The University of Florida, Gainesville, is working with
publisher Elsevier to make it easier to find the research articles it produces every
year. The institution recently launched a pilot that links its repository of
scholarly works with ScienceDirect, the Elsevier online journal and e-book
catalog.
The pilot allows the university to store journal
article searches on ScienceDirect and make them available automatically. Users
can now search the university repository and find links to more than 31,000
articles that have appeared in Elsevier journals, according to a report in Inside Higher Education.
“The nice thing about this pilot is it opens up the repository,”
said Alicia Wise, director of access and policy for Elsevier. “Rather than
being the end destination, it’s part of the fabric of interconnected
platforms.”
The university is pursuing similar partnerships with
other publishers and wants to expand the current pilot to increase access for
users who aren’t subscribers. It would also like to be able to allow all users to
view some text of published articles.
Not
everyone is as excited about the pilot. A group of university librarians and
press directors said the partnership essentially turns the institutional repository
into “discovery layers for commercialized content,” according to another
Insider Higher Ed report.
