Widening Access to Institutional Assets: what are the practical implications?

Implementing an institutional repository:

management and organizational issues ___________________

Jessie M.N. HeyTARDis Project Research Fellow

University of Southampton

JISC Conference 2004Birmingham, 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

• 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

Southampton University Institutional Repository

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk

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