New Developments in Scholarly Publishing Practical issues in creating an institutional repository Dr. Jessie M.N. Hey TARDis Project Research Fellow University.

New Developments in Scholarly Publishing

Practical issues in creating an institutional repository

Dr. Jessie M.N. HeyTARDis Project Research Fellow

University of Southampton

London South Bank University, UK

29 June 2004

Creating an institutional repository: practical issues

• Practical decisions and issues

• Some lessons learnt

• The way forward?

How TARDis started its journey towards widening access

• FAIR – Focus on Access to Institutional Resources programme

More specifically:• TARDis – Targeting Academic Research

for Deposit and Disclosure

• Building on current visions:one institution – collaboration between the

Library, School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Information Systems Services

10 years of progress

• June 27th 10th anniversary of Stevan Harnad’s ‘Subversive Proposal’ leading to the open access vision for scholarly material

• See also Harnad, S. and Hey, J. M. N. (1995) Esoteric Knowledge: the Scholar and Scholarly Publishing on the Net. In Proceedings of Networking and the Future of Libraries 2: Managing the Intellectual Record, Proceedings of an International Conference, Bath, 19-21 April 1995,  110-16. Dempsey, L., Law, D. and Mowlat, I., Eds.

• Supported with JISC funding to Jan 2005

• investigating practical ways in which university research output can be made more freely available - more accessible, more rapidly – as a fundamental building block of e-research

• Background of rapid progression of the Open Access movement – Open Access Journals and Open Access Repositories

• Oxford University Press exploring both strands:– 26th June - ‘Nucleic Acids Research’ to be Open Access from Jan 2005– Trial - OUP journal articles available to Oxford Repository

Southampton University Institutional Repository

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk

Policy Decisions – 1

• Informed by environmental assessment – Personal and school websites, research survey– Variety of practices – to build on, not to destroy– University research report – potential for progression with IRHey, Jessie M.N. (2004) An environmental assessment of research publication activity and related

factors impacting the development of an Institutional e-Print Repository at the University of Southampton. Southampton, UK, University of Southampton, 19pp. (TARDis Project Report, D 3.1.2) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/archive/00006218/

• e-Print Archive (full text) vs Institutional Repository containing publications records– is it to be a record of all organisational output or just specific media (postprints or

preprints or refereed journal articles)? • Responsibility at institutional level – official record, definitive, greater visibility

• Scope - potentially all organisational output (research, educational, administrative?) Southampton – all Research Output, but not learning objects or

administrative documents (at present)– Current research and legacy literature?– Who can deposit?

Research Deposit types explained

Policy Decisions – 2

• Database/s?

– depending on scope will all document types be included in one database or a separate database for different document types or organisational unit?

Southampton building one database for ease of maintenance and upgrade but collaboration with individual schools to meet their needs

Nottingham has a theses database separate from its e-Prints database Glasgow has three separate databases: Published and peer reviewed academic papers, Pre-Prints and Grey Literature and Theses (and different supporting software)

Software decisions

• Software

– which software to choose? Now a selection e.g. GNU EPrints – the pioneers, DSpace, CDSWare, Fedora, I-ToR, MyCoRe, MPG eDoc, ARNO. Can migrate as circumstances change.

• Or will you write your own! Open Archive Initiative compliance essential to make repositories interoperable and searchable

• Southampton working with GNU EPrints and feeding experience back into software development (eg improved underlying structure in recent upgrade)

A new software announcement this week – Digital Commons@

Policy Decisions – 3

• Resources– Team - technical support is v. important – you will want to customize

(Skills – Perl, MySQL for GNU EPrints; Java for Dspace)• add strong advocacy and admin

– Hardware – server – size and growth– Funding – business model, project, core library activity

• Stakeholders/Partnerships– Who owns this activity, who leads?– Southampton – external liaison, researchers, research support office,

library, planning and marketing, Information Systems all involved in parts of research dissemination

• Uses – what other services might be available from the IR. Likely buy-in if

value added is offered? Consider: education agenda, e-Publishing, Knowledge Management, Preservation, Research Assessment Exercise

Selling the vision for the

Southampton University Research

Repository

Selling the vision

• Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access

• Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001 Steve Lawrence Online or Invisible?

http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online

Practical Issues - 1

• Deposit options:– researcher self deposit and/or assisted deposit– Suggested needed Fast Track – but just the file not always sufficient

• Metadata quality – How much can be automated?– Quality and rich metadata is labour intensive – to what level?– Think outside the box

• Mandatory metadata fields– Sufficient to produce a good citation– Too many - a barrier to deposit– DSpace/MIT = 3, Soton = document dependent

Practical Issues - 2

• Digitization– Will you offer to scan hard copy if electronic not available

• Figures often only available this way

• File formats – What file formats will you accept – Nottingham limits to pdf.

