SONEX work on repository interoperability to be presented at the 2nd Open Access Forum

  The communication "The SONEX Workgroup for the Analysis of Repository Interoperability Issues: a Summary of Activities" (in Spanish) presented by the JISC-funded SONEX Workgroup has been accepted for the 2nd Open Access Forum to be held Apr 16-17th along the INFO2012 conference in Havana, Cuba. The motto for this 2nd Open Access Forum is "Interoperability: the Basis for the Ecology of Open Access Repositories".


The selected list of topics for the 2nd Open Access Forum includes:

• Standards for Open Access Repository (OAR) Interoperability


• CRIS/OAR Interoperability


• Value-Added Services based on Repository Interoperability (such as Repository Usage Aggregation Systems)


• Linked Data and Enriched Digital Objects


• Integration of Repositories and Electronic Publishing Platforms


• Semantic Interoperability


• Interoperability between Open Access Repositories and e-Learning Platforms


• Distributed Repository Networks

Repositories and CRIS: Working Smartly Together

  Due to recent involvement in other OA repository-related activities at the University of Khartoum, reports at this blog on recent events such as the 'Repositories and CRIS: Working Smartly Together' workshop organised by RSP last Jul 19th in Nottingham and the 4th edition of the Repository Fringe in Edinburgh were slightly delayed. Good news about it is that interesting reports on these events have been published in the meantime (see the RSP event review by Gareth J. Johnson at UKCoRR blog). This will allow Sonex to take a different approach to the reporting, making it more of a reflection than of a description, as well as covering the conference followup.

One of the subjects discussed along the Reposit project session within the Conference at EMCC was what mailing list or discussion group should replace the reposit@googlegroups.com forum for discussing IR and CRIS-related issues once the RePosit project comes to an end. Several options were considered, from using already existing lists such as UKCoRR's or ARMA's, to creating a new Super-CRIS list at JISC mail such as cris-super@jiscmail.ac.uk. Steps are being taken after the workshop to make this new list available.

The REF is working as a very strong driver towards CRIS implementation (with CERIF format being extensively considered in order to become a standard, see Marc Cox's presentation). A good number of HEIs do now operate a CRIS as a result (either commercial, in-house built or an extension of their EPrints repository). That is the good news. The not so good ones may be the fact that due to CRIS systems offering an enhanced collection of features, RIM infrastructure managers are starting to wonder whether an Open Access repository (usually managed by the Library) isn't becoming a somehow redundant piece of software, with most of its functionalities being increasingly covered by the CRIS (managed at the Research Offices). Repository phase-out is thus beginning to be discussed at given institutions for integration and optimization purposes. However, as Janet Aucock (University of St. Andrews) writes in the reposit@googlegroups list, even if the degree of overlap between repositories and CRIS systems may be large and growing, there are still features a CRIS will not be able to deliver:

"(...) Another point is to do your homework really well and make absolutely sure that the CRIs can deliver everything that a repository can do. Can it provide established permanent identifiers for items? Can it handle embargoes effectively? What about stats? Does the discovery interface in the portal display all the metadata that you need with regard to open access full text eg rights statements etc. These are small details which we take for granted but are not always embedded into the CRIS. CRIS software is still evolving too, and perhaps not all the functionality necessary is there yet. Another aspect of this is the question of the interfaces for users and discovery. Is the CRIS successfully harvested or crawled by search engines. Is it ranked appropriately. Can it expose metadata appropriately to other services where required? Can it isolate metadata with full text attached/open access full text attached and allow that set to be harvested and reused? We know that our own CRIS supplier is still working on adding all the "repository" functionality that they think is needed for their product. But at the moment I don't know the fine detail of this".

Besides R4R/CERIF4REF Project at KCL mentioned by Marc Cox, other projects also dealing with CERIF implementation regarding CRISes were mentioned such as MICE for Measuring Impact under CERIF, or the BRUCE Project (Brunel Research Under a CERIF Environment) that was presented at the 2011 euroCRIS meeting in Bologna last May (see Sonex post on the two recent euroCRIS meetings in Italy).

