Measuring repository use
Data on usage events can be the basis for a variety of services, the most obvious being the generation of metrics similar to COUNTER statistics. A report from a small review study supported by JISC outlines one approach to sharing such data. Based on a consultation workshop, and drawing on the architecture proposed by Johan Bollen and Herbert van de Sompel in 2006, this report proposes a format based on OpenURLContextObjects shared over OAI-PMH. Other projects are taking this approach forward, eg the JISC PIRUS project (article-level COUNTER statistics from publishers and repositories) and the DFG OA-Statistik project (a German infrastructure for standardized collection of usage data). I know some have argued that a lighter approach to sharing item-level usage data might be better, and I also wonder whether it would be helpful to describe some of the use cases for sharing usage data, other than the generation of metrics?
Manuel Castells and Open Access
Manuel Castells and Professor John Barrow featured in a recent edition of the Forum programme on the BBC World Service. It was an interesting discussion, touching on Castells’ view of the emerging network organisation and society, and Professor Barrow’s observations on scientific practice in that context. Castells sees ICT as affording advantage to organisational arrangements that are horizontal (rather than bureaucratic), featuring loosely coupled units of highly skilled professionals, using project-oriented relationships with other such units to get work done. It is a picture that many academics will find familiar of course. Professor Barrow cited arXiv as an example of researchers working in this way, contrasting it with the more traditional “institution” of accessing the literature via journals. Might he also have mentioned libraries? This did make me think about Lorcan Dempsey’s ideas of the network effect and gravitational pull on the web, but also of arXiv’s ability to embed itself and provide value in researchers’ everyday workflow, as they work in network organisations. Providing this kind of appropriate infrastructure for other disciplines remains a challenge.
Understanding organisational cultures
Last week we had a really productive programme meeting about organisational cultures organised by the Embed project at Cranfield. The one day event managed to squeeze in 6 presentations and some interesting discussions without the event feeling rushed or cramped. There is an event blog which is worth having a look at.
Ian Stuart has written a nice summary of the day so I’ll point to his blog rather than repeat his efforts. I want to focus on what for me was the real standout of the day, the morning session where two academics spoke, one an enthusiast for the repository and the other a critic (but a very constructive one).
First up was the enthusiast; Dr Colin Macduff from Robert Gordon University. Colin came across the repository while preparing his PhD thesis. The thesis was designed as a standard paper thesis written for the supervisiors and examiners. However it became apparent that Colin’s work would be very relevant to public policy so he decided to look for alternative methods of publicising the thesis. Colin chose to deposit his thesis in the repository and actively promote it. Interestingly Colin also chose to build evaluation to gather data about the whole process of thesis deposit. There were 1400 downloads of Colin’s thesis in a year. This is especially impressive when you compare it to the 300 requests for the same year that the Royal College of Nursing had for all the paper theses that it holds. For me the most interesting idea that Colin suggested was the possibiliy of turning online theses into “virtual guest houses” where authors and readers meet. This seems to fit in with what other repository commentators have been saying about repositories needing to reflect the social networks that surround academic’s work.
The critic role was filled by Dr Bruce Jefferson of Cranfield University who billed himself as the Hooded Claw to the repository managers Penelope Pitstop. Although I don’t remember the Hooded Claw being quite so useful. The main thrust of Bruce’s talk was repository managers are not bringing the right evidence to their advocacy efforts. Number of downloads from the repository and studies that show an increase in citations in certain disciplines are interesting but what would be really persuasive is some evidence that depositing in the repository has a positive impact on the institution’s perfomance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF). From Bruce’s point of view a repository does not need to dramatically increase the number of citations for a paper. If it just prevents some of the institution’s papers from being zero cited then it could be considered a success since this will improve the institution’s REF profile. Bruce mentioned that he is conducting an experiment to gather this kind of data. If they choose to make this data available then it will make for interesting reading.
Another interesting point that Bruce made was that papers from repositories do not look as good as the official publishers versions and this is going to have an impact on how the content of that paper is perceived. This led on to a striking idea that repositories should seek to gather resources (such as press releases, powerpoint slides) that seek to explain the content of the paper to the press or the general public. This could be a great value added service if the repository presented those objects alongside the original academic paper.
Thanks very much to the Embed project for organising such a useful event, I haven’t come away from an event with so many new ideas in a long time.
Rights and repositories
The powerpoint slides from these talks can be found at:
The afternoon was given over to the discussion of 4 topics covering some of the legal issues that repository managers face:
- risk management,
- negotiating with rights holders,
- choosing the right licence
- and changing cultural perceptions of copyright.
Each speaker prepared 10 top tips on these topics and these tips can be found at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres/rightsrepositories.aspx. They will also be added to the Repository Support Project website in due course.
For me the most interesting things to come out of the day were the issue of establishing the correct IPR regime or regimes in an institution and the problem of communicating complex legal issues to people not terribly interested in them.
The IPR regime subject arose in response to a question from someone who is running a repository service that is being subjected to some restrictive practices imposed by the University legal team. John Casey suggested that this was not uncommon and was indicative of the fact that a lot of University IPR regimes were designed for the enterprise part of the institution’s business. Naturally this IPR regime did not necessarily fit with other parts of the institution’s business such as education and non-commercial research so it would probably be appropriate to establish a parallel IPR regime for these parts of the business. John recommended that repository managers could help in this process by preparing business cases and risk assessments to support a different IPR regime for senior managers to discuss.
Communication cropped up again and again throughout the day. Lots of delegates reported problems communicating legal issues to senior managers and academics. A couple of ideas to help with this problem were suggested. One was inserting help prompts for legal issues into the repository deposit interface. The other was adopting the model used in the CAMEL project. The Camel model was designed to get senior managers to a neutral venue to discuss the issues with elearning and to share good practice. It was suggested that this model could be used for IPR issues as well.
I also think that there are lessons to be learned from the creative commons website which makes good use of symbols, cartoons and web design to effectively communicate about Intellectual Property issues. Perhaps a similarly visual communication method could form a page of repository websites or a central website such as RSP?
All in all it was a very useful day and it is a credit to the speakers that I came away full of ideas and enthusiasm rather than the fear and paralysis that exposure to legal issues has caused me in the past.
Inventory of digital resources catalogues 3,707 free collections
The JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has finished phase 2 and has catalogued a total of 3,707 online collections that staff and students in higher education can access for free. These catalogue records will be added to the IESR.
The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in the UK that are relevant to UK higher education and are free at point of use. For the purposes of this project a very loose definition of repositories and archives was used. The only sites that were excluded were those that restricted access and those with little or no structure.
Phase 1 of the project discovered 1,924 resources and phase 2 discovered 1,783. The records from phase 1 are already in the IESR and records from phase 2 will be added soon.
Phase 2 also enriched the metadata collected about all the resources and contacted resource owners to approve or extend the data collected about their resources. This produced a very positive response with approximately 800 resource owners providing extra information about their collections.
The final report from the project is available now (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/244/) and has some very interesting results on preservation, usage rights, subject coverage, discovery, collection owners and the availability of information about the collections.