UKCoRR Meeting Leicester

On Friday Wendy and I trekked across the frozen wastes of Northern Britain to Leicester (which I have now looked up on a map and discovered is pretty much slap bang in the middle of Albion).  I had missed the last UKCoRR meeting back in August ’09 due to gestational issues and was looking forward to catching up with repository-managing colleagues, some of whom were familiar faces, some of whom I recognised only by name and some of whose aquaintance was entirely novel – indicative of the growing repository community in the UK with the membership of UKCoRR now getting on for 200 souls.  The meeting was well attended which is especially exciting given that the Council is unfunded and operates only by the dedication of its Committee and the good-will of its members, a paragon of which was our host Gareth Johnson who kept a live blog of proceedings at http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/ukcorr-meeting-university-of-leicester/.

I was due on at 11:50, hopefully to demostrate the Bibliosight prototype, and Gareth and I had been liaising with Thomson Reuters in order to have IP authentication to access the service; I was there early and, with trepidation, tested the prototype on the presentation PC and….it didn’t work.  Nor could I gain access to the wireless network to pore over emails in order to resolve the problem so I decided, instead, to have a cup of tea and rely on my Blue Peter style contingency – here’s one I prepared earlier.

The running order is below – presentations from the event will appear on the UKCoRR blog in due course so I’ll link to them from here as and when:

• Chair’s Activities – Jenny Delasalle, UKCoRR Chair
• Aberystwyth University, CADAIR and Me – Nicky Cashman, UKCoRR Secretary
• The Bibliosight Project: Querying Web of Science from the Desktop – Nick Sheppard, Leeds Metropolitan University (presentation below.)
• The Repository Scene at Leicester – Gareth Johnson, University of Leicester
• Web & Publicity Update – Dominic Tate, UKCoRR Web & Publicity Officer
• Welsh Repository Network: Services and Support – Hannah Payne, Aberystwyth University*
• Advanced RoMEO – Jane Smith & Peter Millington, University of Nottingham
• Copyright and Repositories Workshop – Nicky Cashman, Aberystwyth University

*  Hannah also showed us some learning objects produced by WRN and there are plans to create several more.

Bibliosight (UKCoRR presentation):

Gareth has done a pretty good summary over at The UoL Library Blog so here I really just want to follow up after my own presentation, with reference to the R4R project and JournalTOCsAPI, and also perhaps note one or two particular points that caught my interest through the day.

There is a screen-cast of the Bibliosight prototype at http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/bibliosight/video/; as I mentioned, the R4R project has also developed a prototype to perform a similar task and Les Carr posted to the list last week emphasising that the major issue from their point of view is duplicate avoidance / reconciliation and that he and the R4R team would be looking for guidance from repository managers around how we already tackle this issue.  We didn’t really have time to discuss these issues on Friday and I’ll just reiterate Les’ on-list invitation to please post any initial feed-back there which will also help the project team to focus their questions.

The other questions and issues I asked folk to consider were:

• Different workflows relevant to:
  • Backfilling a repository with a one-off download
  • Ongoing use to populate repository

• Other uses for records downloaded from WoS?

• Other datastreams to populate a repository:
  • UK PubMedCentral, arXiv
  • sources that better serve the arts, humanities and social sciences

• WoS records become available some time after publication*

• Duplicate records/ambiguous relations with existing records?

• Implications for a repository’s mission/reputation if balance of content changed by large number of WoS-derived records

*  One of our use cases was to use Web Services as an alerting service in a similar manner as proposed by JournalTOCsAPI but the advantage in that case, as Jenny emphasised when she mentioned her involvement with the project at the top of the day, is that the data is immediately available, via the API, as soon as it is published, whereas, in the case of Web Services, there will be a delay while data is harvested/re-keyed by Web of Science.

We also briefly considered another question that had already arisen on the list from Hannah Payne of the Welsh Repository Network around acknowledging the source of WoS data in repository records with the vague consensus that acknowledgement should go in the rights field; it was pointed out that, in the UK, metadata does not carry any copyright restrictions but I think the issue is purely about acknowledging WoS as the source of the data – there are some issues around this to clarify, however, as we are given to understand that abstracts are not made available via Web Services as WoS are not able to grant a license for reuse even though it seems that a license may not actually be necessary (see last post).

