KULTURising research repositories

  "...I can only add that research for art, craft and design needs a great deal of further research. Once we get used to the idea that we don't need to be scared of 'research' - or in some way protected from it - the debate can really begin."
(Christopher Frayling, RCA Rector (1996-2010), from: "Research in Art and Design" (Royal College of Art Research Papers, Vol 1, No 1, 1993/4). Royal College of Art, London).


  On the Jul 6th meeting at JISC Brettenham House some planning was done as well for Sonex extension besides Swordv2's. In the framework of this project extension, Sonex is expected inter alia to further support the JISC Deposit Projects and continue to gather international deposit use cases, as well as to provide some
recommendations on how to improve deposit.

As part of this further involvement with JISC Deposit Projects, Sonex was attending the Kultivate Project Conference on Jul 15th at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).


Based at the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a research centre at the University for the Creative Arts, and funded by the JISC from late November 2010 to the end of July 2011 within the JISC Deposit strand, the Kultivate Project aims to "share and support the application of best practice in the development of institutional repositories that are appropriate to the specific needs and behaviours of creative and visual arts researchers". Kultivate builds upon the knowledge and experience of the Kultur II group, which grew out of the JISC funded Kultur project (2007-2009). The Group currently consists of over forty institutions and projects and is led by the VADS.

Specific goals of the Kultivate project are:

- to increase the rate of arts research deposit,
- to enhance the user experience for researchers, and
- to develop and sustain a sector-wide community of shared best practice in arts research repositories.

There are significant differences between Kultivate and the rest of the JISCdepo projects (RePosit, DURA and DepositMO) in the sense that while the three other ones deal specifically with semi-automation of widely-recognised content ingest into repositories (mainly by fostering platform interoperability), Kultivate seeks
to extend the coverage of institutional repositories to the creative arts environment, which is both rather different in nature to the mentioned well-accepted research and which hasn't been specifically addressed so far as scholarly output. In this regard, Kultivate can be both seen as sort of an outlier project and as the most challenging of them four.


After eight months of hard work, the Kultivate Project Conference put together a model set of talks and presentations (see programme and updated presentations) to introduce the project outcomes.

Several talks made introductory reflections on what creative arts research should be - with its specific peculiarities. The fact that the output from activities in the creative arts is or is not called research (artists themselves sound a bit surprised sometimes on being called researchers) doesn't seem that relevant anyway - main thing actually being it's scholarly output from many HEIs and Arts Schools, and as such it should be subject to standard deposit into institutional repositories.

However, it is often hard to persuade artists to have their work filed into repositories ("the repo doesn't fit the needs of creative artists" a frequent allegation for not taking part in the project). In this regard, advocacy is particularly critical for institutional projects being carried out in the area - they are breaking through in a discipline where no such thing could possibly exist (so far) as PubMed, Chemical Abstracts or arXiv.

See examples of effective advocacy under the Kultivate project umbrella at Goldsmiths Research Online and UAL Research Online, plus the own Kultivate Advocacy Toolkit, one of the project's main outputs.

Another relevant progress Kultivate is promoting is the setting of metadata standards for description of creative artworks (something that incidentally brings the project closer to the data management strand rather that to the deposit one, making it a quite heterodox one). See for instance 'The listening room' item at UAL Research Online with its four-tabbed description including metadata as well as images and videos (and thus effectively delivering an answer to frequent artists complain on work documentation: "I did a performance, not a video" or "Fine, but where am I?").


Performance Art Data Structure (PADS), for which the unit subject to description is the 'work' not the 'digital object', is yet another solution for complex description of creative arts output developed by the University of Bristol within the JISC-funded CAiRO Project for Complex Archive Ingest for Repository Objects (see example of PADS example record for 'Becoming snail' performance by Paul Hurley at JISC Digital Media).
PADS is also involved in the Europeana attempt to standardise perfomance metadata accross the EU.

Finally, a good (and growing) number of EPrints-based implementations of the Kultur enhancements for designing creative arts output-focussed institutional repositories were presented at the project conference (incidentally arising questions by DSpace-based IR managers on when something similar will be developed for DuraSpace). Kultivate has also provided (in cooperation with the University of Southampton team) a set of technical enhancements to the EPrints platform, among them on the MePrints application and the IRStats package.


