SHERPA and OUP: an odd couple? Co-operation between an institutional repository project and a publisher By Dr. Johanneke Sytsema Oxford University Library Services Systems and Electronic Resources Service johanneke.sytsema@sers.ox.ac.uk

SHERPA – Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access A three year nationwide project Funded by JISC and CURL Institutional E-print Repositories Open Access Research papers At Oxford: Oxford E-prints repository You will be wondering what SHERPA stands for, well it means Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access. It is a three year project funded by JISC and CURL to develop institutional e-print repositories. It is about providing open and free access to research for everybody and to preserve what is deposited for use in the future.

Oxford E-prints E-prints.org software Members of Oxford university can deposit http://eprints.ouls.ox.ac.uk

Oxford E-prints - OUP Co-operating with University Press Launch the repository with content Start: June 2003

First agreements (June 2003) OUP to provide: Metadata of 500 articles by Oxford authors OUP papers by authors from other SHERPA institutions Model 1: Unrestricted Access URL to full text held on OUP server Model 2: Final version text generated by authors themselves on SHERPA server Copyright: OUP to ask learned societies for permission to mount articles In June 2003 the first meeting was arranged between (Martin Richardson,) head of Journal Devision OUP, (Frances Boyle) head of Electronic Resources OULS, general SHERPA project manager (Bill Hubbard) and the SHERPA project director (Stephen Pinfield). They agreed that OUP would provide metadata and full text of 500 articles written by members of Oxford University, published in 2002, from a range of different journals and disciplines. After extracting the data for Oxford, OUP would do the same for other SHERPA partners, who regard ‘Oxford’ as a test bed Two models were considered: 1 . OUP provides a URL with unrestricted access to the full text which will be held on OUP’s server 2. SHERPA Project Partners have permission to mount in their e-print repository the full-text of final versions of papers published in OUP journals in a format generated by the authors themselves Copyright is an issue: OUP owns the copyright to part of the journals it publishes. Therefore it needs to ask mainly the learned societies that own copyright to their journals, for permission to mount articles. Since there are quite a few learned societies that publish via OUP, this is a time consuming business.

Progress Start : June 2003 (draft memorandum of understanding) First articles on Oxford E-prints server: April 2004 First articles for other SHERPA partners: May 2004 Oxford E-prints live: June 2004 Model 1 implemented, working towards Model 2 Permission from learned societies still to be obtained (time consuming) After the first meeting a draft memorandum of understanding was written. August 2003 was mentioned as delivery date for the first batch of articles. In fact, partly due to personel changes, the first batch arrived on the Library’s server in April 2004. After that our technical officer could only start testing the bulk-upload of the articles after April and make the repository go live in June. After this experience, it wasn’t too complicated for OUP to extract data for other SHERPA partners and Nottingham could receive its data in May. The technical officers in Nottingham and Oxford will solve problems and document the upload procedure together, so that other SHERPA partners will not have to reinvent the wheel. So far, model 1 has been implemented, which means that a URL connects to the full text article held on the OUP server. For the user it looks however as if the article is held on the Oxford E-prints server. We are working with OUP towards model 2, where the full text can actually be held on the OUP server whilst usage data will be provided to OUP.

Hurdles Lack of documentation with eprints.org software SGML material variable in quality Sgml-dtd has evolved over time, leads to inconsistency Some infois not found in the SGML but in the path names Lack of PDF’s for number of articles Sometimes: several abstracts – 1 PDF Sometimes: PDF not available PDF’s released for indexing purposes only Usage data comes in inaccessible log files There is no documentation to speak of for the ‘import e-prints’ function. There is no data model, you have to read the database to work out where things are. The sgml-dtd has evolved over time and the older xml seems not to have been updated. This leads to inconsistency in the sgml abstracts – things are not always in the same field or fields are used for different things e.g. sometimes the author field contains the name of a group of authors or corporation- Sometimes the name of the journal is not found in the sgml but in the path name. It may be clear that inconsistency causes a problem for creating a standard procedure for bulk-uploading. Another hurdle was that the sgml’s don’t always match with a pdf. Sometimes there is just a sgml without pdf, sometimes several sgml’s refer to one pdf. Again that causes problems for a standard procedure. PDF’s are held on the publisher’s server and we have to redirect the user to OUP’s server. It would be less complicated to have the PDF on our own server. Both OUP and Oxford E-prints are interested in usage data. Extracting the data from the large log files would be far too time consuming (several days for each query)

Looking ahead Oxford E-prints currently contains 350 articles from more than 50 journals (1999-2004) More articles provided each year of project Looking forward to discussing model 2 Other SHERPA partners will receive data soon

Lessons learned OUP test bed for bulk-uploading OUP test bed for co-operation with publishers Looking to work with other publishers to bulk-upload articles Raising awareness among academics Something tangible to show them

Useful links Oxford E-prints http://eprints.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ Publisher policies re. Open Access http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php www.eprints.org