Integration of SHERPA/RoMEO in institutional digital repositories to address the uncertainty of copyright

Abstract

Repanovici, A., & Barsan, I. M. (2015). Integration of SHERPA/RoMEO in institutional digital repositories to address the uncertainty of copyright. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science, Vol.20, no. 1: 29-45

The article describes the research conducted to identify the barriers to dissemination and communication of scientific articles made available by institutional digital repositories through self-archiving. Transilvania University of Brasov Romania provides a new service attached to its digital repository, in the form of an automatic query interface of the SHERPA/RoMEO publisher reviewing platform to support the academic community. The query principles of the platform SHERPA/RoMEO’s database of publisher policies is integrated with DSpace, a digital repository software. While defining a new submission for a collection on the DSpace platform, a query is sent to the SHERPA/RoMEO server, using the application programming interface it provides, which responds by an XML document containing the information required. The XML document is further processed through the XSLT transformation in order to generate the content displayed on the HTML page. Authors find out via a simple query, whether they are allowed to self-archive an article, whether the publisher allows it, and under what conditions. Developing a software application that integrates the copyright conditions imposed by publishers emerges as the solution for resolving authors’ scepticism towards self-archiving published articles. The software application, which has been developed with low cost, would be very useful to other universities that face obstacles in populating institutional digital repositories due to copyright concerns.