Implementation of those enhancements by different institutions (either arts-focussed or general purposed ones with Arts Departments within them) is giving way to a wave of repository KULTURisation (ie being adapted to deal with creative arts output) across the UK that might well spread beyond that once working standards are consolidated. In the meantime the VADS-lead eNova project is already building upon the outputs of both Kultivate and Kultur projects.

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]

A first analysis of data management

As previously mentioned in this blog, the Sonex workgroup is now try to extend its use case scenario analysis on 'Deposit opportunities into repositories' to the realm of research data. A first meeting held at EDINA on Mar 30th served the purpose of drawing a general picture of the data management landscape.

Stress should be put on the fact that the way of handling SSH and STM data may substantially differ. Given the strong IASSIST-attachment of some Sonex members, the workgroup initial approach to data management may therefore be a bit biased towards procedures in the area of Social Science and Humanities. However, attention will be paid as well to specific ways of dealing with STM datasets as the analysis gets fine-tuned.

Moving along the same lines as we did for research articles, we first try to tackle the ACTIONS scope. Data deposit is certainly an issue, but there's more to data-related processes than just deposit. It's also about Access to data and also about Data Notification/Register.

Next we get on to the WHAT and the WHO. Answer to WHAT? is a data set. Previous analysis by Peter Burnhill shows -at least- three different types of research data (see image below).


Dealing mainly with the data file itself, this data type classification is somewhat narrow for the general picture of data management, so Sonex would rather set a new and more generic data classification for answering the question WHAT is there to deposit:

• Metadata record


• Codebook or user guide, where all necessary information is provided to allow for data re-use*


• Raw data or dataset file(s)

* See a DCMI-based description at: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). (2009). Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving: Best Practice Throughout the Data Life Cycle (4th ed.). Ann Arbor, MI. Section 'Important documentation elements', p. 22

These three elements should ideally be supplied as a single package.

As to the question of WHO performs each data-related operation (Notification-Deposit-Grant access), a handful of running projects within the JISC MRD (phase I) programme should serve to test the different use cases resulting from a double-entry 'Action/What' table as featured below.


Next step as we proceed to further development of this preliminary analysis should be a survey for gathering information on procedures for data handling as carried out in specific JISC MRD projects.

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.

"On such a full sea are we now afloat"

Such quotation -from W. Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'- closed Drs. Eefke Smit's talk "Taking the Current when it Serves: Research Data from the Publisher's Perspective" she delivered along 'Academic Publishing in Europe': the APE 2011 conference, held at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Jan 11-12th, 2011.


Aiming to gather some facts for its ongoing analysis on research data management and its deposit into repositories, Sonex just attended APE2011, a meeting for the publishing industry and its environment held yearly in Berlin since 2006. The conference organisers do regularly publish a brief official report shortly after the event celebration (reports on previous APE editions
available here, report on this edition due shortly).

This particular visit to Berlin offered the chance to attend yet another event besides APE2011: the SOAP Symposium. Final report by the SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project survey was presented along this one-day meeting, held on Jan 13th in the Goethe Room of the renowned Harnack-Haus in Berlin. The SOAP project describes and analyses the open access publishing landscape as well as exploring the risks and opportunities of the transition to open access publishing for libraries, publishers and funding agencies - see preliminary survey results, final report will be available as of next March.

The conference programme for APE2011, entitled "Smarter Publishing in the New Decade", included promising topics such as evolution of peer-review and ways to improve it, the so-called data deluge, business opportunities in China and how Open Access is becoming increasingly mainstream within the publishing environment. Discussions on those matters were lively both at round tables and at lunch pauses. Sonex interest being mainly on research data management, this report will subsequently focus on presentations and debates on the subject.

On Tuesday Jan 11th afternoon, a session was held on “The Data Deluge: to Drown or to Swim?”, chaired by Bob M. Campbell. Herbert Gruttenmaier, INIST-CNRS, started his presentation "Helping to Ride: a look at data sharing and access policies" by reminding that, since we were in Berlin, the definition of an Open Access Contribution on page 1 of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge includes “raw data and metadata”. Some highlights from his talk were:

• There is a large number of Data Sharing Policies being defined by administrations, institutions, funding agencies and publishers themselves under the guideline "data should be made as freely and widely available as possible". See for instance NSF’s requirement for submission of data management plans of May 10th, 2010, under general policy statement “Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants”.
  Or the very recent (Jan 10th, 2011) commitment by a group of major international funders of public health research to “work together to increase the availability of data emerging from our funded research, in order to accelerate advances in public health”.
  


