Sword-Sonex project extension

  "Data deposit nowadays... is mainly based upon submission by email... and remains labour-intensive"
(Simon Hodson, JISCMRD Programme manager, on present data deposit workflows)


Representatives of the JISC-funded Sword and Sonex projects met Balviar Notay and Simon Hodson (JISC) on July 6th at Brettenham House, London for further dealing with Sword v2 extension to automated transfer of research data (see reference to last meeting on the issue on Nov 20th).

Once the first round of JISCMRD Phase I projects is over and final reports have been published, the Sword-Sonex workteam is already working to put together a data transfer use case document where different project solutions are listed, with their advantages and shortcomings, so that some analysis is carried out on how Sword might aid the automation of the dataset transfer into repositories (or similar target resources for research data). The team will liaise with several JISCMRD projects in order to find out their specific approach to the data transfer issue. Timeschedule for the extended Sword project (coordinated by Paul Walk, UKOLN) is as follows:

WP1: Identify key projects & individuals who have relevant information and skills regarding datasets [Jul 6-13]

WP2: Document the dataset use cases in collaboration with Sonex [Jul 18-end Aug]

WP3: Interpret the data set use cases as processes carried out with Sword [Sep 5-24]

WP4: Carry out gap analysis on dataset use cases on Sword and recommend future work, and produce a web resource for any new or existing JISC projects (such as those in JISCMRD2 Programme) to refer to, which will provide all the relevant information regarding dataset deposit [Sep 27-Oct 21]

WP5: Identify key Sword clients and potential client environments, accept and evaluate proposals, issue development contracts [Jul 6-Aug 15]

WP6: Development of 1, 2 or 3 client environments [Sep 5-end Oct]

WP7: Project management and administration [Jul 6-end Oct]

JISC Repository Deposit Programme Meeting in Birmingham

  A JISC Repository Deposit Programme meeting was held on Mar 1st, 2011 at Maple House Birmingham. Under coordination from Balviar Notay, JISC manager for the Deposit projects, presentations were delivered from representatives of the four presently running projects under JISC Deposit call: DepositMO (Steve Hitchcock, U Southampton), DURA (John Norman, UCam), RePosit (Ian Tilsed, Leeds U) and Kultivate (Marie Therese Gramstadt, VADS). Additional presentations were done for the deposit-related Open Access Repository Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project (Theo Andrew, EDINA), Sword v2 (Richard Jones - Symplectic) and Sonex (Pablo de Castro, Carlos III University Madrid) projects.

Lots of interesting issues were raised and discussed along the set of presentations, and specific teamworking activities were later carried out for promoting cooperation between projects. This was the first opportunity for representatives of all projects involved in the JISC Deposit programme to personally meet the other projects and learn about their progress and potentially complementary findings.

Several complementary visions of deposit were outlined along the workshop: a quite technical one from projects such as DepositMO and Sword, an advocacy-focused approach from RePosit project aiming to increase engagement to repository and a vision of repositories as potential suppliers of the global institutional research output required for REF purposes from DURA.

Steve Hitchcock (DepositMO, implementing Sonex usecase scenario nr 4, Deposit via personal software) delivered a few demo examples of Swordv2-assisted deposit into the DepositMO test repository via local computer file manager, including deposit of previously parsed full-text document ingesting metadata as well and achieving the metadata+object transfer. A key question on document deposit for management vs publishing purposes was also raised along DepositMO presentation: are repositories (or could they evolve into) a proper environment for document management or does the Open Access philosophy prevent them from being used as cooperative tools for example for pre-print edition by a group of authors?

DURA and RePosit projects, implementing Sonex usecase nr 2, CRIS/IR integration, are both dealing with making deposit as easy as possible for the author community by ingesting previoulsy synced inputs from Mendeley and Symplectic Elements into IRs (DURA) and specificallly “increasing engagement with repository” (RePosit) by designing a set of awareness-raising materials and campaigns later to be shared with other projects.

Kultivate, aiming to increase deposit in the arts and design environment, is both the newest and possibly the most innovative project in the strand. Repository development having been strongly focused on research papers as a main research output, work on so far underexploited creative arts materials gives Kultivate the opportunity to set new standards and provide new resources to the Open Access repository community.