Another interesting outcome of this RSP event was the opportunity to learn from local SHERPA RoMEO team about the RoMEO API new v2.8 version and the release of the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher's Policy Tool, that will allow publishers to directly define their RoMEO policies via an embedded portal in SHERPA (actually presented next day, Jul 20th, at the 'RoMEO for Publishers' event in London).

Finally, a poster was featured in the event poster section called “SICA: A CRIS with an embedded Repository working for the innovation in Andalusia Region (Spain)”. With this integrated system for recording scientific production of the researchers belonging to nine universities, research organizations, technology centres and other scientific institutions of the Andalusia region in Spain, the National & Regional CRIS/IR integration initiatives (as recorded by Sonex in its May'2010 post) keep growing. This particular CRIS initiative is being developed within the European SISOB Project on -yet again- how to measure the impact of science in society.

Besides this -not thorough nor systematically updated- Sonex list of National & Regional CRIS/IR integration initiatives, a comprehensive list of 'CRIS + Repositories in the UK' is being put together as a Conference followup. When complete (it's open for any missing one to be filled in) the list will join the RSP Wiki where Institutional Repositories in the UK are already listed as to provide a clear picture of existing infrastructure.

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.

CRIS and OAR 2011: "Integrating research information"

  Two important euroCRIS events were held in Italy at the end of May: the 2nd workshop on CRIS and OAR (Rome, May 23-24) and the euroCRIS membership meeting 2011 (Bologna, May 26-27). Following last year's euroCRIS meetings in Aalborg for euroCRIS 2010 and Rome for the 1st workshop on CRIS and OAR (link to Sonx posts), these two 2011 workshops offered the international reseach information community the opportunity to debate current state of the development of CRIS systems and their integration with Open Access Repositories for best serving institutional needs in different countries.


Bernard Rentier was a keynote speaker at the meeting at CNR in Rome (presentations available here), where he presented the 'à la liégoise' mandate he has promoted at the Université of Liége for populating the ORBI institutional repository (currently holding near 65,000 items). The ORBI-generated report is actually the only official document for research evaluation at ULg.


Keith Jeffery (STFC) -the embedded milestones, roadmap and workshop purpose slides are taken from his presentation- introduced the 2011 Rome workshop by describing the progress made in the CERIF implementation since last euroCRIS meeting, the 2010 and 2011 milestones (CERIF spreading to several continents, adoption of Avedas Converis at ERC and the ENGAGE Project on Open Govenment Data and the JISC 'Measuring Impact under CERIF' (MICE) Project in the UK), the CERIF roadmap for 2011 and 2012-12 and the purpose of the CNR workshop.


After lots of interesting presentations on the workshop day 1 (with a special mention to CRIS/OAR integration examples in the UK by Simon Kerridge, U Sunderland and ARMA), day 2 was devoted to joint work by workshop attendees on updating the white paper on CRIS and OAR integration. This work resulted in the recently published (July 8th) Rome Declaration on CRIS and OAR, consensus on which was reached after extensive debate via mail.

A few days after the CNR workshop, the 2011 euroCRIS Spring Meeting was held at CINECA, Bologna (watch meeting presentation by Nicola Bertazzoni), with special emphasis on the topic 'CRIS in a University IT environment', for which Italian (Politecnico di Torino Research Information System) and British (BRUCE Project - Brunel Research Under a CERIF Environment) examples were presented.

Gettin' on...

  After quite a long, not totally intended silence - schedules get so hectic every now and then- it is the purpose of the Sonex workgroup to update the project blog by briefly reporting on recently held workshops we have attended since last post. These have been, inter alia, the 2nd euroCRIS/CNR-IRPPS workshop on CRIS and OAR (Rome, May 23-24), euroCRIS membership meeting 2011 (Bologna, May 26-27), CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7, Geneva, June 22-24) and LIBER 40th Annual Conference 2011 (Barcelona, Jun 29-Jul 2).