Anyway, I hope these issues are taken up in more detail either here or on the UKCoRR discussion list.

Other interesting issues that came up during the day and that deserve fuller posts of their own in the fullness of time were:

• CRIS (Current Research Information Systems)
• Institutional mandates for etheses (relates to developing ETHoS service)
• Forthcoming report on the economics of Open Access from Alma Swann
• Integrating repositories with the REF (WRN is planning a repository and CRIS event right here in sunny Leeds using the Rose Bowl, our world-class conference facility – TBA)
• Advanced RoMEO and ongoing developments to the service

I really enjoyed the day and thank you to everyone involved.  Looking forward to the next meeting!

Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice

Bill Hubbard’s slides from last weeks event (which I didn’t go to) may come in useful.

(Thanks to UK Council of Research Repositories blog)

Publishers allowing the deposition of their published version/PDF in Institutional Repositories

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PDFandIR.html

Hallelujah.  Let’s hope this is a sign of things to come!

The copyright iceberg

I have found that one of the characteristics of repository development and, well, life in general for that matter (repository development is like the travails of life in microcosm – discuss) is that, though you may be aware of the full gamut of issues (or think you are) they only become actually real when they are actually present; until then, 9/10ths of their misshapen form is concealed from view.  So it has been that throughout our start-up that I have blithely referred folk to SHERPA/RoMEO whenever the tip of the copyright iceberg appeared on the horizon, busying myself with carefully steering the good ship repository through the icefloe of overall functionality and metadata pack(age) ice.  Ok, I’ll kill this metaphor now before it really gets out of hand – it’s just that I’m taking a break from writing up the final project report!

However, now that we finally have a functional infrastructure to support Open Access to research I am naturally keen to populate the repository with full text material (as well as citations I’m afraid, for any OA purists out there).  Given the university’s recent success in the RAE along with its inherent high profile and  implicit quality I have been focussing on this material and recently liaised with the University Research Office to email, en masse, those academics whose work was submitted to the RAE, drawing their attention to citation information for their work in the repository and requesting author produced copies of the full text.  I tried to make the copyright issue as clear as possible and included links to SHERPA/RoMEO while emphasising that I would undertake all necessary copyright investigations.  The response has been reasonably positive but includes:

• Publishers PDFs – which, of course, generally speaking I’m unable to use
• Instructions to the URO to supply me with PDFs – which are generally publishers PDFs and which, generally speaking, I’m unable to use
• Instructions to the URO NOT to supply me with PDFs under any circumstances as Publisher x owns the copyright
• Statements from individual academics that they are unwilling to make unedited drafts openly available
• Statements from individual academics that they do not have appropriate versions of their papers to put in the repository and/or the observation that it will entail extra work to find them and send them to me

Add to this my own work load associated with the task of looking up individual journals/academic publishers on SHERPA/RoMEO and the fact that RoMEO, though a truly indispensible resource, is not, by any means comprehensive and I’m really beginning to get a sense of the iceberg’s sub-marine mass as I hesitantly trace its contours.

One academic who expressed his willingness to include his RAE submission in the repository happens to be published by John Wiley & Son so I duly visited SHERPA/RoMEO to discover that they are a RoMEO ‘green’ which I naively assumed meant that I would be able to archive an author produced version in the repository…until I read the conditions which explicitely state “Not allowed on institutional repository”.  As many of my fellow repository managers around the country are considerably more experienced than me and further on with developing and populating their IRs  I decided to post to JISC-REPOSITORIES in the hope of some clarification.

I’m now even more confused – which is absolutely no reflection on my colleagues on the list who responded with their usual enthusiasm and expertise – its just that the issue is inherently complex and, as the Open Access publishing  paradigm continues to evolve, we, the repository community are necessarily reliant on (interpretation) of individual Publishers’ copyright policies which vary in both their restrictiveness and their clarity.

I’m hoping that, like many things in repository development (and life) problems that seem difficult and confusing today appear clearer tomorrow, next week or next year…

Discussion in JISC-REPOSITORIES archive here