Further presentations for projects providing general-purpose deposit infrastructure followed, such as EDINA Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) middleware for discovery and Sword-assisted deposit. OA-RJ is already live-testing its broker for automated transfer of publisher or subject repository content inputs into specific target repositories. Richard Jones described the ongoing process for developing Sword-v2, which will deliver fine-tuned functionalities for metadata+object automated transfer to the rest of the Deposit projects and the wider repository community, resulting in higher deposit rates. Finally, a Sonex presentation stressed the need for re-examining Sonex deposit usecase scenarios for covering new types of materials such as research data, creative arts materials and learning materials. Sonex also suggested common strategy for measuring success of JISC-funded deposit projects being designed at Birmingham City University Evidence Base might include specific questions to be asked to repository managers such as whether any given automated deposit strategy was used for content ingest purposes besides specific strategies for measuring success devised by projects themselves.

The workshop presentations will shortly be available at the Deposit wiki. Once Deposit projects are completed another programme meeting will be held for sharing conclusions and examine case studies and success stories as to widely implement resulting solutions.

SONEX presentation in Valencia, Spain

The 10th REBIUN Workshop on Digital Proyects will be held Oct 7-8, 2010 in Valencia, Spain. Among the technical presentations scheduled for the workshop, there is one on Sonex called 'Interoperabilidad y Repositorios: el Grupo de Trabajo SONEX' (Interoperability and Repositories: the SONEX Workgroup).

In the Sonex presentation, to be delivered on Thu Oct 7th, the main Sonex worklines will be discussed, as well as incipient implementations of Sonex usecase scenarios in Spanish Institutional repositories.

BMC Automated Article Deposit feature

As of Sep 29th, BioMed Central Update announced BMC Shared Support Membership as a new kind of low-cost membership for sharing article processing fees between institutions and their research teams. Main issue from a Sonex point of view in this new type of BMC membership is it includes a feature for Automated Article Deposit into repositories via Sword, by which "any article published [in BMC open access journals] will be automatically deposited into the Shared Support Member's institutional repository". This means extension to further institutions for the http://sonexworkgroup.blogspot.com/2010/04/biomed-central-partners-with-mit.html announced last Apr 29th.



See BMC Automated Article Deposit for further information on this deposit service and BMC customers entitle to it, and BMC Member list by country to check for potential institutional users.

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.

A summary of ongoing deposit-related projects

A summary of currently running deposit-related projects and initiatives (as of Jun 5th, 2010) is shown in the table below. The list is not intended to be comprehensive, but just a sample of ongoing initiatives known to the Sonex workgroup. Should there be any remarkable deposit-related project missing from the list, it shall be promptly added as soon as we get a notification.

Project name	Institutions/ Organisations	Country(ies)	Contact person
Publisher-driven initiatives
PEER Project	STM-Assoc/ESF/Max Planck G/UGöttingen/INRIA/SURF/ UBielefeld	EU	Julia Wallace (STM)/Foudil Bretel (INRIA)
Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ)	EDINA	UK	Theo Andrew (EDINA)
BMC Deposit into DSpace@MIT	BMC/MIT	UK/US	Matthew Cockerill (BMC)
National & Institutional CRIS/IR integration initiatives
NARCIS	Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)	NL	Elly Dijk (KNAW)
Enrich: Repository and Research System Integration	University of Glasgow	UK	William Nixon (U Glasgow)
CRISPool	University of St. Andrews	UK	Anna Clements (U St. Andrews)
TDC Systems Integration	TCD	IE	Niamh Brennan (TCD)
U-GOV	CINECA Consorzio Interuniversitario	IT	Nicola Bertazzoni (CINECA)
CRIStin	University Centre for Information Technology (USIT-UiO)	NO	Anne Asserson (U Bergen, UiB)
Aramis	State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER)	CH	Beat Sottas (SER)
USDA-CRIS	US Dept Agriculture. National Institute of Food and Agriculture	US	Carolyn Deckers, Juanita Hammond, Teresa Bailey (USDA)
RCAAP/DeGóis Integration	UMIC/FCCN/FCT	PT	Eloy Rodrigues (UMinho)
RIS/IR Integration at UPC	Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)	ES	Jordi Serrano, Toni Prieto (UPC)
CRIS/OAR Interoperability Project	KE/DTU	DK	Mikael K. Elbæk (DTU), Mogens Sandfær (DTIC)
CCLRC Corporate Data Repository (CDR)	Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC)	UK	E. Grabczewski (CCLRC)
SEMAT	Iranian Research Institute for Information Science & Technology (Irandoc)	IR	Omid Fatemi (Irandoc)
Commercial initiatives
Article Authoring Add-in	MS Research	US	Lee Dirks/Alex Wade (MS Research)
Repository tools	Symplectic Ltd	UK	Richard Jones (Symplectic Ltd)
Pure	Atira	DK	Bo Alroe (Atira)
Converis	Avedas	DE	Rudolf Weiss (Avedas)
Enovation Solutions	Enovation	IE	Gavin Henrick (Enovation)
Other
SWORD Project	UKOLN/JISC	UK	Adrian Stevenson (UKOLN), Julie Allinson (U York)
York Digital Library - Integration for the Next Generation (YODL-ING)	University of York/University of Leeds	UK	Julie Allinson (University of York)
EasyDeposit – SWORD deposit tool creator	University of Auckland	NZ	Stuart Lewis (U Auckland)

