 July 2009, Accra, Ghana

1. Open Access and Institutional Repositories in
Agricultural Sciences: The Case of Botswana
College of Agriculture (BCA)
IAALD Africa Chapter Conference, Accra Ghana, 13 - 17 July 2009
Kebede Hundie Wordofa
&
Poloko Ntokwane-Oseafiana

2. Introduction
Agricultural sector is faced with some major challenges:
• increasing production in a situation of dwindling natural resources
necessary for production such as water shortages,
• declining soil fertility, climate change and rapid decrease of fertile
lands due to urbanization and population growth.
• Agricultural information spread over different agencies, notably
farmers, universities, research institutes, extension services,
commercial enterprises, and non-governmental organizations.
• poorly documented information and hard to access; and indigenous
knowledge on good practices and lessons learned about innovations
is generally not captured .

3. Open Access
What is Open Access
• Unrestricted access to scholarly information
• advocates the principle of making scholarly literature available to the public at no
cost removing price barriers such as subscriptions, licensing fees
• removes the financial, technical and legal barriers
• makes the literature accessible online free of charge
• The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines OA as follows:
By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet,
permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the
full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or
use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers
other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only
constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this
domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right
to be properly acknowledged and cited (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002).

4. Why Open Access (AO)
AO overcome obstacles:
 “Price Crisis”
 rising price of journals subscriptions and
electronic databases
 “Permission Crisis”
 constrained licensing terms and software
locks

5. Why Open Access (AO) …
 Low cost of publishing on the Internet
 Ease of accessing information online
 The average prices of journals and the number of new
journals have risen much more faster than the library
budgets.
 Internet Culture - Information should be free
 Increasing legal restrictions on licensing and use of print
and digital resources by corporations (since the 1990s).

6. Benefits of Open Access
• OA benefits authors,
 researchers,
 lecturers and students,
 libraries,
 universities,
 publishers,
 funding agencies,
 governments
 and citizens.

7. Major Vehicles for Disseminating
Open Access Literature
Preprint Services
 Open Access Journals
 Institutional Repositories

8. Institutional Repositories
Definition
Crow (2002) defines IRs as “digital collections capturing and
preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university
community.” Crow (2002) further explains that it is “a digital archive
of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and
students of an institution and accessible to end users both within
and outside of the institution, with few if any barriers to access.”
defines IRs as “digital.
IRs are collections of research output or information generated
particularly by academic or research institutions and stored in a
digital format that can be preserved and made accessible to end
users through the Internet.

9. Contents of institutional repositories
• post-prints
• Peer-reviewed articles
• Book chapters
• Monographs
• Conference proceedings
• Unpublished papers such as pre-prints
• Working papers
• Thesis and dissertations,
• Reports
• Video recordings etc.

10. Benefits of institutional repositories
 To individual authors
 To institutions
 To researchers

11. Benefits of IR cont..
• Besides, the benefits of IRs to research institutions in developing
countries are numerous. According to Chan, Kirsop and
Arunachalam (2005), these benefits are as follows:
• Access to international research output
• International access to research generated in developing countries
• Promotion of institutional research output, providing new contacts
and research partnerships for authors
• Improved citation and research impact
• Provision of usage statistics showing global interest of institutional
research
• allows improved access to subsidiary data
• Facilitating peer review.

12. Some Tools for Finding OA
Literature
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Launched in May 2003. As of February 2009,
there were 3875 journals in the database, of
which 216 journals are in the fields of agriculture
and food sciences.
Users can browse journals by title or subject and
search for them by keyword.
Institutional Archives Registry - As of 25 April,
covers 421 archives Users can browse archives
by country, archive type, or software, or search
for them by keyword.

13. Some Tools for Finding OA
Literature….
OAIster - A project of the University of Michigan
Digital Library Production Service, providing
open access to over 20 million records from 1082
contributors as of March 2009 (e.g., preprints, journal
articles, dissertations, etc).
Google Scholar - Launched in Nov 2004
Indexes the full-text (including the cited
references) of articles in fee/subscription based
scholarly journals on the Internet as well as open
access literature.
 Many others on the web

14. Challenges facing institutional
repositories
• Lack of faculty involvement
• Lack of awareness of availability of different
mechanism for distributing and accessing
research info.
• Lack of promotion by institutions on the use of
Internet
• Copyright issues
• Lack of an IR start-up policy process
• Content harvesting and digitization

15. Choosing IR software solutions
Factors to consider when choosing IR software are:
 cost
 Staffing
 Support and training
 Development of system and
 Hardware requirements
Three main IR software solutions:
• Open Source Software
• Commercial or Proprietary Software
• Vendor Hosted System.

