Implementing an institutional repository:

management, organizational and cultural issues

___________________

Pauline SimpsonTARDis Project Manager

University of Southampton

e-Prints UK WorkshopOxford

22 Mar 2004

The Passion and the Pain

• Passion = enthusiasm, committed, motivated…

• Pain = issues

• Policy Decisions• Management / Organizational Issues• Cultural Issues• Lessons learned • Southampton’s way

• TARDis (Targeting Academic Research for Disclosure and Dissemination)

• Set up with HEFCE/JISC funding to Jan 2005

• Other UK Universities : Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Nottingham (CURL), Edinburgh, Bristol, London Univs : Imperial, UCL, SOAS, Kings College etc

• JISC FAIR Programme – Focus on Access to Institutional Resources – ways in which university research output can be made freely

available - more accessible, more rapidly– Built on rapid progression of the Open Access movement –

IRs part of the solution– IRs part of the building block of e-Research

Southampton University Institutional Repository

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk

Policy Decisions (Pre) – 1

• Informed by environmental assessment –– Personal and school websites, research survey– Variety of practices – to build on, assist with, not to destroy– Research reporting – IR can offer a real support

• e-Print Archive (full text) vs Institutional Repository –– is it specific media (postprints or preprints of refereed journal

articles) or a record of all organisational output; • Responsibility level if IR –official record, definitive• Decision informed by

• Scope– What to deposit - potentially all organisational output (research,

educational, and administrative) – Southampton – all Research Output, but not learning objects or

administrative documents (at present)– Current research and/or legacy literature?

– Who can deposit? What size of footprint?

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 close 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 (and uses three different softwares!)

Policy Decisions - 3

• Software – which software to choose? Now a selection: GNU EPrints,

DSpace, CDSWare, Fedora, I-ToR, MyCoRe, MPG eDoc, ARNO.

• Or will you write your own!– Open Archive Initiative compliance essential to make repositories

interoperable and searchable

• TARDis Project working with GNU EPrints (developed at Southampton) and feeding experience back into software development (eg improved underlying structure in recent new version)

Research Deposit Types – rationalized (13 to 8)

Policy Decisions – 4

• Resources– Team

• Technical support is v. important – you will want to customize software (skills – Perl, MySQL for GNU EPrints; Java for DSpace)

• Strong Advocacy, Admin• TARDis – 2FTE (+ support of academic library staff)

– Hardware – server – size and growth– Funding – business model, project, core library budget

• Stakeholders/Partnerships– Who owns the activity, who leads?– Southampton – external liaison, researchers, research support office,

library, planning and marketing, Information Systems all involved in parts of research dissemination

• Uses– what other services available from IR. Likely buy-in if value added is

offered. Consider: education agenda, e-Publishing, Knowledge Management, Preservation, Research Assessment Exercise

Research Assessment Exercise Collection

draft interface

Management and Organizational Issues - 1

• Deposit options – Researcher self deposit and /or assisted deposit– Southampton experience indicating a need for Fast track – deposit

the file without supplying metadata

• Metadata quality later presentation (JH)

– Ensuring quality and rich metadata is labour intensive – to what level?

• Mandatory metadata fields– Sufficient to produce a citation?– Too many a barrier to deposit – as low as possible

• DSpace/MIT = 3, Soton = document dependent

Management and Organizational Issues - 2

• Digitization– Will you offer to scan hard copy if electronic not available

• Figs often only available this way

• File formats – What file formats will you accept– Southampton accepts all (but…). Formats requiring special

viewers – ensure viewers available eg. Postscript/Ghostscript.

– Nottingham accept only pdf– Will you offer file conversion service.

• Conversion can alter content format• Word should be converted

– Southampton - Word files are archive only

Management and Organizational Issues - 3

• Preservation guranteed?– No definitive answer – projects and DPC

• Southampton – ‘secure storage’• MIT offer preservation

• Only full text database or a publication database?– Accept non full text records?

• Policy linked to organizational needs

• Copyright– Will you actively seek permission to deposit papers– RoMeO Publishers Copyright policies

• http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

Management and Organizational Issues - 4

• Deposit Agreement and Use Agreement– Important to define for both depositors and users– Legal document?– Acceptance by click or proceeding through

• Withdrawal of records, access etc• Plagiarism

• Quality assurance – Not of the content – peer pressure– Appoint editors at school/department level

Cultural Issues - 1

• ADVOCACY -– Dedicated responsibility within the team– Sensitive to organizational culture and background– Enthusiast– Presentation and debating skills– Community size

• Busy researchers, huge task to convince all• Sheer size of exercise to visit all schools• Logistics – pilots before full introduction – Ocean and Earth Sciences, Social Sciences, Education, Physics and

Astronomy

– Strategy– Identify stakeholders, management committees - who are the policy

makers that can make it happen – need high level champions –need to be convinced

Cultural Issues - 2

• Prior art– Do researchers already deposit in a subject archive eg

computer science, economics, physics, education?– Does a publications database already exist?

• import data

• Copyright– Real concern of researchers – University Legal Affairs Office

Cultural Issues - 3

• One record – for many purposes– Funding proposals, RAE, research reporting, CVs,

personal and school web pages.

• Positioning – where to place access to the IR– Access through Library website, main web site,via School websites?– Southampton developing School ‘views’

• Branding– Schools/departments want their own branding

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 – moving target

• Last version not always stored by author – often not totally digital – figures may be hard copy or text + figures held separately – need to zip files etc

– Author may have publisher’s journal version

• Peer review, impact factors, citations are paramount to many– until alternate scientometric measures available – Citebase offers citation-

ranked search service for freely available text. • Full range of research output significant to others

• 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

Providing a value added service?

• Researchers are less interested in institutional visibility or profile and open access issues – 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)

Southampton’s 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 proactively seeking permission

Southampton’s 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) – but keeping abreast of developments with learning objects or administrative document initiatives

• Shared use of other JISC projects outcomes and services vital to success eg RoMeo

• Harvested by global and national search services– Oaister: 3,045,063 records from 268 institution– e-Prints UK

TARDis e-Prints Soton

A national vision: ePrints UK

www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk

ePrints UK architecture

Global Service provider - find the pearls

And Google!

Towards a vision of joined up research – IRs at the hub

Diagram from eBank UK project

Thank You

TARDis http://tardis.eprints.org/

e-Prints Soton http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/

Pauline Simpson Project Manager

Jessie Hey Advocacy, Researcher Support

Tim Brody Technical Support

Natasha Lucas Admin Support