Strategies for research data deposit in ongoing data management projects

  Prior to start performing pattern analysis for research data deposit into (institutional or subject-based) data repositories –whether or not open access– first step by Sonex is to scope ongoing projects dealing with that kind of deposit, as well as already closed projects which supplied relevant guidelines on the subject. A list of projects working on data management follows, with their specific approach on how to deal with actual data deposit as taken from project blogs:


TARDIS (Monash University–Australian National Data Service).
“There is a pressing need for the archival and curation of raw X-ray diffraction data. However, the relatively large size of these datasets has presented challenges for storage in a single worldwide repository. This problem can be avoided by using a federated approach, where each institution or university utilizes its institutional repository”.


ADMIRAL: A JISC-funded data management infrastructure for research across the life sciences.
"The purpose of the ADMIRAL Project is to create a two-tier federated data management infrastructure for use by life science researchers, that will provide services (a) to meet their local data management needs for the collection, digital organization, metadata annotation and controlled sharing of biological datasets; and (b) to provide an easy and secure route for archiving annotated datasets to an institutional repository, The Oxford University Data Store, for long-term preservation and access, complete with assigned Digital Object Identifiers and Creative Commons open access licences".
(See Oxford University Library Services' Databank)


XYZ Project. “The XYZ Project will create a demonstrator of a new workflow for publishing data in support of full-text. The author prepares data for publication (if possible with validation) in a third-party trusted repository before the paper is submitted to a publisher. Our software will manage the deposition, release to reviewers, dis-embargo and for conventional publication or as a data journal. Two Open Access publishers (International Union of Crystallography and BioMed Central) are engaged with the project and will test the new workflow”.
Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes: A demonstrator repository hosted by the IUCr.


FISHnet: Freshwater information sharing network. “This project will allow researchers in multiple academic, governmental and voluntary-sector institutions to share their data. Data will be held securely in a sustainable subject repository which preserves and disseminates multiple datasets as part of the FreshwaterLife.org information portal. Data creators will be able to manage access rights to their content, from Open Access to sharing with trusted colleagues”.


DMBI: Data Management in Bio-Imaging. “The quantity of data generated by modern high-throughput bio-imaging systems presents a significant challenge in both data management and processing. Furthermore, there is no explicit system/way to record the processing algorithms and parameters that are used to produce results. Thus there is no strong link between images, software and results. This projects aims to address these issues”.
Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes: Build a prototype DMBI system around OMERO.


CaiRO: Curating Artistic Research Output. “No prominent subject-based repository exists to act as the custodians of arts practice-as-research data. Where institution provision for data management is in place (for instance, an institutional repository service) the arts researcher-practitioner cannot always rely on an understanding of the special nature of arts research data. More commonly, data is retained in departmental collections, built and maintained by small teams which often include researchers themselves”.


BRIL: Biophysical Repositories in the Lab. “The BRIL project aims to enhance the repository facilities at the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics at King’s College London. This will involve:
» Embedding the repository within the researchers’ day-to-day research and experimental practices;
» Integrating the repository into the wider King’s infrastructure”.
Example of KCL “internal” repository: Mutation Testing Repository.


ADS+: Enhancing and Sustaining the Archaeology Data Service digital repository. The project aims to “Increase the sustainability of the ADS, by implementing Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). This is a world-leading open source digital repository application which will allow the automation of many ADS curatorial functions, according to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model (ISO 14721:2003). This will help ensure the long term preservation of all ADS digital archives, as well as making the ADS archival procedures more cost-effective”.


IDMB (Institutional Data Management Blueprint) Project, U. Southampton.
The project’s aims are to provide the University of Southampton with a ten-year roadmap for delivery of a comprehensive data management infrastructure.

