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 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 presentation in Valencia, Spain

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

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

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".

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.
  

Sonex Deposit BoF at OR10 Madrid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JISC Deposit Call

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