Open Research Online

This is a brief reminder of why it is a good idea to deposit the full text of your items into ORO.

Most of all it will enable interested parties to gain access to your research more easily. This is especially true if we are able to make the text downloadable. The ‘accepted manuscript’ (aka ‘postprint’) is the version most likely to achieve this. This is the final post-peer-review version that you send to the publisher. We can convert from Word to PDF if necessary.

Please note we cannot accept a preprint (pre-peer-review) version.

Also, we check publishers’ copyright rules before making text downloadable and err on the side of caution – we can also set embargo periods – so please don’t let uncertainty over permissions put you off.

Even if we cannot make the text downloadable, having it stored in ORO offers benefits:

•    When a request for a copy of the text comes in via ORO you will have the option to click to ‘Accept the request’ within the email – ORO then sends a copy to the enquirer, saving you time and effort.

•    It also helps to preserve your work – offering a safe back-up in case your copy is lost or corrupted.

•    ORO will be the source of the OU’s REF submissions, so depositing relevant items now will make us better prepared.

We are happy to add the full text to items retrospectively – please email to lib-ORO-team with the item title or ORO item number.
When you email a text in response to an enquirer, please copy us in and we can then upload it into ORO.

David Clover and his team in the Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology (MCT) have done an excellent job with using ORO data to feed the people pages of their academics. See, for example Dr Michel Wermelinger‘s page within the Computing Department‘s site. Scroll down the page and you will see a chronologically ordered list of Dr Wermelinger’s publications, which can also be rearranged by item type using the “View by” drop-down menu. This list is generated using ORO data, as is noticeable when hovering over one of the publications, and is updated in real time. That is, when an academic deposits something new in ORO, it is pushed through immediately to their profile page in the MCT webpages.

This, in my opinion, is a crucial angle for success with institutional repositories: seemless integration with other university systems and websites. The benefits are mutual: for the academic, there is one single place to update their publications record; and for the repository, long-term engagement from individuals is ensured because academics will not want their faculty profiles to look out of date.

More information on the technical side of things can be found in David Clover’s blog, here and here. Many thanks to David and his team for their work on this.

Unfortunately, the software underpinning ORO (EPrints) does not currently accommodate phrase-searching. That is, if you are looking for papers on “climate change” in the title, the default search will return papers with “climate” AND “change” in the title, even if the words are separated. So, for instance, you may get papers with “a change in the climate of…” in the title, which might not necessarily relate to “climate change”. This has been raised with EPrints and is very likely to be fixed in a future release; however, in the meantime, it is very easy to use Google to power a phrase-search in ORO, and there is now a short screencast available in the Video Tutorials section of the ORO help pages demonstrating how to do this. Follow this link to take a look: http://oro.open.ac.uk/help/helpvid.html#tutorial3.

As from today, you can now deposit a copy of your OU-awarded PhD, EdD or MPhil thesis in ORO. Note: it must be OU-awarded, and it must include the full text. Abstract-only records of eTheses are not being accepted. Further guidance is available from the ORO Help Pages, including what to do about any third-party copyrighted material in the thesis being deposited.

One of the many advantages of ORO is the role it can play in raising the profile of OU research. By this, I don’t only mean at the University scale, but also at Faculty, Department, Centre, Research Group, and individual researcher level too.

As such, we have had many people come to us and ask if we can create a publications feed for their website. The answer is yes, it can be done in a variety of ways, but up until now we’ve tended to work with people making these requests on a case-by-case basis, which of course can be very time-consuming.

However, now (as of today), it is a lot easier for you (or your website editor) to embed a publications feed, driven by ORO, without much (if any) involvement by us! From any set of search results, or indeed from any browse page within ORO, you will now see “Embed as feed” towards the top of the page with a “+” sign next to it. Clicking on the “+” will reveal a string of code which, when copied into the code for your site, will create a publications feed based on that page.

The standard feed this code creates is the ten most recent publications, in descending order by year of publication. I would suggest this, together with a link through to ORO to view all publications matching the criteria, would be a very nice feature on any OU-research-based website. And remember to make use of ORO’s Short URL service when linking through to a set of publications, particularly if it has been generated from a search.

Clearly, some people may want feeds ordered or styled in different ways, and in these cases you may still need to come back to us for help. However, we are addressing that too! Pretty soon we will also be rolling out a feed API for ORO, allowing developers to play around with the raw data, perhaps changing the citation style, the order of results, the number of results displayed, and so on. Also on the cards is some new functionality to allow individual articles to be tagged with Research Group information, thus enabling feeds for Research Groups to be created off the back of that information. Keep any eye on the blog for further announcements!