[IDMB Recommendations] The data management audit and gap analysis indicates where improvements can be made in the short, medium and long-term to improve data management practices and capabilities at the University. The following preliminary recommendations are put forward for short (one year), medium (one to three years), long (more than three years) term action.
[Short Term (1 year)] Crucial to supporting researchers is the consolidation of data management into a coherent framework that is easy to understand, use, and has a sustainable business model behind it. A number of major recommendations are put forward here for the short-term:
• Create an institutional data repository
• Develop a scalable business model
• One-stop shop for data management advice and guidance


MaDAM: Pilot data management infrastructure for biomedical researchers at University of Manchester.
A pilot infrastructure for Biomedical Researchers at the University of Manchester, which covers data capture, data storage and data curation. This infrastructure comprises procedural support, hardware and software.
[18/03/2010] The development team have built a prototype data management front end which fits a generic set of needs amongst our Life Sciences researchers. It is aimed at being flexible enough to allow researchers themselves to assign attributes (i.e. metadata) to their experiments and datasets for them to be usefully categorised and tagged. The prototype is also entirely dispensable and intended as a catalyst for feedback from our use cases on their specific functionality requirements.


DISC-UK DataShare Project. The DISC-UK DataShare project, led by EDINA National Data Centre and the Edinburgh University Data Library, with partners at the Universities of Southampton and Oxford, has advanced the current provision of repository services for accommodating datasets in the UK.
Key conclusions: 1) Data management motivation is a better bottom-up driver for researchers than data sharing but is not sufficient to create culture change, 2) Data librarians, data managers and data scientists can help bridge communication between repository managers & researchers, 3) Institutional repositories can improve impact of sharing data over the internet.

Repository take-up and embedding: the future of repositories

  Being already in Birmingham for the JISC Deposit Project Meeting on Mar 1st, Sonex stayed in town for attending the JISC Repositories Take-Up and Embedding Meeting as well. Start up meeting for this new JISC programme aimed to outline the future of repositories, dealing with specific issues such as (automated) deposit, shared services like RoMEO or OpenDOAR, repository integration into general software infrastructures for research information managament and promoting national (via RSP) and international (via KE, COAR and OpenAIRE) collaboration.

Six projects were presented along this programme start up meeting:

- Bringing a Buzz to NECTAR (Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton)
- Hydrangea: letting the repository flower (Richard Green, University of Hull)
- MIRAGE 2011: Repository Enrichment from Archiving to Creation (Xiaohong Gao, Middlesex University)
- Enhanced interface design for supporting take-up and embedding of the Glasgow School of Art research repository, including visual
engagement with practice led and applied outputs (Robin Burgess, Glasgow School of Art)
- eNova (Marie-Therese Gramstadt, VADS)
- EXPLORER: Embedding eXisting & Propriatary Learning in an Open-source Repository to Evolve new Resources (Alan Cope, De Montfort University)

An extra postprandial presentation on repository consolidation within a university research information management environment and the way it was done at University of Glasgow Enlighten IR was delivered by Willian Nixon. Statements like "Silos are the past, embedding repositories -through the use of tools like Sword or LDAP- is the future" made the point on how repositories should evolve in the future. According to William, repositories are to exploit new opportunities for data mining, business, intelligence, KPIs, analytics, 'stickiness' and visibility (some of these issues being thoroughly dealt with at Enlighten repository blog).

There was a remarkable presence of image-related projects among the presentations, Glasgow School of Arts, eNova and MIRAGE 2011 dealing with archiving of images into repositories one way or another. This is great news for momentum-gaining development of new information infrastructures in the area (also traceable at the JISC Deposit Programme meeting the day before), which will no doubt benefit from these projects outcomes.

After watching project presentations from a Sonex point of view, it seems they could particularly benefit from interacting with JISC Deposit projects in terms of implementing resulting strategies for automated content ingest into repositories. A handful of the take-up and embedding projects would thus be the soundest candidates for initial "customer implementation" of the various resulting methods for quick population of repositories with institutional research output (the take-up bit, prior to embedding) coming from the Deposit strand. As these projects will run
until the end of 2011 and the ones from Deposit strand should deliver around July, interaction among them could probably be easily achieved.

