One of the main purposes of the BTH Electronic research archive is to try to make BTH’s research available in full text. According to guidelines from the government and the National Agency for Higher Education we support the idea that scientific information should be free to access to as high an extent as possible and therefore actively support initiatives which promotes such free access.
The financial year of 1988 a regulating letter was issued regarding grants form universities and university colleges etc. Among other things, you could read that:
”University colleges should, by May 10th 1999 at the latest, account for their plans of actions for cooperation with the community to the Ministry of Education, together with an account of what measures have been taken during 1998 based on the plans of actions. Furthermore, from the same account, it should be clear what measures have been taken to develop research information systems, especially with regard to research information on the Internet. Such a system should be running by the end of 1998 according to the government’s commission for the National Agency for Higher Education November 21st, 1996.” (My translation.)
This is the reason why the Library at BTH, at the time named the University College of Karlskrona/Ronneby, in 1997 was commissioned to develop a database in order to gather and present electronically all the University colleges’ research documents and research projects in process. The documents should as far as possible be available in full text. The system was constructed from the idea that the researchers themselves would enter data into the system in a web form and attach a file with the full text of the original document.
Postprint
From the beginning in 1998, close to 2000 documents have been added to the database, of which more than a third are in full text. BTH’s electronic research archive mainly consists of postprint documents, i.e. they are published in and reviewed by another source. The different types of documents published from 1990 onwards are dissertations, licentiate’s dissertations, journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, monographs and research reports.
Intensive research
Research at BTH comprises a number of subject fields, from technology to the humanities, from business administration to health sciences and today it is organized in four schools: School of Engineering, School of Health Science, School of Management, School of Technoculture, Humanities and Planning. Research is most intensive in Signal processing and Computer science. The common denominator for all research and education is the profile applied information technology.
Free access to research
One of the main purposes of BTH’s Electronic research archive is to try to make the research of BTH available in full text. According to guidelines from the government and the National Agency for Higher Education we support the idea that scientific information should be free to access to as high extent as possible and therefore actively support initiatives which promote such free access (Open Archives Initiative, Berlin Declaration etc.) by implementing Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH) in our databases. This means that the material in BTH’s Electronic Research Archive is also searchable and accessible from scientific web tools such as OAIster etc.
Peter Linde
2005-05-16