Sonex Deposit BoF at OR10 Madrid

The programme of BoF session proposals for Open Repositories 2010 Conference in Madrid was just released. There will be a Sonex Deposit BoF taking place along the conference (final date & location still to be announced), under following guidelines:

Along last year Sonex workgroup has been devoted to analysis of Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange, that is, of potential deposit processes into repositories for scholarly publications from various sources and related interoperability issues. Several relevant usecases have been selected for following their implementation at institutional environments. After recent publication of Deposit call by JISC (Feb’10), Sonex was assigned the new role of providing support and eventual coordination for selected bids. We are therefore inviting colleagues taking part in ongoing or future deposit-related projects to debate on different approaches, common problems and chances for avoiding redundancies among them.

BioMed Central partners with MIT Libraries to deposit open access articles using SWORD

BioMed Central, the leading open access publisher, has worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries to develop an automated system that uses the latest technology to automatically populate MIT's digital repository, DSpace@MIT, with the official version of articles by MIT researchers that have been published in BioMed Central's journals.

In order to make it easier for MIT authors to submit articles to DSpace@MIT, the MIT Libraries worked with BioMed Central to set up an automatic feed of MIT articles, using a version of the Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) protocol. The SWORD protocol allows the institutional repository to receive newly published articles from any of BioMed Central's 200+ journals as soon as they are published, without the need for any effort on the part of the author and streamlining the deposit process for the repository administrator.

In describing the importance of the SWORD integration, Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central's Managing Director said, "Campus open access policies are hugely important, but the effort involved in compliance can be a major obstacle to their success. That is why we think that automated deposit has an important role to play. We hope that this pioneering work by BioMed Central in collaboration with MIT Libraries will encourage other institutions to work with us to establish similar automated feeds, and we encourage other publishers to adopt a similar approach".

Read more at BMC Press release.

Richard Jones joins Sonex workgroup

After Jim Downing announced last March he would be forced to leave the Sonex workgroup later this year, group members were discussing possible candidates for bringing a similar technical profile into the workgroup. Richard Jones, Head of Repository Systems at Symplectic Ltd, was nr 1 on the resulting list of repository techies. A few weeks after these conversations, Richard has agreed to become part of the Sonex workgroup, and will be contributing his large experience on Publications System's integration with digital repository systems and general interoperability issues to further Sonex analysis of the deposit landscape worldwide.

Richard is Head of Repository Systems at Symplectic Ltd, and is responsible for integrating their research and publications management system (Symplectic Elements) with a variety of digital repository platforms.

Prior to joining Symplectic, Richard built and deployed repository systems for three large universities: the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bergen, and Imperial College London. He also spent some time as a research engineer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, working with cloud services and content management systems.

Richard is a founder member of the DSpace Committer Group, although is now much less active in that community than he would like. He plays an active role in open standards development; he was on the technical committee defining the Open Archives Initiative Object Re-use and Exchange (OAI-ORE) standard, and has recently taken up technical lead for SWORD standard, in which he has been involved in since near its inception. He is also chair of the Developer Focus group, part of DevCSI representing developers in and around higher education. He has written numerous articles on repository development and Open Access, as well as a book concentrating explicitly on Institutional Repositories.

OA-RJ Multiple Deposit meeting (HEFCE, London, 2010/04/08)

This meeting aims to debate relevant issues for the already running Open Access-Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project, as a means of advancing with successive phases of it. The meeting, organized by OA-RJ manager Theo Andrew (EDINA), joins up different stakeholders related to OA-RJ, such as publishers (NPG, UKPMC, BMC), funders, IR managers, the Sonex workgroup, the NAMES project, the SWORD protocol and JISC (represented by David Flanders and James Farnhill).

