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

Richard Jones joins Sonex workgroup

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

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

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

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

Meetings held & Documents available

• International Repository Workshop (Amsterdam, Mar 16-17, 2009)
Repository Handshake strand - Action plan

• Edinburgh workgroup meeting (EDINA, Edinburgh, June 10, 2009)
Notes on meeting
Repository Handshake (actor-based) use case scenarios: a summary
Notes from whiteboard

• OAI6 Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (CERN, Geneva, June 17-19, 2009)
The Repository Handshake - a followup

• Copenhagen workgroup meeting (DTU, Copenhagen, Aug 12, 2009)
Notes on meeting

• Madrid workgroup meeting (CSIC, Madrid, Nov 2, 2009)
Notes on meeting

• Informal workgroup meeting in Cambridge (Cambridge, UK, Mar 21, 2010)