• Publishers such as BioMed Central were featured as high-profile supporters of Open Data (see Dec 11th, 2010 post at this blog), and NPG editorial policy on dataset sharing was specifically mentioned along the talk, as well as the Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing statement that “Raw research data should be made freely available to all researchers”. Finally, discipline-based data policies such as PaN-Data Scientific data Policy Draft for Scientific Data Management Framework at European Photon and Neutron Facilities or the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) adopted in a coordinated fashion by Dryad partner journals.
  


• Not everything is that simple though: the Nov 2009 "Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences” RIN report shows that researchers are not so eager to share their data with others, and that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies may not achieve the goals there are aiming for, namely scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences.
  

Drs. Eefke Smit, International Association of STM Publishers, provided a counterexample for these growing data sharing policies by publishers along her talk on "Research Data from the Publisher's Perspective" by describing the Journal of Neuroscience policy of no longer taking supplementary material from authors since Nov 1st, 2010, the procedure posing too heavy a burden on paper reviewers.
She also warned of the so-called data deluge, according to which tera- and petabite sized datasets will increase their share in research projects in upcoming years.
However, when researchers are asked where they would like to submit their research data, the answer is more often than not "publishers". This brings along the issue of research data preservation: results of an internal survey by STM Publishers show what she called “an improvable situation” with regard to preservation.

Planned talk “Data Publishing in the Context of the ICSU World Data System” by Dr. Michael Diepenbroek, Director of WDC-MARE/PANGAEA, University of Bremen, went finally off the conference programme. However, the next speaker, Dr. Jan Brasse, Managing Director of DataCite, provided some information on the progress of one of the main databases for research data in the geosciences area, by for instance stating there was “a wide cooperation between Elsevier and PANGAEA via DOI-based external links from online papers” at the former’s platforms. This kind of cooperation between publishers and international databases for handling research data might be useful for tacking the abovementioned data preservation issues.
Dr. Brasse, affiliated with the German National Library of Science and Technology Hannover, described as well the evolution of the DataCite international project as it gets carried out by local member institutions: as of Dec’10, over 1M records are already registered with DOI names at datacite.org. Perspectives for the project include setting up of a Central Metadata Base as of Jun'11; DataCite becoming a harvest point for third parties such as WoS; and cooperation via CrossRef for data-article lookup.

The data management session ended with the talk on “Managing Publication and Research Data: the eSciDoc Research Infrastructure” by Dr. Malte Dreyer from Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL). eSciDoc is as a joint project of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), with the aim to realize a next-generation platform for communication and publication in research organization. Further eSciDoc projects mentioned along the presentation and dealing with research data management were ‘Astronomer‘s Workbench’ (astronomy), Lifecycle Logger (biochemistry) and BW-eSci(T) for computational linguistics. DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) –in whose development eSciDoc is directly involved- and CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) projects were repeatedly highlighted along the session as leading EU projects on development of digital research infrastructure (including data management) for the Humanities and Social Sciences.


A joint panel discussion was then held after the presentations on research data management, with speakers taking questions from the floor. Alicia Wise, Elsevier Director of Universal Access and former archaeologist raised the issue of costs attached to research data management and who should fund them: it was agreed by the panellists that national funding bodies should assume the cost of data management. Along her question Dr. Wise incidentally mentioned that data management at the archaeological research project she used to work for succeeded only thanks to researchers dedicating 50% of their time to data curation. This aspect of dataset deposit will be examined by Sonex in order to identify alternative (automatic) curation procedures currently being used to relieve researchers of the data curation burden.

The data management issues extended well outside the session specifically devoted to them and into the Innovation session held next day, where Portland Press Adam Marshall presentation on the Semantic Biochemical Journal and Project Utopia at the Manchester School of Computer Science did extensively deal with data handling (see “Calling International Rescue: knowledge lost in literature and data landslide!” at Biochem J. (2009) 424, 317–333 for a review on “how to provide new ways of interacting with the literature, and new and more powerful tools to access and extract the knowledge sequestered within it”).