Some meeting conclusions from a Sonex viewpoint (general conclusions summarized by Theo in a post at the OARJ blog):

- The PEER project should be considered as a key reference for OA-RJ, at least at its initial stages, for there are important similarities between both projects. NPG has also taken part in the PEER project, which dealt mainly with publishers depositing authors' manuscripts into an array of IRs, and warns about risk of redundancy at this stage. However, publishers as deposit agents is just one of the OA-RJ lines of work, so overlapping between both projects should be just partial. Nevertheless, whenever PEER previous developments may be reused for OA-RJ purposes, a strong effort should be made to ensure this is done. Sonex may be of great help in achieving some degree of cooperation between both projects.

- The Sonex workgroup may eventually support the OA-RJ project for tackling some of the basic issues at design stage (such as the multiple copy vs one copy+multiple links dilemma or the way deposited items may be kept at the OA-RJ deposit until -and even after- receiving notification from target IRS of the item going live). These points are dealt with in the meeting, but there are still questions remaining and new issues are likely to show up along the project development. If Sonex succeeds in organising the proposed Deposit meeting (initially set for Oct'2010) on ongoing deposit initiatives worldwide, it may also be a good opportunity for discussing different approaches to the same objectives among members of the represented projects.

JISC Deposit Call

As of Mar 9, 2010, JISC Grant Funding Call 2/10 on "Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research" was released. Strand A in such call relates to Deposit, with the specific objective of "Ensuring take-up of solutions that enable and encourage author deposit of Open Access research outputs into repositories by embedding deposit into research or related practice". Sonex already working on the issue, there is an opportunity for the workgroup to assist projects funded under the JISC Deposit Call by supplying the bigger picture of repository deposit. The possibility of providing a webspace where people interested in deposit can go to learn about deposit work was also suggested.

Related projects

The following projects are dealing with some kind of deposit action into repositories, and are therefore related to the Sonex initiative:

• JISC-EDINA’s Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) Project

• PEER Project

• Knowledge Exchange ‘CRIS/OAR Interoperability Project’ for defining a CERIF-based metadata exchange format between CRIS and Institutional Repositories,

• SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit
Sword overview
Sword2 final report

• JISC-Heriot-Watt University’s JournalTOCsAPI project,

• JISC-The Deposit Plait

• JISC-EM-Loader

• JISC-EIDeR (Enhanced ingest to digital e-research repositories)

• EU OpenAIRE

Sonex timeline

At the Amsterdam workshop the initial time horizon was estimated to be two to three years in a multi-phase activity, with Phase 1 being rapid engagement over a six+ month period. Once the RH workgroup started dealing with the use case analysis and selection for implementation, the timeline was scheduled in terms of milestones:

June 2009 - State of development of Repository Handshake works to be summarized at OAI6 (CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication) in Geneva

October 2009 - Production of a 2-page preliminary workplan document for each of the three selected use-case scenarios in relation with actual projects being presently developed. To be presented at the JISC Deposit show and tell barcamp, London, Oct 12th. Upload of resulting information to the wiki http://repinf.pbworks.com/

End of 2009 - Gap analysis and complete study of all selected use cases

2010 - JISC Deposit Call - SONEX potential supporting role

No 'Repository Handshake' anymore?

The Repository Handshake workgroup started its activities along the International Repositories Workshop held in Amsterdam on Mar 16-17, 2009. This workshop was organised by JISC, Surf Foundation and DRIVER in order to (i) identify the essential components of an international repositories infrastructure and (ii) agree ways to resolve any issues identified as such essential components, including areas where practical international collaboration would help. Task analysis was divided up among four workgroups, Repository Handshake being one of the strands. Its objective was to improve the ways in which repositories can be populated with research papers from a range of sources by automating negotiation between depositing agent and repository(ies), building from the SWORD protocol. At the end of the Amsterdam work sessions several relevant use cases had been identified and an action plan was designed for carrying out further analysis on the main ones along a preliminary 6-month phase that would lead to funded projects. The Repository Handshake workgroup would deal with this preliminary phase analysis.

Later on the Repository Handshake strand was renamed Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange (SONEX) by the members of the workgroup, in order to get a more accurate picture of the scope of the works. The new name narrows the scope of the analysis to the actual operations that are being examined, that is, metadata and digital object exchange, leaving out the potentially misleading Handshake terminology.

More information on the other strands developed at the Amsterdam International Workshop in: http://repinf.pbworks.com/