16. Software Advantage Disadvantage
Open Source -It is free promotes No support , no training, time
collaboration and knowledge consuming in metadata,
sharing . systems admin and
-No marketing is involved programming skills required,
more technical staff ,
-Flexible and can be tailored to
development undirected
match individual institutional
requirements.
-used by institutions with
minimal resources
Commercial or Proper support and training, Not free, pay for license and
proprietary Less technical skills,
development directed, input of maintenance
customers
Vendor of Host no hardware to purchase, Institutions do not have control
over it.
install and maintain.
not as staff intensive in terms
of set up, customization,
configuration and ongoing
administration and
maintenance, backups and
redundancy are the vendor’s
responsibility

17. Implications of OA for developing
countries
• Overcoming problems of inability to afford
subscriptions to journals
• Overcoming inability to integrate national research
into global knowledge base
• Expanded access to global scientific literature
• Access to both published and unpublished
literature
• Provision of a platform to e-journals
• Research more exposed
• Easy dissemination of research output.

18. Numbers and percentages of IRs by continents
20; 2%
58; 4%
Africa
77; 6%
South America
146; 11%
Australasia, Carribean and
628; 48% Central America
Asia
North America
375; 29% Europe

19. IR of Botswana College of
Agriculture (BCA)
Background information
 was established on 31st May 1991.
 is a parastatal under the Ministry of Agriculture and an
associate institution of the University of Botswana.
 offers programs at undergraduate and postgraduate levels
 Has five academic departments, namely;
• Animal Science and Production,
• Basic Sciences,
• Crop Science and Production,
• Agricultural Economics Educations and Extension, and
• Agricultural Engineering and Land Planning.

20. Vision and Mission
Its vision is to become “a world-class institution in
teaching, research and service in agriculture and
related fields.”
The College’s mission is “to produce high quality
graduates, generate suitable technologies and
provide advisory services to improve agriculture
productivity through innovative teaching, relevant
research, and customer-driven service”
(Botswana College of Agriculture).

21. Institutional repository of BCA
Established an IR in 2007 with the following objectives:
• Provide access to college output
• Preserve the scholarly work in digitization format
The Development Phases of the BCA IR
• Project Proposal
• Develop a service definition
• identify collection
• liaise with teaching staff and administrative staff
• Assemble a team
• assessment of current staff and skills
• Acquire/install software/hardware
• research and choose a software
• download, install and configure
• digitize collection
• Setting up different collections
• Market the service
• Test
• Launched officially in
• October 2008

22. Figure 2 The screenshot of the BCA IR homepage.

23. Figure 5 The screenshot of the college journal in the BCA IR.
.

24. Figure 4 The screenshot of the college volumes of the journal in BCA
IR.

25. Figure 4 The screenshot of table of contents of BCA journal in IR.

26. Figure 6 The screenshot of the college journal full text in the BCA IR.

27. Lessons Learned
• It needs support from management, IT staff, faculty,
librarians, etc to succeed
• Do a pilot project to teach staff, test the software, and
gain more support through demonstration
• Demonstration to relevant people through
presentations convinces them to support - “seeing is
believing”
• Contents harvesting, digitization and creation of
metadata is time consuming and huge task
• Budget for staff time
• Train staff on metadata

28. Conclusion
• Researchers and academicians in developing countries face the impact
of financial constraints to access scholarly literature due to the escalating
costs of journals and proprietary databases.
• Besides, the research output of developing countries does not get a
wider audience, hence less impact globally.
• Agriculture is the most important sector that supports the majority of
population in developing countries.
• The sector has its own challenges that need to be overcome through
research and development (R&D) that needs adequate, relevant, and
timely information.
• Much of agricultural research output and indigenous knowledge in
developing countries are not well documented and not easily accessible.
• Concerned institutions and governments need to do more to make their
research output accessible to the public through OA and IRs.
• By so doing, institutions will be able to collect, store and disseminate
their research work.

29. Thank You.
Questions/Answers & Discussions.