At the end of the data session panel discussion Dr. Eefke Smit synthesized the three challenges of research data management: normalization, standardization and migration. She did also remind the audience of verses following the one quoted in the title of this post:

(…) On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

SONEX and Research Data: new deposit usecase scenarios

A SONEX meeting was held last Sat Nov 20th at JISC Office in Brettenham House, London. The meeting was intented to produce some feedback on the RFC version of the DL.org Technology and Methodology Digital Library Cookbook. SONEX feedback on featured interoperability solutions was mainly focused on enhancing the Sword protocol description in the Cookbook as to cover functionality updates in the new version of Sword.

Richard Jones (SONEX-Symplectic), Balviar Notay (JISC manager for SONEX) and Pablo de Castro (SONEX-Carlos III Univ Madrid) at SONEX meeting in Brettenham House

The second half of the SONEX meeting was devoted to preliminary analysis of deposit into Open Access repositories of raw research data produced either as specific research output or as supplementary material of research publications. Raw data as a further SONEX usecase deposit scenario was already included in the list of issues for the SONEX Bird-of-Feather session held at the Open Repositories Wokshop (OR2010) last July in Madrid, where it was identified as 'the missing piece in the general deposit picture' at the time.

Some deposit-related projects are already running since Jul 2010 along the JISC Deposit Call (JISCdepo), but none of them so far is dealing with deposit of research data. However, dataset handling is already being considered as a forthcoming candidate for Sword-based transfer, and preliminary analysis of this new deposit usecase scenario may well be partially carried out under the SONEX umbrella.

Some of the discussed ideas on research data and their deposit via Sword into repositories follow:

- A JISCdepo meeting will be held in early Mar 2011 as an internal coordination event for JISC Deposit Call projects. It's a good opportunity for SONEX to fine-tune analysis of usecase scenarios at running projects, as well as for sharing potential new deposit usecases arising both from the Kultivate project (digital versions of creative works ie non-textual materials) and the research data-based approach.

- Regarding deposit of research data into repositories, the DRYAD international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences was highlighted as a pioneering implementation of infrastructure for research data filing and preservation. DRYAD acts as a kind of PubMed Central for research data – with an equivalent mandate by a group of 50 journals (so far) to their authors for depositing publication-related research data into this specific repository (besides archiving them in their IR or with the publisher).

- The JISC-funded DRYAD UK project was also discussed. DRYAD UK, currently being developed within the JISC Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) programme, is planning to expand Dryad into the UK by both establishing a UK mirror site and extending service to new publishers and disciplines.

- A JISC Managing Research Data Programme (JISCMRD) International Workshop will be held in Mar 2011 for analysis and evaluation of outputs and progress of the JISCMRD Programme. There will be a place in the Workshop programme for issues related to research data, such as citation, deposit and metadata/identifier exchange with publishers. SONEX is expected to bring in some input into some of those subjects.

- Regarding creation of research data management infrastructure for collection, digital organization, metadata annotation and controlled sharing of datasets, the ADMIRAL project (A Data Management Infrastructure for Research Across the Life sciences) was identified as the main presently running initiative to be followed. DataPac, an idea for a standard data shipping container for submitting research data with identifier and other information in RDF and HTML formats, was mentioned too as a potential complementary infrastructure to ADMIRAL.


In terms of SONEX deposit usecase analysis, deposit of research data poses a double usecase framework,

• R2R usecase scenario (IR to DRYAD, other)


• Publisher to repository usecase scenario

as well as a set of Sword-related procedural issues to be checked from a SONEX perspective, such as:

• metadata-related issues – very case-specific and different from metadata standards being used for research papers (previous work on the subject done by JISCMRD MRDonto Group: “Metadata for Datasets: Identifiers and Ontologies”)


• SONEX should definitely NOT get into identification schemas for datasets – DOIs should do for identification purposes


• issue of attached file sizes – should deposit by reference be considered instead/besides binary data transfer?


• At what point along the publication lifecycle should dataset deposit take place? Picturing the process via workflow diagrams would help


• How should Sword deal with this particular deposit usecase?

