Open Metrics for Open Repositories at OR2012

Next week I’m looking forward to visiting Edinburgh for the 7th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2012) and delivering my very first Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat apparently) a presentation format based on 20 slides of 20 seconds.

“Open Metrics for Open Repositories” is based on the unpublished paper written with Brian Kelly, Jenny Delasalle, Mark Dewey, Owen Stephens, Gareth Johnson and Stephanie Taylor available from http://opus.bath.ac.uk/30226/

Open Metrics for Open Repositories at OR2012

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An institutional tangram – musings on developing an integrated research management system

“The tangram (Chinese: 七巧板; pinyin: qī qiǎo bǎn; literally “seven boards of skill”) is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective of the puzzle is to form a specific shape (given only an outline or silhouette) using all seven pieces, which may not overlap.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangram

Having implemented an institutional repository at Leeds Metropolitan and learning by experience some of the difficulties associated with advocacy around the use of that repository (both for OA research and OER) I have become all too aware “that repositories are ‘lonely and isolated’; still very much under-used and not sufficiently linked to other university systems”. So said JISC’s Andy McGregor at an event called “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” in May 2010 at Leeds Metropolitan (see my report for Ariadne here). This quote is still relevant, though  perhaps a little less so than when I heard it nearly 2 years ago, thanks to the ongoing work of JISC and particularly the RSP. In any case, the event was a revelation for me and I have coveted a so called Current Research Information Management systems (or CRIS for short) ever since!

And now, in Symplectic Elements, I have one…or at least the components of one (click on image for full size.)

The finished tangram? (click on image for full size)

It’s a puzzle though. A tangram if you will…one with considerably more than seven pieces:

intraLibrary, Symplectic, institutional website, University Research Office (URO), faculty research administrators, The Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic staff, web-developers, bibliographic information, research outputs, Open Educational Resources (OER)…

In fact, this may well not be all the pieces…pretty sure a few have been pushed down the back of the settee. I’ll look for them later.

Anyway, tortured metaphors aside, I have become increasingly aware that working in a large institution, in a role that encompasses technology and institutional policy (though I’m not, by any means, a policy maker…or indeed a real techie) is largely about communication and getting the right people, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time! Absorb policy and technical requirements from senior stakeholders and communicate those requirements to the proper techies – while also trying to ensure any motivating passions of one’s own don’t get lost along the way – Open Access to research and Open Education in my case.

For various reasons, individual user accounts have never been implemented for our repository and historically it has been administered centrally from the Library. In Symplectic we now have a system that is populated with central HR data; all staff will have an account they can access with their standard user name and password from where they can manage their own research profile including uploading full-text outputs directly to the repository*. In addition, administration by the University Research Office and faculty research administrators will be more easily centralised (particularly for the REF).

* In actual fact this functionality is not yet available in lieu of development work from Intrallect to capture the Atom feed from Symplectic and transform with XSLT to a suitable format for intraLibrary. I think.

One of the clever bits of functionality used to sell the software is automatic retrieval of bibliographic data from online citation databases – we are currently running against various APIs, Web of Science (lite), PubMed and arXiv – but I think this may actually be a bit of a red-herring for an institution like Leeds Metropolitan – at least until more (preferably free) data sources are available (JournalToCs API please!); early testing has shown, at best, it will only retrieve a subset of (the types of) outputs that we will need to record and it will be necessary to manually import existing records (e.g. EndNote) as well as implementing other administrative procedures at faculty level to capture information at the point of publication, especially for book-items, monographs, conference material, reports and grey literature.

More important, I think, to ensure that academic staff actually engage with the software rather than just seeing it as a tool for administrators, is to re-use the data to generate a list of research outputs – a dynamic bibliography – on a personal web-profile which has the potential to dramatically increase the visibility of research including Open Access to full-text.

