engleski

PhD Thesis Going Digital: the Example of the University of Zagreb Medical School Repository

Institutional repository is a collection of scientific and professional papers written and published in digital format by members of an institution. In this way, digital content is collected, stored, published and disseminated. Institutional repository provides scholarly community with prompt and direct exchange of information. Authors and their institutions share interest in building repositories – authors present their research to wider public and at the same time institutions provide their work to financing bodies and scientific community. In 2005 the project team of the Central Medical Library launched the project of establishing the institutional repository of the University of Zagreb School of Medicine. Librarians are most often initiators for setting up a repository because the knowledge and skills important for its establishing and maintenance are partially related to the managing of traditional library collections. Librarians' roles and responsibilities include the initial building of repositories and its implementation, and also imply continuous learning and keeping up with the novelties in the open access movement parallel to familiarity with copyright law and regulations. University of Zagreb Medical School Repository (http://medlib.mef.hr) was presented to the scientific and professional public in 2006. It was the first open access institutional repository in Croatia. The Repository stores scholarly content (full texts of articles, conference presentations, book chapters, etc.) published by the members of the School of Medicine as well as PhD Theses defended at the School of Medicine. At the end of February 2019, the Repository contains more than 2000 items – mainly scientific papers (1538) and PhD Theses (732). Being a part of the so called grey literature, dissertations are invisible to scholarly communication and therefore limited to a small user community. For this reason institutional repository is the best tool to ensure visibility and present results of the dissertation to scientific community and public in general. The Medical School Repository contains PhD Theses that have been defended at the School of Medicine since 2003. Download statistic (2011– 2018) show that full texts monthly downloads is between 10 000 and 20 000 and daily usage statistic show average 400 accesses. More than 80% downloads refer to dissertations. In 2018 total number of downloads was 137 319 with monthly average 11 00 downloads. Even 49 of the top 50 most downloaded papers in the Repository are PhD Theses. Author with the highest number (20 248) of downloads is a PhD Thesis author. This is not surprising because opposite to a published scientific paper that is disseminated through different media and platforms, PhD Thesis has limited accessibility. Medical School Repository enabled that dissertations became more visible and used. Through lecturing, the library’s web page and social network librarians stress the importance of accessing sources in digital form. Actively participating in building and managing institutional repositories in today's digital environment, librarians add new value to their traditional role of collecting, processing and storing knowledge. Librarians play an important role in the promotion of the repository and the open access approach in general.

academic libraries ; institutional repositories ; University of Zagreb School of medicine

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