Some interesting examples of international initiatives dealing with dataset management are also being examined by SONEX, such as:

- PANGAEA [Germany]: Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data, see example dataset with attached DOI

- [Dutch] NARCIS (National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System) FAQ page contains info on handling datasets.


Further references on submission of research data to repositories:

• Research Remix blog, by Heather Piwowar


• JISC XYZ project for publishing data in support of full-text


• "A Scientist and the Web": Peter Murray-Rust's blog - Archive for the 'data' Category


• "SPARC Digital Repositories meeting includes session on open data" (blog post at IASSIST website, 2010/11/10)


• 'Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research' (EIDCSR) project blog


• 6th International Data Curation Conference (Chicago, IL, Dec 6-8th, 2010) - Programme


• "Riding the Wave: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data": Final Report of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data: a submission to the European Commission (Oct 2010)
  

Sonex to contribute to RFC version of DL.org Cookbook

As of Oct 14th the DL.org project released the RFC version of its 'Digital Library Technology and Methodology Cookbook'.



According to DL.org, "the Cookbook is aimed at collecting and describing a portfolio of best practices and pattern solutions to common challenges faced when it comes to developing large-scale interoperable Digital Library systems. The current version of the Cookbook should not be considered neither authoritative nor final but rather as a 'work in progress' with the aim of enhancing it through external feedback".

After the Sonex work was presented last September at the 2nd DL.org workshop held in Glasgow, Sonex reached an agreement with DL.org as to provide technical feedback on the Cookbook regarding those usecase scenarios identified by Sonex.

SONEX at the Kultur/Kultivate workgroup meeting in London

by Richard Jones

On 8th September 2010 the JISC-funded Kultur project group gathered for a meeting at the JISC Offices in London, to carry out some post-project discussions and to look to the future with the Kultivate project. During the meeting William Nixon, University of Glasgow, presented "Minding your P's and Q's: Enrich-ing Enlighten at the University of Glasgow" on their work at the Enrich project and the enhancement of Enlighten Institutional Repository, while Richard Jones from Symplectic (and SONEX) presented "A whirlwind tour of repository deposit technology and use cases". This latter presentation covered his work at Symplectic and the Symplectic Repository Tools deposit technology (c.f. the CRIS to Repository use case), as well as the current state of the SWORD 1.3 standard and the future of SWORD through version 2.0. He also then presented some slides on SONEX describing the key identified use cases and suggestions on the way that Creative and Applied arts might engage with the SONEX process.

Some key realisations from this meeting for SONEX are that:

1) The deposit use cases in Creative and Applied Arts may not be significantly different from the use cases in STM, but the devil will be in the details

2) CRIS systems are being used to some degree in Arts Institutions, and undoubtedly there is work which will be considered research in these fields, but automatic acquisition of content for these systems is virtually impossible, because ...

3) There are no comprehensive or even substantial Creative and Applied Arts data sources online, because ...

4) The publishing lifecycle for the Creative and Applied Arts is not only significantly different to STM but also non-standard across the discipline. It was suggested, for example, that YouTube and Vimeo were likely to be some of the largest repositories of research outputs from these fields.

It is hoped that if the 4th JISCdepo project goes ahead it should be easier for SONEX to engage in this field. In the meantime, any people working in Creative and Applied Arts should feel very welcome to contact SONEX members with a view to understanding the variations in the standard deposit use cases which would meet their needs.

RepoFringe 2010: lots of interesting presentations plus a Sonex Pecha Kucha

The 3rd edition of the Repository Fringe was just held in Edinburgh along Sep 2nd and 3rd 2010. This new edition of the RepoFringe (see programme) was a good opportunity to learn about the most recent advancements regarding repositories in the UK, and new ideas for their development were shared in an informal, stimulating atmosphere. This edition's success story was undoubtedly EPrints Bazaar app-store for its new version 3.2, as live demoed by David Tarrant and Patrick McSweeney, with Les Carr's cooperation as an inspired pre-recorded speaker. EPrints will also shortly release its CERIF4REF plugin in order to comply with the R4R schema, thus proving that repository software is swiftly progressing towards anticipating user needs by closing the gap with CRIS systems from a research output perspective.

