Harvesting usage data?
I was talking with a researcher the other day who said that, despite his institution mandating deposit of research papers in his institutional repository, he didn’t comply - prefering to deposit in an international subject repository. Naturally, I asked him ‘why?’. He said that it was because he wanted each of his papers to be in one, and only one, place on the web, so that he could get accurate download statistics for it. Obviously, we’re aware in the JISC IE team of the various arguments on this topic, and we’ve funded a piece of work to look at the practical ways in which subject and institutional repositories might work together, which could address this issue among others. We’ve also funded various projects on repository statistics, such as ‘Interoperable Repository Statistics’ (which has developed a tool that repository managers can use to analyse and share statistics) and an ongoing small piece of work on harmonising article-level usage data formats. There is also MESUR and other projects in this space.
However, in the real world, it is likely that copies of some research papers are likely to be at various places on the web, and we wondered whether a tool could be built that used fuzzy matching to identify copies that were probably the same paper, some means of querying the servers on which they sat to get download data, and a reliable way of then aggregating that data into some acceptable statistics. Is that an important use case? Is feasible to build something that addresses it?
What’s the relationship (if any) with name authority services (see the JISC pilot Names project) or persistent identifiers (see the JISC Resourcing Identifier Interoperability for Repositories - RIDIR demonstrator)?
Repositories and Preservation Programme Synthesis
We are proposing to undertake a synthesis of the repositories and preservation programme which will support action. This means that the outputs need to be targeted at decision makers with additional information for those that will have to implement the decisions.
We have taken as a starting point the idea that decision makers are most likely to take note of what we are saying if repositories or preservation address problems that they are already worried about, and that many of these will stem from government, funding council or similar policies which they have to implement.
We have identified policies, decision makers who are concerned with them and ways in which we think that repositories or preservation can help.
We are aware that there will be other policies out there that we should be considering, that there may be other ways in which repositories or preservation could help and there may be other people we need to address.
We would very much welcome comments and thoughts on our thinking so that we can take it forward and start the synthesis.
Please comment either by posting comments or by email to Tom Franklin who is leading on this (tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk).
Research
The Research Excellence Framework is of concern to many at the moment including senior managers, research managers, researchers and librarians. We believe that it is likely that institutional repositories will make collection of the relevant information easier and cheaper and will support whatever metrics are likely to be selected. It is also possible that open access repositories will lead to research being found more easily and therefore cited more widely. This also supports increasing research recognition.
Funding mandates from funding bodies such as research councils and Wellcome can be addressed through the use of required repositories (such as UK Pubmed Central), but through the use of suitable institutional repositories that support things like embargo periods.
Community and business engagement requires that information is made accessible to those that might effective use of it. Institutional repositories may assist here.
Teaching and learning
Cost reduction may be achieved through better sharing of learning materials, including learning objects, this will be of interest to both managers and teachers who need to then implement and make use of repositories, but contributors will also have to think about using appropriate standards. Integration with the VLE would also enable the most current version of materials to be easily accessible.
Quality assurance of courses, especially franchised courses for instance between a university and FE colleges is of concern to senior managers and teachers and could be supported by making learning resources available across the group through use of repositories.
Many institutions and their managers are concerned with retaining control over the IPR of their learning materials, institutional repositories for learning objects offer one way of controlling access effectively.
Information services and libraries
All managers and Staff are concerned with meeting their legal and Contractual requirements including self-deposit / open access and being able to enforce embargoes. Institutional repositories can help with these issues.
Help wanted
Are these the most important drivers?
Are there other drivers that we should consider?
Have we correctly identified the key audiences who can help to identify these things?
Posted by: Tom Franklin
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/
Open Repositories 2008
Before arrival at the recent Open Repositories 2008 conference, I was telling myself that this would be a dynamic, busy and vibrant conference, attended by a technically ambitious and knowledgeable community, and that it would obviously be a great opportunity for me to engage in constant blog activity (reading and writing). As it turned out, the preconceptions I had about the conference were exactly right. The aspirations I had about my own activities in the blogosphere, however, turned out to be more a case of ‘amplified expectations’ rather than the ‘amplified conference’ that Lorcan Dempsey has referred to (http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001404.html).
From the more comfortable perspective of two weeks after the energetic and meeting-packed week down in Southampton (that made it impossible to get near a blog!) it’s possible to look back and consider a few of the more prominent features of the conference.