Developing staff profiles of this type has been something of an obsession of mine for a while; we explored doing so from the repository (using SRU and email address as a Unique Identifier) and did develop a working prototype. Symplectic, however, integrated with central HR data and with its more sophisticated API, should make it much easier, at least from a technical perspective, and we are currently liaising with the central web-team to develop something similar to this example from Keele University – http://www.keele.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/mormerod/ (like us, Keele run Symplectic alongside intraLibrary.)

N.B. From the Symplectic interface, a user is able to “favourite” a research record and a flag comes out in the xml from the API which I understand is used on this page to display “Selected Publications”. DOI is also available from the API to link to the published version and if a user uploads full-text to the repository from Symplectic, this link is also in the xml – the first two records on this page include links to the full-text in Keele’s intraLibrary repository.

Our own Library web-dev Mike Taylor has been looking at the Symplectic API in detail and has put together a couple of prototype pages on a development server and after a meeting this week with a representative of the central web-team I’m reasonably confident we can move forward with this work fairly quickly…though there’s still a bit of a chicken & egg situation in populating the Symplectic database to then be re-surfaced via the API in this way.

There is also the question of whether we might alter our repository policy to become full-text only; one limitation of repositories across UK HE from an original conception (in the arXiv mould) of holding, disseminating and preserving full-text research outputs, is that they have in effect become “diluted” by metadata records for which it has not (yet) been possible to procure full-text or copyright does not permit deposit and “hybrid” repositories like ours, of full-text and metadata typically contain more metadata records than full-text (see figures from the RSP survey here). As I have argued on the UKCoRR blog, I think is makes sense to separate a bibliographic database (in Symplectic) from full-text only in a repository.

N.B. As Symplectic does not have the same search functionality as the repository, this approach has the potential disadvantage that it makes it more difficult to search across the entire corpus of research records (though one potential solution may be along the lines of that implemented by City Research Online which, in my view is rapidly becoming an exemplar of a research management system (Symplectic) + full-text repository (EPrints). Another good example is  St Andrews (PURE + DSpace) who presented a case study at “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” (video here.)

And what of OER? Along with our EasyDeposit SWORD interface, using OER to resource the refocus the undergraduate curriculum and the soon to be released intraLibrary 3.5 that will enable us to harvest OER from other repositories…for now I think they may be the bits down the back of the settee…

Linking from a research paper to associated OER and thoughts on extending the CRIS model to OER

With our “blended” repository comprising research and UKOER, I still feel very much like I have a foot in two camps. A feeling that, ironically, is reinforced, by my role as Technical Officer for UKCoRR – the UK Council of Research Repositories!

I think I’m right in saying that it’s still atypical to manage both types of resource with a single repository platform and there are certainly considerations why it may not necessarily be desirable – both from a technical and political perspective.

The main repositories that have been developed as part of the ukoer programme are modifications to DSpace (Jorum) and EPrints (HumBox, EdShare), the two main open source repository software platforms that were both initially developed to manage research. In contrast, we have worked with intraLibrary, a commercial learning object repository, to manage both OER and research and while this certainly hasn’t been without it’s problems, I’m naturally interested in potential benefits from this approach both in terms of “reward & recognition” for OER by something analogous to peer-review perhaps (a theme that was explored as part of the Unicycle project) and also in terms of work-flow, possibly mediated via a CRIS-type system such as Symplectic Elements or Atira Pure…

intraLibrary has a workflow to link related resources which I can easily use to link a research paper with associated OER, so in the example below I can link…

Coates, C., Smith, S. (2010) Promoting the concept of competency maps to enhance the student learning experience. Assessment, Teaching and Learning Journal (Leeds Met), 10 (Winter), pp.21-25.

…to the three ALPS Common Competency Maps in the OER collection (see Linked Resources at the bottom of the record):

ALPS Common Competency Map – Communication

ALPS Common Competency Map – Ethical Practice

ALPS Common Competency Map – Team Working

These records, in turn, comprise links back to the research paper (and associated conference paper):

With such an approach, is there perhaps an opportunity to tie research and OER more closely together at an institutional level (if this isn’t politically naive!) and contribute to research led teaching?