Formats requiring special viewers – ensure viewers available e.g. for Postscript

– What helps the author most - Southampton accepts all– Will you offer file conversion service– Conversion can alter content format

• Word preferably should be converted– Southampton Word files are archive only

Practical Issues - 3

• Preservation– No definitive answer yet but will get support from experts in future

• Southampton – ‘secure storage’

• Copyright– Will you (or your authors) actively seek permission to deposit papers?– RoMEO Publishers Copyright Policies

• http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

• Deposit and use agreements – Important to define for both depositors and users – ‘Creative

Commons’ will come for use (will be used by BBC)

• Quality assurance – Not of the content – peer pressure– Can appoint editors at school/department level as required

New usage rights

Can use database to check many publisher copyright policies e.g.

Geological Society

Add your metadata and article if available

This deposit was assisted by archive staff

e-Print created with a good citation, e-Print URL, PDF, link to publisher

version and even references

Southampton Research Repository version available regardless of

journal version

e-Prints Soton version here too

Some key lessons learned• Choose optimum time to introduce new service or adapt to

circumstances – – Challenge - Southampton restructuring emphasised need for

any new service to save time rather than imposing extra tasks!– Database introduced with new structure

• Last version not always stored by author – often not totally digital – figures may be hard copy or text + figures separate

• Author may have publisher’s version (is this OK?)

• Peer review, impact factors, citations are paramount to many

• Full range of research output significant to others

– until alternate scientometric measures available – Citebase offers citation-ranked search service for freely available text

More lessons

• Some disciplines are often not so IT familiar eg what is a pdf? – will receive tailored support

• Assisted deposit and quality control can be extremely time consuming

• smarter support for deposit (TARDis input to improvements) and sharing of skills and services will lead to improved sustainability

Providing a value added service?

• Researchers are less interested in institutional visibility or profile

– want services to save them time with research related admin

• Our feedback showed a growing need to develop (in order to be able to offer) value added services such as export to a web page, cv, funding proposals and reporting, group research visibility

• Import facilities may be necessary for established departmental databases or where subject based deposit is common

• Useful to offer a fast track deposit alternative –somebody else to do it (although might be research office, secretarial, library or database support)

Southampton’s Practical Steps

• Choice of deposit options including full mediation

• Accepting variety of file formats – discipline specific – but thinking about easy dissemination versus preservation

• Some conversion offered – would like automatic conversion tools (eg CERN conversion service)

• Copyright permission – advising and encouraging rather than proactive

Southampton’s Way Forward

• Migrating to an Institutional Repository of publications (= Research Soton) with full text where possible, from solely e-Print Archive (full text)– current copyright precludes all output being full text– a bigger task but required and more effective in the long

term?

• Research Output (perhaps linked to data) – but keeping abreast of developments with learning objects or administrative document initiatives

• Shared use of other JISC projects and services vital to success

• Global and national search services• Oaister: 3,045,063 records from 268 institutions

(updated 5 March 2004)

Global searching – QUEprints at Cranfield added this month

Institutional repositories at the hub

CNI Spring 2004 24

Learning & Teaching workflows

Research & e-Science workflows

Aggregator services: national, commercial

Repositories : institutional, e-prints, subject, data, learning objects

Data curation: databases & databanks

Institutional presentation services: portals, Learning Management Systems, u/g, p/g courses, modules

Validation

Harvestingmetadata

Data creation / capture / gathering: laboratory experiments, Grids, fieldwork, surveys, media

Resource discovery, linking, embedding

Deposit / self-archiving

Peer-reviewed publications: journals, conference proceedings

Publication

Validation

Data analysis, transformation, mining, modelling

Resource discovery, linking, embedding

Deposit / self-archiving

Learning object creation, re-use

Searching , harvesting, embedding

Quality assurance bodies

Validation

Presentation services: subject, media-specific, data, commercial portals

Resource discovery, linking, embedding

Linking

eBank UK diagram

Wither London South Bank? A head start: Staff expertise and

publications

Towards full text and the open access vision at LSBU

Potential – some initial thoughts

• Make Open Archive Initiative Compliant database – searchable by global OAI search engines e.g. OAIster, Google

• Encourage full text where available• Perhaps add links to publisher version• Add links to bookseller information via

ISBN or add book covers• Create fully searchable database• Could add RAE module (Southampton

pilots)

Thank You

TARDis http://tardis.eprints.org/Hey, Jessie M.N. and Simpson, Pauline (2004) Opening access to

research with TARDis at Southampton University. ASSIGNation, 21 (3), 19-22. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/archive/00005007/

Building Southampton University Research Repository (with e-Prints Soton) to showcase the university’s research and enrich collaborative research: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/

Jessie Hey [email protected]