The Kaust University Library signed a number of transformative agreements with STEM publishers from 2019 to 2021. This poster presents our initial strategy, results, challenges, and plans in the open access publishing area. In 2019 KAUST Library signed 3 transformative agreements with STEM publishers. In 2020 the number of deals increased to 7, and in 2021 to 11. The number of OA articles published under these agreements has been growing steadily - 31 articles published under the terms of transformative agrements in 2019, 111 articles in 2020. The expectations of KAUST authors to have more options to publish open access free of charge are growing, too. Our initial strategy proved to be very successful with smaller and mid-sized publishers, but we reached the point where we should create an evidence-based approach and revise our strategy to deal with big publishers. Higher instances and alignment with the University-wide strategic plan (with clear goals in open research and open access area) are needed to take our open access publishing to the next level.

Usage statistics, such as access and download data, are a widely used tool in a collection development librarian’s toolkit to assess the relevance and usefulness of a library’s collection to its patrons. The use of citation analysis of students’ theses and dissertations adds another dimension to this evidence-based user-centered approach to assessing collection development activities of the library. In this project, a liaison librarian and a systems specialist teamed up to make use of a systems approach to analyze the citations of doctoral dissertations from the Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) Division in a graduate research institution. Making use of KNIME, an open source data-mining software, we created a workflow to examine citation data to discover citation patterns of student dissertations across the different programs within the BESE division and resource usage. This is matched against the current library holdings as well as compared with usage statistics obtained from JUSP. Results suggest that as an academic division, the BESE Division is not a homogenous division and citation patterns are different across the different programs. What and how references are cited are also valuable information to inform, direct and focus our collection development and information literacy program. The use of an open source data-mining software helps to automate the citation analysis process and provides an efficient and replicable framework to analyze citation data to supplement usage statistics. This would be useful for academic libraries planning to conduct similar studies to assess the usefulness of their collection with respect to the research activities of graduate students.

The institutional repository became popular solutions to Capture, Preserve and Share university intellectual outputs; it had a great value on advancing scholarly communication, for both published materials such as peer reviewed article, conference paper where it is considered as an additional dissemination channel or for the best scenario as a nonrestrictive (Open Access) channels, where for the gray literature the institutional repository could be the only sharing method, and thus the gray literature could be considered as the uniqueness items that can add significant values the university repository materials. This Poster demonstrates the establishment phases of institutional repository in a brand new University. We will be discussing, the early consideration of the gray literature, success stories, difficulties, establishing different workflow, plagiarism checks, approvals , stakeholder’s involvement, establishing policy and service level agreements. The future challenges associated with grey literature, the increasing demand on different material types such as audio, video and research datasets. The skill sets required in describing gray literature materials, expertise in preserving datasets, research data expertise and continued access are going to be the challenging faces for any ETD programs in near future. Finally will wrap up with statistical of the download and viewed items of the shared grey literature materials from the repository and how that led to increase items citation.