First projects selected at jiscDEPO call

Some selected bids for JISC Deposit Call (tagged as jiscDEPO) on "Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research" were announced along the Open Repositories 2010 Conference held in Madrid from Jul 6-9th. The jiscDEPO call was released last Mar 9th and according to its timeline, all selected projects should already be running (their estimated start due June 2010).

Following projects have been selected at the jiscDEPO call as of today - with some extra one still to come:

• DepositMO: Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits. Developed by teams from the University of Southampton (Lead Institution) and Edinburgh University, and with a close liaison with Microsoft, the DepositMO projects aims to create a repository deposit workflow connecting the user’s computer desktop, especially popular apps such as MS Office, with digital repositories based on EPrints and DSpace. A first DepositMO presentation was delivered by David Tarrant (U Southampton) at OR2010.
  


• RePosit: positing a new kind of deposit. The RePosit Project seeks to increase uptake of a web-based repository deposit tool embedded in a researcher-facing publications management system. Institutions involved in RePosit are University of Leeds (Chair), Keele University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Exeter and University of Plymouth, with close connection to Symplectic Ltd as commercial partner.
  


• DURA: Direct User Repository Access. The DURA project, lead by the University of Cambridge with Mendeley Ltd and Symplectic Ltd as consultant firms, aims to embed institutional deposit into the academic workflow at almost no cost to the researcher, by using Mendeley and Symplectic tools to allow researchers to synchronise their personal research collections with institutional systems.
  

The Sonex workgroup will be supplying its conceptual framework on deposit usecases to these projects and contributing to their coordination via the jiscDEPO project blog planet to be available shortly.

Some topics for Sonex BoF at OR10

Place, date and time for Sonex Bird-of-Feather session to be held next week at Open Repositories Conference 2010 in Madrid are already set: Sonex BoF will take place next Wed July 7th at Room "Reino Unido B" from 17:30 to 19 hrs.

Here are some topics to be discussed along the session:

• The growing number of deposit-related initiatives and events should be properly summarized, classified and advertised somewhere: the Sonex website could widen its present coverage in order to play that role, especially in the US & Canada (out of Europe would probably be more accurate, Berlin 8 Open Access conference 2010 being held in Beijing next Oct), for keeping an eye on progresses wherever they may take place. Some ideas are already available.
  


• Main classes of deposit-related initiatives: Publisher-driven & CRIS transfers. Is the Sonex classification thorough enough? Are there any other possible groups that weren't accounted for and left under the 'Other' general section? Are all classes being adequately covered by some ongoing deposit-related project? What about e-Research repositories (datasets + software)? Could they be the [Sonex] missing piece of the institutional research systems integration jigsaw? Input on the issue by a representative of some related initiative attending the BoF could help.
  


• Common challenges in publisher-driven deposit initiatives. Re-usable procedures: NLM DTDs. The filtering strategy. SWORD endpoint (scarce) implementation and how OpenDOAR/ROAR may help. Author and institution persistent identifiers. Processing of citations. Everything being developed at the same time doesn't make things easier.
  


• CERIF as a spreading standard for CRIS/IR integration. Different ways for achieving the objective, and how the REF affects the whole environment. Hybrid CRIS/IRs: an alternative procedure.
  

8th International JISC/CNI meeting 2010: "Managing data in difficult times"

Along Jul 1-2, 2010, JISC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are holding their 8th International meeting 2010 in Edinburgh, under title "Managing data in difficult times". This meeting joins experts from the US, Europe and the UK to examine policies, strategies, technologies and infrastructure to manage research and teaching data in a fast changing technological and economic environment.

Topics for sessions include: Cloud Computing; Innovation in Learning and Teaching; Open Data Policies; Shared Services; Repositories; Digital Content and Institutional Planning; Resource Discovery; Digital Preservation; e-Science (see meeting programme).

Peter Burnhill from EDINA National Data Centre Edinburgh and member of the Sonex workgroup will deliver a presentation on "Repositories Update UK" at the Repositories update session on Conference Day 2 - which includes also a talk on "Repositories Update US" by Sandy Payette, DuraSpace. Presentation by Peter Burnhill will be shortly available here.