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Publishing and sharing ‘open’ journal articles in ILRI

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In line with ILRI’s strategy on publishing, we aim to make as many of our ILRI research products as possible open for our partners and others to access.

  • Our dspace repository (Mahider) contains a full index (we hope) to recent outputs as well as the full ‘text’s of reports, documents and the like … See http://mahider.ilri.org
  • All our official publications are put on Google Books – where you will also find the archive ILCA and ILRAD texts in full for free download. See http://www.ilri.org

The ‘missing link’ in all of this is the famous journal articles!  We now have quite a complete list of them as they appear, but as this link shows, most are still ‘limited access’. Which means they are not free to view or download, nor do we have a soft copy in the repository.

We can do something about this:

  1. You can choose to publish in an open access journal that may or may not charge author fees (so you may need a budget): ‘Livestock Research for Rural Development’ is an example: http://mahider.ilri.org/handle/10568/3817 and http://www.lrrd.org/lrrd23/5/luku23112.htm
  2. You can pay the publisher to make your article open (again you need a budget!) as is possible with PNAS and many other titles:  http://mahider.ilri.org/handle/10568/3727 and http://www.pnas.org/content/108/22/9304  is a recent example.
  3. You can normally deposit an author version of your article in our Dspace.  See for example http://mahider.ilri.org/handle/10568/3910 which contains the a pre-final format version of this closed access article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377840111002021  [the drawback is that these versions are not exactly the same as what is published]
  4. You can deposit the final PDF version of your article in a restricted part of our Dspace repository – for access to staff only.

Actions ILRI authors can take

  1. Please send KMIS your author version articles – with the line numbering and not yet final layout.  We can normally share these.
  2. Please also send KMIS the final PDF version of your article – we will restrict access to this to staff only.
  3. [The communications people in ILRI teams can make sure these get to the right people and places]
  4. BUDGET open access to articles into projects and proposals so these costs can be paid up-front and we have no need to look for PDFs etc.

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