Wageningen University repository « Open Access Success Stories

“Wageningen is a Dutch university with a specific focus on the life sciences and ‘healthy food and the living environment’. It is also home to a groundbreakingly comprehensive institutional repository, Wageningen Yield, that covers not only all the scientific output of the university but also collects grey literature and makes it available to the rest of the world. In addition to its comprehensiveness, the repository is leading the way in providing user statistics and citation reports to its researchers – which in turn encourages greater involvement in the repository by the institution’s academic staff.  Wageningen Yield is a comprehensive, total output bibliographic database of all the research of the university. The metadata for every article is as complete a description as possible. If an article is open access it is made available, so Wageningen Yield is both a complete academic bibliography and an open access repository. The coverage goes back to 1975.  ‘Our success lies in the 100% coverage and the large share of open access publications. We’re making reports and proceedings more visible and accessible,’ says Peter van der Togt, the  former manager of Wageningen Yield. The repository currently contains over 183.000 metadata records, 44,000 open access records and 39,000 records for e-harvesting ... ‘What we see is that a lot of repositories containing only formal academic outputs, only peer reviewed journal articles published by PubMed or the Web of Science,” says Wouter Gerritsma, bibliometrician at Wageningen library. “But academic output is far more than that, especially if you have agricultural research stations as part of your organisation. They publish a lot of reports in all kinds of trade journals, such as Farmers’ Weekly, and, in most circumstances, these are open access publications. So this is where we have a head start on all the other universities because we cover these publications as well and so we cover the complete, comprehensive academic output. We collect grey literature and we make it available to the rest of the world through the repository.’  It sounds like a huge task for the library, so does it work in practice? For a start, it’s mandated. But it’s also deeply embedded in the university’s administrative system. Secretaries log the output of professors in the research information system then the library staff check the data – ensuring, for example, that the right distinction has been made between book chapters and conference proceedings, open access peer reviewed journals and professional body journals. If the publications are in open access journals or the researchers provide post-prints, they are published on the web and made freely available...”