Widening Access to Institutional Assets: what are the practical implications?
Implementing an institutional repository:
management and organizational issues ___________________
Jessie M.N. HeyTARDis Project Research Fellow
University of Southampton
JISC Conference 2004Birmingham, UK
23 March 2004
Implementing an institutional repository: management and organizational issues
• Practical steps
• Some lessons learnt
• The way forward?
How TARDis started its journey towards widening access
• FAIR – Focus on Access to Institutional Resources
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
• 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
• Background of rapid progression of the Open Access movement
• Fundamental building block of e-research
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
• e-Print Archive vs Institutional Repository containing publications records –– is it to be a record of all organisational output or just specific media?
• Responsibility at institutional level - 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
Software decisions
• Software
– which software to choose? Now a selection: GNU EPrints, 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)
Policy Decisions – 3
Resources– Team - technical support is v. important – all software 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– Who owns this activity, who leads?– Southampton - marketing, researchers, research support, library,
planning, Information Systems all involved in parts of research dissemination
• Uses – what other services might be available from the IR. Buy-In if value
added is offered? Consider: education agenda, e-Publishing, RAE, Knowledge Management, Preservation
Selling the vision
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
Management and Organizational Issues - 1
• Self deposit or assisted deposit– Suggested needed Fast Track – just the file
• Metadata quality – How much can be automated– Quality is labour intensive – to what level?– Think outside the box
• Mandatory metadata fields– Sufficient to produce a citation?– Too many - a barrier to deposit– DSpace/MIT = 3, Soton = document dependent
Management and Organizational 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 accept only
pdf. Formats requiring special viewers – ensure viewers available eg. postscript
– Will you offer file conversion service• Word preferably should be converted
– Southampton Word files are archive only
Management and Organizational Issues - 3
• Preservation– No definitive answer
• Southampton – ‘secure storage’
• Copyright– Will you 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
• Quality assurance – Not of the content – peer pressure– Can appoint editors at school/department level
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
• 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
• Anticipate 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) – 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)
Towards a vision of joined up research
Diagram from eBank UK project
Thank You
TARDis http://tardis.eprints.org/
e-Prints Soton http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/
Jessie Hey, Pauline Simpson
And with us today complementary viewpoints from our cluster of projects