Finally, to help people understand how to use this new functionality, we’ve produced a short screencast demo which can be found in a new “Video Tutorials” section of the ORO help pages. More screencasts demonstrating other features of ORO will be added over the coming weeks and months!

I’d just like to take a moment to showcase a recent ORO entry, which I think demonstrates how a repository record can actually look reasonably attractive, and offer a bit more other than just a single-point entry for one particular article, or item.

A number of OU authors have recently been involved (as editors and contributors) in the publication of a book entitled “Environment, Development, and Sustainability: Perspectives and cases from around the world”. The main entry in ORO for this book can be found here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/19088.

As you will see when you visit the page in ORO, in the “Extra Information” field we have provided links through to the individual book chapter records in ORO by OU contributors. You will also see that three of the links indicate that the full text is openly available (we received permission from Oxford University Press to do this). If you then choose one of the chapters to click through to, you will see that there is also a link back to the main book entry. Thus, if someone arrives at one of the individual chapters (say via a Google search), they can then very easily find out more information about the book as a whole.

I would certainly encourage OU academics to consider cross-linking in this way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a book and its associated chapters; it could, for example, be a series of related journal articles. If anyone is interested in doing this, do please get in touch.

On a related note, we are planning to make author names clickable in the near future, so that if someone comes across a particular article by an OU author, they can, with one click, see a list of all publications on ORO by that same author. Watch this space!

There is no doubt that a very good way to embed an institutional repository across campus is to encourage people to create publication feeds from it. For example, in indivudal staff pages, research group pages, or (as we are doing here at the OU at the moment) in an online research degrees prospectus. Not only does this help demonstrate to Faculty that the repository has uses, it also encourages academics to keep depositing their publications, so as to not adversely affect the content of the feeds created.

The most commonly used feed system is of course RSS, and all repository software comes RSS-ready, out-of-the-box. But exactly how useful are RSS feeds for the type of content a research repository contains? I would argue not very, and this has long been a concern of mine. The reason is, like RSS, really simple: standard RSS feeds do not deliver repository content in an order which is useful for Faculty pages, i.e. by date of publication.

I mentioned above that we are embedding publication feeds from ORO in our soon-to-be-launched online research degrees prospectus. When I was approached about this I explained that RSS feeds would be very easy to implement, but that they would deliver the most recent content added to the repository, and not necessarily the most recently published items. Nevertheless, it was decided to go ahead, mainly due to tight time schedules. I suspected that when the prospectus went out for approval to Faculties this decision would come back to bite, and I was right.

RSS feeds provide a reflection of recent activity in the repository, and not necessarily recently-published research. We are in the process of uploading a selection of exemplar (but old) PhD theses at the moment, so naturally these appeared in the RSS feeds for the prospectus. Also, in another area, one particular person had been spending some time depositing a large number of his publications, and so the RSS feed consisted only of that person’s work.

Of course, there are solutions. It is quite easy to re-write RSS for it to be delivered in a different way, and this is indeed what we are doing for the research degrees prospectus. However, RSS is a standard, and so we cannot really change it for the whole site. Just because someone wants their RSS feeds delivered like this, does that mean the next person will? But, I return to my original question of this post: exactly how usefel are standard RSS feeds for research repository content? Although “recently added” probably has a use, I think “recently published” has more.

Despite the clear advantage of broadening access to research, some academics are still concerned about depositing Accepted Manuscript versions of their research output in their institutional repository. I’ve written about this in the past on this blog, including highlighting other ways in which academics can look to embrace Open Access (i.e. through publishing in Open Access journals, or by looking to retain copyright).

Central to this issue is the worry that, for someone coming across a paper in an institutional repository, it may not be immediately obvious exactly what version of the paper is being viewed, especially if that paper is downloaded and becomes divorced from the repository itself. So, to help allay this concern, we have now established a coversheet system for ORO full text articles. For an example, open the PDF of this article deposited in ORO.

As you will see, not only does the coversheet make it clear that this is the Accepted Manuscript version of the paper, it also provides information on how to cite the paper and who the copyright holder is – two other very important elements. Not only that, but the coversheet also provides a bit of OU/ORO “branding”, which again is very significant should the article be downloaded and thus separated from the system.

The coversheets are generated “on-the-fly”, so we can change their content or design at any point in the future without having to physically edit every single item on ORO. We would just go in and edit the master template and then each coversheet would regenerate next time it is opened. For this reason, we have noticed that (occasionally) the PDF needs refreshing once opened before the coversheet appears. We think this is a glitch with the PDF conversion software and will continue to look into the problem. However, this issue should naturally phase out with time, as once a coversheet has been generated for the first time, it is then saved.

