Widening Access to Institutional Assets: what are the practical implications? Implementing an institutional repository: management and organizational issues ___________________ Jessie M.N. Hey TARDis Project Research Fellow University of Southampton JISC Conference 2004 Birmingham, 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

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

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?

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 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 publishers 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)

Southamptons 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

Southamptons 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 e-Prints Soton Jessie Hey, Pauline Simpson And with us today complementary viewpoints from our cluster of projects