One principal item was the role that OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Protocol – Object Reuse and Exchange (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) may have in describing the structure and semantics of aggregations of web objects, thereby making those objects available to a variety of applications. Though still in beta (or perhaps even alpha) by the time of the conference, this data model was used in the development of the winning prototype of the ‘Repository Challenge’ competition (http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/developers.html ) - a JISC/CRIG sponsored event that was an important and characteristic feature of the conference.
Tim Brody (University of Southampton) along with fellow team members, Ben O’Steen (University of Oxford) and Dave Tarrant (University of Southampton) developed the winning application which was called ‘Mining the ORE’. Tim Brody describes it as …
‘A practical approach to copying complex objects between repositories. Every eprint in a repository is exposed as an ORE aggregation (Object Reuse and Exchange). Each ORE
aggregation of an eprint links together all the files and associated metadata. This aggregation of files had one resource that was marked as conforming to simple Dublin Core and this was used as the basis of the metadata interoperability. When ingested into a new repository each resource in the ORE aggregation is retrieved and stored. The simple Dublin Core is used to index the new eprint for the purposes of search and discovery, otherwise all of the component resources are simply shown to the user. We implemented exemplar ORE interfaces for both EPrints and Fedora, enabling the transfer of complex objects between the two system implementations.’
19 teams entered the ‘Repository Challenge’ and in total over 40 developers were involved in creating the rapid prototypes. Five prototypes were shortlisted by an international panel of judges and the winner was then selected by a balloted vote from the conference delegates at the OR08 awards dinner. This type of developmental process is a new departure in terms of JISC-funded initiatives but has proved to be potentially of great benefit in terms of providing candidate service-usage models (SUM’s) for submission to the e-Framework, and other forms of documentation including training materials and case studies. It would be very interesting to hear views and opinions about the value of this form of rapid prototyping exercise. Anyone interested should contact David Flanders at the Common Repositories Interface Group (CRIG) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG. David was the driving force behind the Repository Challenge at OR08 and its success was entirely to do with his energy and determination.
Returning to the mainstream sessions of the conference, Peter Murray Rust gave the first keynote speech and urged delegates to be wary of the ubiquitous use of the pdf format to capture the complexity of scientific information. This reluctance to accept what has become the de facto deposit standard clearly rang bells with some delegates (http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2008/04/or08—the-pres.html).
One of the challenges tackled by many presenters was how to ease the burden of deposit and how to incorporate web 2.0 interfaces and techniques into repository design and workflow. The automation of metadata tagging and the design of batch ingest procedures were also variously discussed.
All the papers are being made available in the OR08 repository (http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/) and this will give some idea of the complexity of the main part of the conference. What it won’t describe is the amount of peripheral but important activity that happened around these presentations, encompassing: Fedora, e-Prints and DSpace group meetings; a repository manager forum; a developer barcamp; an international meeting about Global Registries; a EurOpen Scholar day addressing issues about Open Access … not to mention gatherings and briefings put together by commercial participants such as Microsoft, who introduced the research data repository platform that they have been developing.
Perhaps the very busiest part of the conference was the one that I almost completely missed. If Owen Stephens’ experience of the conference was anything to go by (and this was someone who wasn’t even at the conference), then all the ‘amplification’ that was going on was perhaps a bit too much! http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/micro-blogging-at-events/#comment-64627.
The ‘chattering classes’ is obviously a thing of the past. Now we have the ‘twittering’ classes.
A tool for revealing web conversations and citations for an open access scientific paper
I found this via Jon Udell’s blog and thought it might be useful for those of you who are expecting to host scientific papers in your repository.
It is a tool that could be embedded in a repository splash page to reveal what open access conversations are occurring about an open access paper. The tool uses either doi, url or pmid and displays:
- blog postings that have discussed the paper (using postgenomic);
- comments that have been made on pubmed;
- people who have bookmarked the paper using connotea;
- how many citations are recorded for the paper on pubmed central and scopus.
The demonstrator is avaliable from Alf Eaton’s Hublog
It might be worth reading Jon Udell’s blog post for the background that lead to Alf Eaton posting this demonstrator.
Now I don’t use a repository on a daily basis so this may have disadvantages that are hidden from me, or be problematic to embed in a repository, but I think that putting this kind of tool on your repository might be a nice selling point for any scientists you are trying to convince to deposit.
I would love to hear from anyone who has tried this out on a live repository.
Posted by: Andy McGregor