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TeLearn, the TEL open archive
From Stellar Deliverable 6.1
1 Brief history
Two initiatives paved the way of Kaleidoscope to engage in the construction of an OA. In France, two archives have been created in this domain in the early 2000, one in human and social sciences (called Edutice) and the other in Informatics (called archives-EIAH). Both archives are based on the French Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD) and the Hype-Article Online (HAL) technology. They responded to the desire to join the OA movement expressed by two different communities with two different views of the organization of the domain. However, it is now possible to access all documents by whatever portal, including one as sub-domain of informatics of the general scientific portal. This contrasts with the fact that TEL as a domain or a sub-domain is not registered as such by the most renowned OA, either the famous arXiv.org, nor by the Cognitive science OA.
Based on this experience and recognizing the strategic importance of participating to the development of open archiving from an international perspective, the Kaleidoscope NoE steering decided to create TeLearn, with the additional originality of being multidisciplinary and multilingual. The creation of TeLearn has been achieved successfully in collaboration with the CCSD (to ensure the sustainability of the repository), the next section describe the current status of its development.
2 The current state
The creation of the TeLearn OA was a challenge because of the special resistances in the HSS sector in adopting the open access policy. However, it is also known that passed a certain threshold the adoption grows very fast. The table below illustrates the evolution (upload) of the repository from its initiation in June 2006 to May 2009 (a closer look at the data shows a kind of break due to the end of the Kaleidoscope contract at the end of 2007).
| June 06(1) | Dec 06 | June 07 | Oct 07 | May 09 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publications | 110 | 254 | 500 | 804 | 1348 |
| Video | - | 75 | 82 | 118 | 120 |
| Affiliated institutions | 114 | 132 | 140 | 144 |
(1) Initial upload of files by the CCI team to initialize the repository
The use (download) of TeLearn has reached a significant level. On the period from December 2006 (opening) to October 2007, the average number per month of publications downloaded was of 1295 (total of 16839 downloaded). Again, a break at the end of 2007 is visible, it corresponds to the contract end; still the use kept a rather significant level and is recently rising again.
The next diagram shows the evolution of the average number of different (unique) users and visits (cumulated per quarter):
The next diagram shows the origin of connections. The evolution of the curve “Direct access / Bookmark” shows that increasingly people appropriates TeLearn website by typing it or by putting it in their bookmarks. The “search engine” grew during a first phase and now has stabilized while the access by bookmark is more and more important what shows that users have integrated TeLearn as a resource to access directly.
Concerning the content of the repository, the situation as we are starting the Stellar OA initiative, is that more than 80% of the archive is made of reviewed documents (peer-reviewed communications, articles, thesis of book chapters), what means that the issue of the quality of what is accessible is no longer a concern. However, this means that the uploading of pre-print, which is the rule in other research sector, remains here quite rare: the issue of ownership is not completely clarified. If TeLearn is fully multidisciplinary, as witnessed by the keywords (see section), the opening to any language has had a limited effect: 81% of the papers are in English, 16% in French, the rest includes Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Danish and Portuguese with percentages which do not reflect the activity of these communities.