eprints.fri – a case study open access: maximising research impact in sofia sofia, 23 april 2009...

ePrints.FRI – a case study

Open Access: Maximising Research Impact in Sofia

Sofia, 23 April 2009

[email protected]

ePrints.FRI – a case study 2ePrints.FRI – a case study 2

FRI = Faculty of Computer and Information science

ePrints.FRI – a case study 3

Overview

• Context

• Content and activity

• Development

• Organization

• Service implementation

• Submission policy

• Integration

• Success analytics

• Challenges


ePrints.FRI

• ePrints.FRI is the publications database of the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana

• It is based on open source ePrints with modifications

• It is integrated into Open Archive Initiative indexer network

• It was the first OAI archive in wider region

• It is integrated into existing faculty web infrastructure

• It has recently become official digital repository for all student theses


Context

• ePrints.FRI is an effort of Faculty of Computer and Information Science

• There is a separate University Library

• Most of material is also catalogued in COBISS (metadata only)

e P rin ts .F R I

F R IF a cu lty o f C om pu te r a n d In fo rm atio n S c ie n ce

D IK U LU n ive rs ity L ib ra ry

U LU n ivers ity o f L jub lja na

C O B IS SN a tio n a l ca ta log


Goal

• Initial goal (volunteer effort, 2002)

• Provide a simple self-archiving tool for the laboratory supporting Open Archive Initiative (prof. Franc Solina)

• Try to deploy it Faculty-wide

• Revised goal (institutional effort, 2008)

• Fulfill national directive on thesis publishing

• Revise policies for digital publishing

• Try to provide single point of meta-data entry


Overview of current contents (710 publications)

• 591 theses

• 473 diplomas

• 73 MSc theses

• 45 PhD theses

• 77 conference or workshop papers

• 32 articles

• 4 monographs

• 3 book sections

• 1 book

• 2 unclassified


Overview of current deposit activity

• Almost exclusively theses only


Current activity & age of publications

Mostly papers

Mostly theses


Developmental phases

• ePrints 2 – 1 person effort

• Basic customization – less than 1 month

• Internal testing – 1 laboratory

• Dedicated server & multilingual debugging – 1 month

• ePrints 3 – institutional effort

• Organized process


Developmental phases – ePrints 3

• Institutional planning

• Metadata definition

• Customization

• Translation

• Staff education

• Testing

• Migration of existing publications from ePrints 2

• Initial deployment

• Workflow facilitation

• Statistics


Workgroup staff

• Workgroup manager: prof. Mira Trebar

• Software engineers (2)

• IT department representative

• Student office representative

• Library representative

• Linguist

• Plus occasional institutional representatives

• More student office & library personnel involved in final testing


Chart: Institutional departments involved

• Workgroup staff dispersed over several departments

S ta ff (4 )

R e p re se n ta tive

S tud e n t o ff ice

S c rip t e n g in e er S u pp o rt e ng ine er

S ys te m e n g in e er

IT de p artm e nt

S ta ff (2 )

R e p re se n ta tive

L ib ra ry

M a na g er e P rin ts en g in e er

L a bs

F R IF a cu lty o f C om pu te r a n d In fo rm atio n S c ie n ce

U n ivers ity o f L jub lja na


Workgroup organization chart

Faculty senate & commissions

Workgroup manager

ePrints engineer System engineer

Automation script engineer

Libraryrepresentative

Student officerepresentative

Linguist


Developmental milestones

• Institutional commitment: December 2007

• First workgroup meeting: January 2008

• Test installation: April 2008

• Metadata testing: May 2008

• Institutional presentation: June 2008

• Metadata migration, Testing: August 2008

• Institutional deployment, Testing: September 2008

• Public deployment: October 2008


ePrints.FRI – 2008 revision


Hosting

• IT department, Faculty of Computer and Information Science

• Platform:

• IBM server

• VMWare hosting multiple virtual servers

• Virtual Debian Linux server

• Backup

• Backup virtual server images

• Provided by IT department


Service sustainability

• Printed instructions

• 4 student office staff educated

• 2 library office staff educated

• One ePrints administrator plus one support engineer

• One system administrator plus one support engineer

• Virtual server with full-system backup

• System, metadata and publications all backed up

• Technical support


Technical support

• 1st level: IT department

• System engineer

• Support engineer

• 2nd level: involved technical staff

• ePrints software engineer

• Automation script engineer

• Network administrator


Policy formulation and licensing

• Policy formulated to respect national laws and university workflow

• Two-track licensing

• Strict requirements for student theses

• Scientific papers self-published and checked on best-effort basis

• Legal paperwork prepared for students

• Students must sign papers submitting rights for electronic publishing


Student submission

• Thesis work in printed form

• Thesis work in electronic form (PDF/DOC on CD)

• Metadata in electronic form (TXT/DOC on CD)

• Signed legal paperwork

All of above submitted to student office before oral defense, so that announcement and publication proceed automatically


Thesis submission workflow


Workflow facilitation (1)

• Auto-complete names and titles from a database

• Avoids tedious ID lookups and related errors


Workflow facilitation (2)

• Fill in standard fields

• Prepare links and fix them later


Scientific submission

• Self-archived by author

• Electronic document in PDF form preferred

• Metadata in web forms

• Metadata and document validity checked by administrator on best-effort bases

• Returned to author or published

• No legal policy at the moment


Publication HTML page


System integration

• Web integration

• Thesis defense announcements

• Thesis details

• Links to content hosted in ePrints

• Information system integration

• Morning mails include thesis defense announcements

• Mentoring and committee participation statistics automated


Web integration – defense announcements

Generated by automation scriptfrom ePrints 3 XML


Measuring and demonstrating success

• The first open archive in the wider region, quickly picked up by OAI indexers and big search engines

• Relatively quick deployment with NO serious glitches

• Attracted interest from other open-access projects (DRIVER) and faculties

• Access statistics:

• AWStats and Webalizer – general web access

• IRStats – repository specific

• Increased ability to monitor INTEREST and ORIGIN OF INTEREST for publications and subjects of publications


Google ranking


Visitor statistics (AWStats)


IRStats• Internet Repository Stats package

• integrates with ePrints database

• Simple interface, but still many bugs


Visitor statistics (IRStats)


Document downloads (IRStats)


Top 10 publications


Visitor statistics summary

• Publication dissemination about double the number of enrolled students PER MONTH

• Greatly increased promotion and dissemination of student theses

• Elevated practical status of thesis as a reference

• Most visitors arrive by search engines looking for general keywords


Key challenges faced

• Translation and multi-language specific issues

• Terminology

• Missing ePrints language flexibility

• Missing OAI multilingual support

• Overcoming resistance to change

• 1 point data entry for student department

• Facilitators for data entry (auto-complete, workflow)

• System integration with existing web software: Ažur, Moodle

• Metadata set changed from ePrints 2 to ePrints 3


Important unresolved issues

• Minor reliability problems: indexing, automated data transfer

• Legal policy for scientific publications

• Centralized archive provides little incentive for self-archiving

• If Google can find it, who cares about repository

• Automated integration with current and future national archives

• Goal: Enter metadata once, publish many times


Thank you

• Any questions ?

[email protected]

eprints.fri – a case study open access: maximising research impact in sofia sofia, 23 april 2009...

Documents

department slide

case study open access

unclassified slide

revision slide

information science

technical support slide

final testing slide

electronic publishing