The next stage might be to develop a common workflow for research and OER…

Workflow, in fact, has long been a bug-bear of mine and, for both types of resource, essentially remains fully mediated by me and administrative colleagues. In all likelihood, however, as are many institutions, we will soon be implementing a CRIS that will make it easier to collate institutional research outputs by harvesting research data from external bibliometric sources, as well as allowing records to be added manually, and integrating with the repository such that academic staff are able to attach an appropriate full-text to a record and upload it along with metadata into the repository directly from a “user-friendly interface” (TM).

At a recent demo of one of these types of system I confirmed that it could transfer a range of file-types to a repository (utilising SWORD) as well as allowing various licences to be configured including (I think) Creative Commons so there seems no fundamental reason why such a system could not be used to support the workflow for both OA research and OER.

Of course I will need to get my hands on one of these systems before I can properly investigate exactly what is achievable…watch this space.

British Library special collection: ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Sport

Hylton, K. (2008) 'Race' and Sport: Critical Race Theory. Routledge.

Dr. Kevin Hylton, Course Leader – MA Sport, Leisure and Equity here at Leeds Met, is working with the British Library to assemble a special collection of material around ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Sport.  Dr Hylton has already collaborated with the British Library on their website Sport & Society – the Summer Olympics and Paralympics through the lens of Social Science which includes a synopsis of his book ‘Race’ and Sport: Critical Race Theory published by Routledge and which “takes on the controversial subject of racial attitudes in sport and beyond. With sport as his primary focus, Hylton unpacks the central concepts of race, ethnicity, social constructionism and racialisation, and helps the reader navigate the complicated issues and debates that surround the study of race in sport.”

The new collection will be archived at www.webarchive.org.uk which, under the auspices of the BL, aims “to collect and permanently preserve the UK web” – more info here – and the Public Call states that “we hope that the ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Sport Collection will provide a valuable resource for researchers now and in the future.”

As far as I understand, Dr. Hylton is currently at the stage of identifying suitable material for the archive and asked me whether it was possible to cross-search UK Institutional Repositories to discover relevant full-text research material in this area (having, on numerous occasions, had the [mis]fortune to hear my advocacy on Open Access and repositories!).  As far as I am aware there are two services currently available – the UK Institutional Repository Search from MIMAS and the custom Google Search at OpenDoar (I’d be interested to know of any others) and some preliminary searches yielded a few relevant results – though there is no way of specifying full-text only, of course, which means many results are bib records only.

It’s perhaps still a moot point whether there is real value to a fully functional IR cross-search tool (in the style of http://rian.ie/en for Irish repositories) and the MIMAS and OpenDoar tools are described respectively as “demonstrator” and “beta” but, as Dr. Hylton’s interest supports, I’m inclined to think that such a tool, properly promoted and combined with a fully realised system of Green OA would indeed benefit the academic community, especially since Google abandoned support for OAI-PMH; I do think it would be necessary, somehow, to be able to filter by full text however which perhaps keeps the idea moot for now…

In the meantime, if anyone does have appropriate full text material archived in their repository please let us know and/or pass the call on to interested colleagues.

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

I wasn’t able to attend the UKCoRR meeting held in Kingston on Friday, as much as I would have liked to.  It sounds like I missed out on a really good day with an excellent programme.

A thorough summary and all the presentations from the day are available from the UKCoRR website:

http://www.ukcorr.org/events/aug2009-event.php

In addition, there is a summary on the UKCoRR blog:

http://ukcorr.blogspot.com/2009/08/after-our-meeting.html

I was particularly interested in Theo Andrews’ presentation on Central Funds for Open Access and ensuing discussion around institutionally designated funds for OA – both Gold and Green routes.  I hope UKCoRR don’t mind me reproducing some of the issues discussed here:

1) Concern about the costs: these might escalate, and sometimes amount to “double dipping” (some publishers are paid by authors and subscribers because they charge authors for OA article publication but don’t reduce their subscription fees).
2) Publishers who are aware of funder mandates for OA within 6 months, might introduce 12 month embargoes on post-print availability in OA repositories, in order to force authors to pay for OA publishing of the final version or miss their funder’s mandate. (NB the point here is that funders are paying, as authors can claim such costs from funders. But we’re all struggling to set up mechanisms by which this can be done – see Theo’s presentation for a summary of the issues.)
3) An institutional response might be to set up an OA fund, or it might be to encourage authors to deposit post-prints into the OA repository, rather than paying such publishers’ fees. Some researchers object to the fees being charged.
4) The Wellcome Trust does seem to prefer that the authors pay for OA publication, and indeed it suits authors better than depositing themselves because a part of the Wellcome mandate is for PubMed deposit. By paying, authors can leave the PubMed deposit up to the publishers to do. Is the Wellcome Trust’s mandate skewing the OA landscape in the way publishers have responded to them, whilst other academic disciplines are no way near as well funded?

The inimitable @llordllama has also posted summaries of the day on the UoL Library blog:

http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-1/

http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-2/

On the strength of this I’m certainly looking forward to attending future UKCoRR events – maybe even oop North next time?!

JorumOpen will use DSpace

I think it fair to say that intraLibrary being the platform behind Jorum was a factor in our institutional decision to use the platform at Leeds Met so as the #ukoer projects get underway including Unicycle of course, it is with considerable interest that I discover that Jorum plan to implement a customised DSpace repository apparently to run alongside intraLibrary.

The news came to my attention in an email on the OER-INST mailing list which said that the move was to ensure that Jorum scales up for global access. This I promptly tweeted (me being me) and received a couple of coy allusions from interested parties before a tweet from @JorumTeam informed me that “All OER content for #jorum will be served from DSpace. Content licensed under JEducationUK or JPlus will be served from Intralib.y“.  Aside from this tweet, I’m not sure if there’s been anything more official from Jorum yet and apologies if my immediate web 2.0 dissemination of information in a closed mailing list was in any way inappropriate.

As discussed in previous posts (eg.  This one), I am aware of one or two issues with facilitating Open Access via intraLibrary, though I am confident that we do indeed have suitable technology within the software to facilitate OA, in the form of RSS, SRU and OAI-PMH for example.  It may be there are other issues around scalability that I am unaware of and I’d be very interested to learn why and precisely how Jorum have decided to also utilise DSpace.

No doubt we’ll learn more in due course…

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)

Development of Research Repository Aspect of IntraLibrary

On Friday Mike and I visited colleagues at Keele University for a meeting with Charles Duncan from Intrallect to consider development priorities for intraLibrary to better serve our needs as a research repository.  Over 4 and a half hours we considered the basic issues that need addressing as well as looking forward to some more ambitious functionality and integration with the wider research infrastructure as we move towards the REF.

I was particularly interested to learn about how Keele are implementing Symplectic’s publications management system – http://www.symplectic.co.uk/ – which regularly trawls Web of Science and PubMed central for information about Keele’s academic publications.  Symplectic have clearly been thinking about integration with IRs and there’s even a link to SHERPA/RoMEO.  The system was used at Imperial College London for the RAE 2008 process and includes link functionality with DSpace which is that institution’s IR platform – http://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/.  Intrallect are currently liaising with Symplectic about integration with intralibrary – I’m not certain precisely what form this would take but in an ideal world it would be great if we could auto populate as much metadata as possible (title/bibliographic info/abstract/author/copyright status according to RoMEO) and automatically nudge academics for full text where appropriate!

At Leeds Met we currently lack any form of research database which is why I’ve been exploring what are essentially manual workflows to populate the repository with all research output – I’m not sure how expensive Symplectic is and it may be difficult to justify given this institution’s relatively small research output and the repository may well have to be the research database which is the assumption I’ve been working on; we will also want to explore the soon-to-be-released Web of Science API which may, in any case, enable us to emulate some of this functionality ourselves.