There was one particular project among those presented that captured Sonex's attention: MIRAGE 2011, Middlesex Medical Image Repository with a Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems Archiving Environment. MIRAGE is both an image-related repository project (as it deals with medical images) and a research data project, and it's this latter feature what gets it fully within scope of Sonex activity with regard to research data management. Ongoing data management projects (either JISC-funded or otherwise) usually deal with either numerical or textual data, but projects dealing with the deposit of graphical research data are rare (save for Data Management in Bio-Imaging - DMBI project run at The John Innes Centre, BBSRC, Norwich).

A couple of references were shared with MIRAGE project manager Dr. Xiaohong Gao, 'Feeding Neuroimaging Repositories' poster presented at OR2010 Madrid last July by a team of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)-Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau researchers in Barcelona, and the MIDAS/National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC) medical image repository as to promote synergies among different projects on the same area.

The meeting presentations will shortly be available.

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 at the "Digital Library Research and Open Access: Interoperability Strategies" workshop

After delivering its paper "Handling repository-related interoperability issues" last Sep at the 2nd DL.org workshop in Glasgow, Sonex will be contributing a presentation at the forthcoming DL.org "Digital Library Research and Open Access: Interoperability Strategies" one-day event to be held at the British Academy in London next Feb 4th.









Sonex contribution will be part of this DL.org workshop dealing with digital libraries, Open Access repositories and interoperability among them. Already available conference programme includes presentations on DL. org reference model, DL.org policy and quality interoperability survey, degree of progress of Open Access repositories with regard to interoperability issues in the UK and Europe and research data library management among others.

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)
  

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.

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.

Sonex presentation at the 2nd DL.org workshop on Digital Library Interoperability

(picture by: Anna Nika, University of Athens)

The paper 'Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: The Sonex Workgroup' was presented last week at the 2nd DL.org workshop held in Glasgow in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2010, Sep 6-10, 2010). The DL.org workshop was scheduled under title "Making Digital Libraries Interoperable: Challenges and Approaches" and it featured several presentations by DL.org working groups on the DL Reference Model, such as DL content, functionality, users, architecture, quality & policy (see programme). An invited talk by MS Research Alex Wade, "Digital Library Interoperability: An Industrial Perspective", was also held, where most recent MS developments in the area of DL interoperability were summarized (Zentity, Article Authoring Add-in for Word, DepositMO Project, MS Academic Search or the WorldWide Telescope among others).

The Sonex presentation was delivered on Fri Sep 9th by Peter Burnhill and Pablo de Castro along the workshop's Day I. Sonex approach to interoperability being quite pragmatic in scope, it fitted in well alongside DL.org's more theoretical-founded model. Complementary approaches by both initiatives may in fact offer perspectives for further collaboration between them after this DL.org workshop.

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".

IRs as institutional assets for future Research Assessment Exercises

Beyond their relevance for open access dissemination of research output, the new role of Institutional Repositories as a key institutional research infrastructure for present or future Research Assessment Exercises was extensively debated last month at the Open Repositories Conference in Madrid (some good posts on OR10 available at CAIRSS). For this purpose, IRs should be embedded into the general institutional information research system, which brings up a series of integration/interoperability issues that lie at the heart of the Sonex work.

See below an analysis of several CRIS-IR integration possibilities for creating an institutional research information infrastructure that will live up to the challenge posed by future research assessment exercises.



Considerations on the role of CERIF standard were intentionally left out of the picture, as some debate is still taking place on whether or not it should be the base standard for CRIS-IR integration. Most implementations available have until now
chosen CERIF-based integration strategies to tackle the issue, but from ad-hoc light-CERIF versions to non-CERIF solutions whatsoever, there's still a high level of diversity in the way institutions are facing this challenge. At the same time,
CERIF4REF is being steadily worked out at KCL, and CERIF architecture is also being gradually brought into ePrints new versions.