As with all new ORO developments, we welcome your feedback… but we are quietly confident this will be appreciated among ORO users! 

It is now possible to generate a shortened version of any ORO URL from within ORO itself with the simple click of a mouse. For example, visit the search page of ORO and run a search for something in the Title/Abstract field. I’ll use “ecology” for my example here. This is the URL of the search results:

http://oro.open.ac.uk/cgi/search/simple?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&_action_search=Search&meta_merge=ALL
&meta=ecology&person_merge=ALL&person=&date
=&satisfyall=ALL&order=-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle

A horrible URL, I’m sure you’ll agree.

However, if you look again at the search results generated, and specifically towards the top of the page where the RSS feed buttons are located, you will now also see another button: a white “S” on a blue background (see the circled area of the screen grab below).

Clicking this buttton will generate a shortened URL for that page:

http://oro.open.ac.uk/cgi/r/kkz4i

Alternatively, there is also a “Short URL” tab (between the “User Area” and “Help” tabs) at the top of the page where you can manually paste in an ORO URL to create a shortened version. Note: it will only work for URLs originating from ORO.

We hope that this feature will prove useful for ORO users. Perhaps academics or research managers/administrators might want to embed a link in an email or document to a particular set of search results in ORO, maybe as part of a grant proposal or some either kind of demonstration of the OU’s research output in a particular field. The SURL service will certainly make this a lot easier to do. 

Over the last few months we (the ORO team) have been working with the Development Policy and Practice (DPP) Research Group from the Department of Design, Development, Environment and Materials (DDEM) to produce a feed of their group members’ publications from ORO to their website. I’m extremely pleased to be able to report that, aside from a few minor formatting issues, this has now been finished and is fully up and running.

The challenge came about initially because DPP used to be a department in their own right under the old Technology Faculty. When Technology merged with the then Maths & Computing Faculty to become Maths, Computing & Technology (MCT), DPP lost its browse area of ORO and thus the “shop window” for its research output.

The feed, developed by our Programmer/Repository Web Developer (Chris Yates), is embedded in an iFrame within the Research > Publications area of the group’s website. It has been set up in such a way that ORO’s data is downloaded nightly and stored locally on DPP’s server, thus avoiding delay caused by retrieving the feed in real time from ORO’s database.

To establish the feed, we have made use of the fact that everyone’s publications in ORO are linked to their unique university ID. If we did not have this, it would have been pretty much impossible to do. We would have been limited to querying ORO for the names of the people in the research group, and of course common names might be repeated elsewhere around the campus, and thus we may have ended up with publications in the feed which did not belong to DPP. So, providing we know the membership of a research group, we can put together a feed using a query string based on that membership’s unique user IDs. And that is exactly what we did.

There was of course the option of running a search based on the research group members’ user IDs and then creating and embedding an RSS feed into their website. However, this would have generated a feed ordered by the most recently added items to ORO, and not by publication year. Perhaps we could have tinkered with the RSS coding, but then this would have altered the output for all RSS feeds generated for searches, which we didn’t want to do for obvious reasons. Also, the more and more we spoke to DPP, the more tailored we realised the feed needed to be. Not only did they want their publications ordered by year of publication, but they also wanted all publications from 2002 to date displayed, and then within each year they also wanted the publications ordered alphabetically by first author. It was clear from this that quite a bespoke solution was required.

The result is not only great for DPP, in that they now have an area of their website they can direct people to for their group’s publications (e.g. perhaps useful when writing up grant proposals); but it is also great for ORO too, because in order for DPP members’ publications to appear on their own site they first have to deposit them in ORO, which of course pretty much guarantees ORO will receive the vast majority of DPP’s research publications going forward.

Longer-term, we hope to create a page within ORO which users can visit to generate their own feeds. So, perhaps some kind of web form whereby a person can select the criteria for their feed from a series of drop-down menus (e.g. all publications, by this set of authors, from such and such a date range, ordered by article type). When the person clicks “Generate Feed” at the bottom of the page, the result would be a string of code and accompanying instructions which can be passed on to whomever manages the website in which they want the feed embedded. Clearly this will take some time to develop, and in the meantime we are happy to generate bespoke feeds for people, as we have done for DPP. However, going forward, a system whereby users can manage their own feeds (rather than relying on us changing the feed if, say, the personnel of a particular research group changes), we believe would be a great service for ORO to offer.