The first item on our agenda was somewhat more prosaic and focussed on our immediate functional requirements – SRU searching and metadata.  Mike has been working on incorporating advanced search into the SRU interface and come up against a couple of issues when searching by author and date which are essentially artifacts of having to query DC rather than LOM; in the LOM, creators and contributors are clearly differentiated, however, querying by DC conflates creator and author roles which may (will) be different if resources are uploaded by someone other than the author.

• Searching dc.creator will search for the creator and author roles
• Searching dc.contributor will search for the content provider role

In addition:

• Searching by dc.date only searches data that relates to the intraLibrary submission process (i.e. the deposit date, and perhaps modification dates if you added an author later on for example)
• The only way to search journal dates is to use the default free text search that searches everything (or most fields anyway).

The solution, of course, is to make it possible to query the LOM by SRU and this is now Intrallect’s intention – indeed, to render all LOM fields query-able which would include user generated tags for example.

The next big question is exposure of open content to search engines and Charles gave us an overview of plans to develop an object “home page” with a static URL which should help in this area.  We also discussed sitemaps and what need to be done external to intraLibrary.  I’m still unclear on how we can improve the format of results returned by Google from the SRU interface; to repeat, Google IS indexing http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/ with site: http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/ currently returning over 500 records.  However this is fairly unstructured; Google is simply following links from http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/browse.php; any subsequent links Googlebot encounters are also indexed and returned as “The Repository search for [link name]” and ideally I’d like results to be returned in a more structured and user friendly form.   Many queries actually return no results where there is (yet) no content to find though where there is content, Google is indexing all human readable metadata.  I’m also not certain whether Googlebot is finding its way into the full text via the Open URL/virtual file paths generated by intraLibrary.  Full text indexing within intraLibrary itself has also been promised.

In short, I’m really not sure how all of these factors may combine to be exploited by a next generation SRU interface!

We then touched upon self-archiving and (semi) mediated workflows; potentially developing SWORD based quick deposit from desktop/web, ideally with automatic metadata generation.

The two other major issues we considered are:

• Policy metadata – handling embargoes

This is pretty crucial to an OA archive of research as many publishers of academic journals specify an embargo period of 12 or 18 months from the date of publication before a paper can be made available in a repository.  We need to be able to add a paper to intraLibrary upon receipt but restrict access until the embargo has expired and for this to happen automatically.  On one level, this functionality should be fairly straightforward to achieve by having intraLibrary check today’s date against an embargo date specified in the metadata; it’s a little more complicated than that though as we would want the metadata to be visible before the embargo date, just not the full text.

• Cover pages for PDF

It was suggested that a coversheet should be generated by intraLibrary on the fly which would certainly be useful as manually creating cover sheets for each and every article is time consuming to say the least; this would be useful functionality for CLA materials which also require a coversheet.

These developments will take some time to implement and the next stage is to prioritise – by anonymous e-postal ballot – Intrallect hope we will start to see some of the major initiatives in a build towards the end of the year.

Thank you to our colleagues at Keele for making us welcome and for feeding us!

Final project report published

The final project report for our JISC start-up project, Implementing an Institutional Repository for Leeds Metropolitan University has now been published.  Available to download as PDF or Word format.

PDF version

Word version

Implementing an Institutional Repository for Leeds Metropolitan University was funded by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme – Repositories Start-up and Enhancement (Strand D).

We would like to thank the programme manager Andy McGregor for his support and guidance throughout the project.

During the project, input from several user groups and supporting staff was of great value and these include:

Academic staff at Leeds Metropolitan University

The TEL team at Leeds Metropolitan University

The Streamline project team

JISC Emerge community

The project team would also like to acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of our software provider, Intrallect as well as the Repositories Support Project and Web2Rights for their expert advice throughout the project.

Thanks also to Beth Hall who used our project as a case study for her MSc in information studies; some of her results are presented as a formal element of the project.