A variety of research information system implementation usecases for RAE/REF purposes was also shown at Peter Burnhill's (Sonex/EDINA) "Repository Update UK" presentation at JISC/CNI meeting last month: from IRs being used as REF-gateways to the challenge it poses in terms of open access availability of contents, a whole set of issues arise as IRs undergo enhancement for fulfilling their new role.

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.

CRIS2010 Aalborg: a brief report

The 10th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2010), "Connecting Science with Society: The Role of Research Information in a Knowledge-Based Society", was held last week (June 2nd-5th) at Aalborg University, Denmark. Organised by the euroCRIS association, the conference "aimed to give insight into the role of CRIS in terms of shaping the research agenda and transferring research outcomes from the laboratory to areas of usage and application". Updated information on projects and initiatives for devising CRIS-based National and Institutional Research Information Systems was presented, see conference programme. CRIS2010 presentations will be shortly posted at the conference website.

Some comments below on the outcome of discussions at CRIS2010:

• All across Europe and beyond, CERIF is spreading as an increasingly accepted standard for building Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) both at national and institutional levels. Previously existing databases and management systems at HEIs are frequently undergoing adaption to CERIF.
  


• CERIF-based National Research Information Systems for research management and assessment (such as NARCIS in The Netherlands, Frida in Norway, U-GOV in Italy or the USDA-CRIS in the United States) usually rely on CERIF-compliant Institutional CRISs for supplying the underlying institutional information. This often leads to a two-way strategy for infrastructure development, where National and Institutional Systems are simultaneously being built.
  


• As a consequence, there is an increasing number of CERIF-compliant National Research Information Systems in operation, and more of them are in progress (eg DeGóis in Portugal or SEMAT in Iran).
  


• At institutional level there is also a growing trend towards adoption of CERIF-based solutions, either developed inhouse or based on CERIF-compliant commercial CRISs: there are already several examples of ePrints being upgraded to PURE (presently the most successful of such commercial solutions) in the UK and elsewhere. This trend leads to a variety of resources available at institutional level depending on the adopted strategy: some institutions have plain CRIS systems, others work with CRIS/IR integrated solutions and finally there are also some universities running CERIF-based enhanced-IRs.
  


• The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) is by no means a closed standard at this point, but it benefits from interaction with existing National, Subject and Institutional Research Information Systems in order to "epitaxially" enrich its description features for providing solutions to various system needs.
  


• A wide array of commercial solutions is presently flourishing around the area of institutional research system implementation or enhancement, such as Atira PURE, Avedas Converis or Symplectic Repository Tools to mention just some examples.
  


• There are interoperability issues still to be tackled at various points of CRIS/OAR and CRIS/CRIS integration, but remarkable progress is underway, both from publicly-funded international projects and from private companies.
  


• The presently soundest example of Author ID standard, Dutch DAI, having been driven by institutional integration purposes, CERIF & euroCRIS initiatives could possibly bring in a new momentum for solving pending Author ID issues, as it is a basic requirement for operation of both National and Institutional Research Information Systems.
  


• Despite the fact that "everything being seemingly developed at the same time doesn't make things easier" (quote from Sonex BoF at OR10 preliminary list of issues), important progresses are clearly taking place worldwide on the field of research information system implementation. Some integrated research system development strategy from planning bodies, particularly at institutional environments, may therefore be useful for adapting to the rapidly changing landscape.

Recently held and upcoming events on CERIF-CRIS/IR integration

An euroCRIS-organised event related to CERIF-CRIS/IR integration was recently held at CNR Rome, Italy, and forthcoming CRIS2010 will be taking place next June 2nd to 5th in Aalborg, Denmark:

• Workshop on CRIS, CERIF and Institutional Repositories: Maximising the Benefit of Research Information for Researchers, Research Managers, Entrepreneurs and the Public (Istituto di ricerche sulla Popolazione e le Politiche Sociali, IRPPS, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR, Rome, Italy, May 10-11, 2010).
  
  
• CRIS2010: Connecting Science with Society: The Role of Research Information in a Knowledge-Based Society (10th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems, Aalborg, Denmark, June 2-5, 2010).