Further talks were also held at RF2010 on CRIS systems and IRs. A lot of universities do already have CRIS systems running, and some voices in the community start wondering whether CRIS systems might eventually replace institutional repositories as an "entrance door" to the institutional research output. Projects like RePosit (see Queen Mary University of London Sara Molloy's presentation for more info) on the contrary are exploring ways for batch ingestion of contents flowing from CRIS systems into a currently low-populated array of repositories.

Quite a number of other subjects were amusingly dealt with by other speakers, such as timestamping the web through the Memento project as presented by Herbert van de Sompel (LANL), Topic Models by Michael Fourman (University of Edinburgh Informatics Dept), or Repositories and data at Closing Keynote by Kevin Ashley (DCC).

RF2010 had also its traditional 20-slide-20-secs-per-slide Pecha Kucha sessions once again. There was a Pecha Kucha on the work by Sonex on Fri Sep 3rd, and projects like Enlighten, Jorum, Open Access Repository Junction, ERA, ShareGeo and some others were represented at this light speed presentation variety as well.


On Sep 1st a SHERPA RoMEO API workshop was also held by Peter Millington, Jane H. Smith and colleagues from Nottingham at the e-Science Institute facilities in Edinburgh as a RepoFringe pre-event. As presented last July at Open Repositories Conference in Madrid, major improvements in the RoMEO service are being worked at, and this workshop was an opportunity to get feedback from the RoMEO API users on its performance and suggestions on possible enhancements for version 3 currently in its final stages of development (due Autumn 2010). There were also interesting presentations from outside the UK on the implementation of RoMEO mirrors such as SHERPA RoMEO deutsch in Germany and service internationalisation was extensively discussed along the meeting (Portugal and Spain were scoped as potential areas for development of specific interfaces). An online survey on the RoMEO API was previously distributed among the workshop delegates and its results were discussed and analysed in fruitful specific breakout sessions.

From a Sonex perspective, the RoMEO service does fit into the Sonex proposal for a distributed national- or regional-level automatic ingest system based on an array of brokers dealing with publisher- or funder-driven ingest of contents into a network of national or regional institutional repositories. From this point of view, RoMEO, such as other general-purpose services as OpenDOAR or the broker itself, are pieces of the required infrastructure for this approach to grow real. Find more information about this Sonex proposal in the Sonex paper 'Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: the SONEX Workgroup' to be presented in Glasgow later this month at the 2nd DL.org workshop "Making Digital Libraries interoperable: challenges and approaches".

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.
  

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

Sonex objectives and development

The Repository Handshake/SONEX objective was firstly to identify and analyse deposit opportunities (use cases), which map on to different business processes from which there is prospect of prompting and assisting deposit of research papers (and potentially other scholarly work) into the repository space. These include processes within the repository space to alert and assist transfer/access across multiple repositories (in the use case of multiple Institutional Repositories). An incomplete list of other deposit opportunities include: institutionally-assisted deposit (typically from CRIS systems but also research group activity); grant-funded mandated deposit, with requirement for award referencing; deposit from publishers as OA services for authors; assisted deposit as part of desktop authoring applications).

Once a complete use case list was obtained, the work was to be focused on identificating the most interesting deposit opportunities in terms of populating repositories. This analysis should result in proposals for cooperative development and for implementation possibilities.

The following key use case scenarios were identified and associated with projects being already developed (or to be developed) by the institutions taking part in the workgroup. Participation in the use case development and implementation is open as well for other interested institutions:

• Use case nr 1, PI/author for multi-authored, multi-institution journal articles - related to Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) Project at EDINA

• Use-case nr 2, CRIS systems as source of documents for IRs - KE's strand 'Exchanging Research Info'. There are also several ongoing institutional initiatives for CRIS/IR integration, such as those at the University of Glasgow or the Trinity College Dublin

• Use-case nr 3, Publisher as the source of articles - also related to the EDINA-JISC OA-RJ Project, as well as to European PEER Project

• Use-case nr 4, 'Our Bibliography' as source of references for IRs, meaning lists of publications supplied by individual researchers, research groups or departments

• [Potential extra] Use-cases nr 5 (Subject repositories) and 6 (Research evaluation agencies).

See a brief summary of the four main SONEX use cases/deposit opportunities at: http://repinf.pbworks.com/f/poster_SONEX_deposit_opportunities.pdf