Transcript Widening Access to Institutional Assets: what are the

Widening Access to Institutional Assets: what are the
practical implications?
Implementing an institutional
repository:
management and organizational issues
___________________
Jessie M.N. Hey
TARDis Project Research Fellow
University of Southampton
JISC Conference 2004
Birmingham, 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
Southampton University Institutional
Repository
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk
• 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
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