Open Access and Institutional Repositories: The Turkish Landscape

Abstract

The development of the “Open Access” (OA) movement since early 1990s has been radically changing the scientific communication landscape. Within the last decade more universities and research institutions are recommending their scholars to make their works freely accessible through their web sites and/or institutional repositories (IRs). The research impact of OA articles as measured by the number of citations is much higher than that of printed ones. Several universities have developed policies to mandate OA and set up IRs to guarantee public access to the output of publicly funded research projects. Refereed journal articles, conference papers, theses and dissertations, and courseware (i.e., lecture notes, audio and video records of lectures) can be given as examples of such research output. This paper defines the concepts of OA and IR and briefly reviews the current situation of IRs in Europe. It then chronicles the development of IRs in Turkey. The paper concludes with some recommendations.