Repositories Support Project (RSP) Workshop
I attended a very useful workshop last week which was run by the Repositories Support Project (RSP). About 50 people were there representing around 30 organisations and there were presentations on the following initiatives:
JULIET
RoMEO
OpenDOAR
ROAR
The Depot
JORUM
EThOS
OAISter and BASE
Intute Repository Search
There was also time for some discussion and this highlighted a few issues that might be worth flagging up.
Bill Hubbard (RSP) commented on the lack of success in the U.S. of the Open Access Mandate at the National Institutes of Health. (see Open Access news article for background: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih-now-law.html). There appears to be only a 5% compliance rate at the moment so that obviously hasn’t worked! Bill made the point that this clearly reinforces the notion that the most important factor in improving repository deposit rates is not telling people ‘they must’, but to ensure that deposit is an integral part of the scholarly workflow.
(Obviously it’s not all about quantity, the material in these repositories has to be high quality and JISC is commissioning some work that will investigate techniques to help determine the quality of that deposited material).
Another point Bill made … It’s worth remembering that the amount of research that should be going into repositories is very substanstial. 6 out of 7 UK Research Councils have an archiving policy, and 36 out 38 Russell Group/1994 universities (which account for more than 80% of HE sector research done in the UK) have repositories.
It was good to see some of the repository stats reporting tools that are available in ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories - http://roar.eprints.org/)
One of repository manager participants at the event said that she recently had a conversation with an academic who was much more impressed with the information about repositories that he could see in OpenDOAR and ROAR than he was with the idea that his own institution had a fully operational and well stocked DSpace repository. We talked about the quality of advocacy materials that were available for repository managers to ’sell’ their systems and wondered if more could be done.
Some Other issues/comments from participants …
* JULIET & RoMEO were very useful resources. More should be done to develop API’s for both of these so that information could be embedded into institutional repository (IR) interfaces.
* The diversity of information and resources for HE IR managers was confusing. There should be a ‘one stop shop’.
* SWORD looks really interesting. Multiple deposit could improve the versioning problem where 4 different authors of a single paper are all putting separate (and potentially different) copies into their IRs.
* Is Intute more important for librarians than academics?
* The focus on colour-coded Open Access types is confusing and unhelpful. Green/white/Gold etc.
* Perhaps when talking about copyright issues, there should be more information about what IS possible rather than what isn’t. Copyright is not an issue that a lot of people want to engage with and some clear enabling advice would be good.
* IR managers on the whole had not started to grapple with preservation issues in a methodical way
These are just some of the notes I jotted down and the RSP will be reporting on the workshop in detail. But a very useful session - highly recommended for anyone in the repository field - particularly those who are fairly new to the area.
forthcoming events - http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/
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