OA Repositories for DE in Myanmar

1. Open Access Repositories to Support
Distance Education in Myanmar
Nason Bimbe
28 August 2019 – a webinar held at TIDE ClickMeeting

2. • Introduction
• A description of what an Open Access Repository is
• Approaches Myanmar may take to implementation
• Examples of Open Access Repositories
• An open discussion of where each participant's institution is at with OA
Repository
Covered in this presentation

3. Introduction
• This webinar is part of the Transformation by Innovation in Distance Education (TIDE)
programme which aims to improve quality of higher education in Myanmar.
• The webinar also speaks to and intends to contribute to one of the programmes’
objectives – the development of ICT and Library capacity.
• Open Access (OA) Repositories can play a role on both the ‘supply and demand sides’
of Distance Education (DE) content hosting and delivery in Myanmar
• ‘Supply side’ – OA repository can be used as a publication and ‘smart store’ for
content
• ‘Demand side’ – OA repository can be used by stakeholders to frictionless access
and use/reuse the content hosted in the repository

4. What is an Open Access Repository
• a means of managing, storing and providing access to digital content
• enables institutions to manage and preserve it, and therefore derive maximum value
from it
• can support research, teaching, learning, practice and administrative processes
• may include a wide range of content for a variety of purposes and users
• less an issue of technological or software ability, and more of a policy decision made
by each institution or administrator
• content can include research outputs such as journal articles or research data,
e‐theses, learning and teaching materials, cultural material, administrative data, etc
• One of the advantages of a repository is that each piece of content can be described
in some detail via the input of associated 'metadata' as well storing the full
text/image/multimedia file/s
• If repository has implemented an appropriate content exposure method (such as OAI-
PMH, RESTAPI and/or RSS) the metadata can then be harvested by external services
and also exposed to the wider world
• Content is centrally stored, indexed, preserved and redistributed therefore it is
imperative that repositories are created in a way that they are open and
interoperable, allowing open access to the content

5. What is an Open Access Repository
• Key points
• Means of managing, storing and distributing
digital content
• Can take any form of digital content – It is format
Agnostic
• Describes content in a 'standard way' i.e. use of
Dublin-Core (DC)
• Offers content exposure capabilities for
machine-to-machine interoperability

6. Benefits of Open Access Repositories
• Discoverability
• By making publications easier to find on search engines like Google and Google
Scholar, the repository greatly increases the likelihood of it being found and used
by people across the world.
• The repository software also ensures uploaded outputs are shared and made
visible through big global research directories and aggregators like OpenDOAR [1],
CORE [2], and many others.
• Open access and Impact
• Evidence [3] suggests that content published in Open Access repositories (and
journals) is more likely to be cited in other publications and to reach policy and
practice, as well as academic and general public audiences.
• Preservation
• The repository software preserves copies of content for posterity in a way that is
independent of the original format (which may become obsolete).
[1] http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/
[2] https://core.ac.uk/
[3] http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html#original

7. Benefits of Open Access Repositories
• Persistent Identifiers
• Repositories in general offer persistence identifiers that makes linkages with other
content better and also avoids ‘link rots’ – this is where a URL ceases to work
because the item has been moved for example. These can take the form of URI,
Handle, DOI, ORCID, etc.
• Reusability/interoperability
• Most repository software used are standards based therefore provide standard
Interoperability protocols such as OAI-PMH, SWORD, REST-API, Metadata.
• Repository items can link to a main website or other systems (both internal and
external) such that once documents or files have been uploaded they can then be
seamlessly made accessible via these other sites/services/systems.
• Compliance
• More funders are now mandating that outputs from the research that they are
funding is made open access. An OA repository can provide such a space to store
the outputs.
• Licensing
• Allows you to indicate the level of re-use/type of licensing on each individual output
uploaded.

8. Benefits of Open Access Repositories
• Insights
• All the metadata views and file downloads statistics are collected by an OA
repository and can be made publicly accessible and you can also generate ‘adhoc’
statistics as required to inform usage and reach of your content.
• OA Policy Articulation
• OA repositories can provide policies that are clear and publically accessible on the
site. The policies could cover content, terms of use, deposit, preservation, take
down and many others the institution may want to articulate and enforce.

9. Benefits of Open Access Repositories
• Key points
• Discoverability
• Open access and Impact
• Preservation
• Persistent Identifiers
• Reusability/interoperability
• Compliance
• Licensing
• Insights
• OA Policy Articulation
• Above all, low barrier to entry because of use of open
source software

10. Approach to implementation
• The Goal: there is a need for a central node to provide visibility and access point to
content for DE use
• Take an approach for a ‘single OA repository’ for all participating institutions
• Pros: Only single repository is available for use by all institutions
• Cons: Institutional policy alignment could be a challenge; Creating a
governance regime that works could be another challenge; Long term
sustainability is another one
• Take a ‘distributed OA repositories’ approach for each participating institution with a
‘single aggregation and enrichment service’
• Pros: Each institution can maintain and work within their policy space;
Management of repository is local as well as resourcing
• Cons: An extra aggregation service is required to enable a 'single access
point'; some institutions may not have the capabilities and capacity to maintain
a repository

11. Approach to implementation
• Key points
• The Goal: there is a need for a central node to
provide visibility and access point to content for
DE use
• A ‘single OA repository’ for all participating
institutions
• A ‘distributed OA repositories’ approach for
each participating institution with a ‘single
aggregation and enrichment service’

12. What to look for in a modern OA Repository
and best practice to set up
• Interoperability
• Extensive metadata support
• Standards based i.e. interoperability
• Persistent identifier support
• 'Ease of use'
• 'Easy' to customise
• Support for responsive user interface
• Support for analytics
• Support for other entities such as people, organisational units, equipment, data, etc that
can open up opportunities to support Open Science endeavours
• ‘Community’ support as a sign of ‘a mature software’
• Follow recommended best practice in requirements, setup, operation and management
- by using community tested practice

13. Some examples
1. Institute for Development Studies (IDS) – OpenDocs Repository [1] : - used as IR and
feeds other websites in a ‘deposit once, use everywhere’ arrangement.
2. African Union (AU) Common Repository [2] : - Central archives for content from AU, now
exploring for use in a ‘deposit once, use everywhere’ arrangement by their other
websites.
3. African Digital Health Library (ADHL) [3] :- Uses repository as an aggregation and
enrichment platform for selected content from 6 sub Saharan university’s repository
systems
[1] https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/
[2] https://archives.au.int/
[3] https://adhl.africa/library/

14. Open discussion
It will be great to find out what you have in terms of an OA Repository?
• If you have one: -
• what software platform do you use?
• what's the breadth of content in it?
• how can we access it - what is the URL?
• If not, do you have any plans of having one?
• What support do you think you require to either setup one or improve what you
already have?
• What do you think will be best the way to make content easily discoverable and
accessible - may be from a ‘single point’?

15. Thank you and any questions or comments?
Nason Bimbe
Skype: bimben
Twitter: @nbimbe
28 August 2019