How to Build a Case for University Policies and Practices in Support of Open Access

Briefing paper written by Alma Swan and Frederick Friend on behalf of JISC:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/programme/2010/howtoopenaccessfinal.pdf

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!

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Bibliosight – querying Web of Science from the desktop

The Bibliosight project, as part of JISCRI, officially completed at the end of November 2009. However, due to issues beyond our control, specifically the fact that Thomson Reuters’ Web Services were not fully released until October 2009 and therefore not available to us within project timescales, final deliverables were not available at that time.

I am pleased to report that the project has now produced a desktop client that is able to utilise Thomson Reuter’s “Web Services Lite” to query Web of Science directly from the desktop. The code is available to download from http://code.google.com/p/bibliosight/ (Note: This is code only, not a product distribution (which requires access to WS Lite anyway). There is some very basic info in there on what you’d need to get it running) and you should see http://bibliosightnews.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/final-progress-post/ for more information.

As Bibliosight is now officially complete I am not contributing further to Bibliosight News but am posting here to explore practical uses of the client and also limitations of WSLite. This is prompted because, as a novice user of EndNote who has recently been exploring how to export from Web of Science into EndNote I am not now convinced that the client provides us with a solution beyond what could be achieved already with EndNote alone. This in no way denigrates the fantastic work that Mike has done developing the client and I’m sure there are plenty of practical uses of WSLite in general and our Bibliosight client in particular – it is just that I am thinking very much of an integrated workflow for research management/populating the repository and, at Leeds Met, EndNote is firmly established in the research administration process. I may also gently question the limitations that Thomson Reuter’s have placed on WSLite (which is free) given that, as subscribed users of WoS, we are already able to retrieve more data from WoS by export than via this free API.

The primary usecase that evolved through Bibliosight was as follows:

• Retrospectively download all Leeds Met records from WoS
• Run the query on a regular basis to retrieve new Leeds Met records in WoS

It was decided that the easiest way to achieve this was via a client that could query WoS from the desktop and return records as XML; this XML could then be converted by XSLT into an appropriate format for ingest into intraLibrary and/or other repository platforms and/or EndNote.

However, the data elements that are returned by WSLite are limited to:

• Authors — All authors, book authors, and corporate authors
  Article Title
• Source — Includes the source title, subtitle, book series and subtitle, volume, issue, special issue, pages, article number, supplement number, and publication date
• Keywords — all author supplied keywords
• UT — A unique article identified provided by Thomson Reuters

In addition, a single query is limited to just 100 results; additional queries can be submitted in succession but this is inconvenient with the current application.

As a subscribed user, I am able to log-in to Web of Science, perform a query and export directly to EndNote (a maximum of 500 records); this includes most of the data available from WSLite, it also includes <ref-type> which is an EndNote specific numerical value – I don’t think we can get an equivalent from WSLite – it also includes an abstract.

N.B. Though it is possible to submit a query for Source Publication (SO) though this is for the title of a specific publication so doesn’t help to identify <ref-type>

The issue of abstracts is an interesting one and I recently posted a naive question to the UKCORR discussion list:

“The T&C for Web Services explicitly disallows including the abstract – which I can’t get anyway (!) – but are WoS abstracts not simply author-produced abstracts harvested from publisher’s websites in which case shouldn’t I be able to use them?“

I got a couple of helpful responses from Alison Sutton, Repository Manager at the University of Reading and Leslie Carr of Southampton:

Alison said that they explicitly asked Thomson Reuters if they could use their abstracts in their repository and were told they could not because publishers don’t give Thomson the right to distribute them, which is why they are not included in WSLite.  Les, however (while at pains to emphasise that he is not in fact a lawyer!) suggested that there is no copyright on journal article abstracts in the UK and although Thomson cannot grant a license to use them, you do not actually need one.

I suspect we need a real legal eagle to establish whether or not there is any legal reason why we could not use an abstract procured from WoS which (in most cases) is exactly the same – right down to the minutiae of the ASCII code –  as the abstract from the publisher’s website which I believe is actually supplied by the author in the first place.

The only data element that doesn’t appear to be returned by the export method, that IS returned by WSLite is the unique identifier UT which will need for AMR to return citation counts (though it is returned when exporting in HTML for example.)

The long term value of WSLite – via Bibliosight or some other implementation – would be in a more intuitive, integrated process for the end user – and though Bibliosight, perhaps, is not there yet, the project output will still provide value for the community – also, I think, as a case study for Thomson Reuters and while they certainly have their commercial imperatives, when we met with them back in September (and as I blogged at the time) I was given the impression that the company has been practising something of a balancing act to weigh their commercial interests against providing appropriate value added services to their subscribers under existing licensing agreements.