Open Research Online

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.

Here are the top 10 most-viewed journal and non-journal articles on ORO in the month of July: oro-article-views-07_2009.doc. It is particularly pleasing to see the recently-announced 10,000th deposit in number one spot!

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the depth of the Open Access (OA) debate runs no further than you’re either for or against it. Indeed, a couple of years ago, in my former life as a humble Managing Editor, before I really began showing an interest in and reading about OA, that is exactly what I thought. You’ve got your OA advocates (librarians and some academics) on one side of the fence, driving OA forward, and then you’ve got your publishers on the other side of the fence, who’d really rather it didn’t happen. Simple. Right? Wrong!

Having worked in both camps, so to speak, moving from a journals publishing world to one in which I manage an OA institutional repository, it strikes me that there is probably more cohesion and agreement among OA “delayers” (as I like to call them) than there is among its advocates. I was, perhaps naively, expecting a bit more of a “united we stand” feel to the OA movement when I joined it. As far as revolutions go, it actually strikes me as being a bit “bitchy”.

Take a random sample of postings from the Amercian Scientist (AmSci) Open Access Forum and you’ll see exactly what I mean. You’ve got some arguing the case that OA archiving (repositories) must come before OA publishing, and that throwing money at the latter is a waste of time because the former is already universally achievable. Then you’ve got others saying that OA archiving is just a half-way-house measure – that OA publishing is the ultimate goal, and so why waste time, energy and resources running relatively empty repositories. On top of this you’ve got regular wranglings about copyright, who should pay OA publication fees, whether institutions should implement OA mandates… The list goes on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for healthy debate in order to find the best way forward. However, there is a line (or lines) where, if crossed, healthy debate becomes infighting, and you end up with diverging factions among a group of people that actually, when you remind yourself, all set out in the beginning to achieve the same thing, ultimately. Sometimes, the comments going back and forth between people on the AmSci Forum seem more like body blows between jealous enemies than constructive remarks between united comrades. I have this picture in my head of a personified subscription-based-publisher, reclining in his chair, watching on his monitor in front of him all this arguing going on, with an evil grin spread across his face as we all play into his hands.

Ok, perhaps a bit dramatic, but you get what I mean.

The fact of the matter is that there are many people doing great jobs in working towards OA, whether it is in the “green” (repositories) form or the “gold” (publishing) form, and no one should be vilified for their efforts. If you think of OA as an organism surviving in the publishing world through evolution, then having as varied a genome as possible surely has to be a healthy thing. If any one element of OA does turn out to be too weak, then it will die off naturally in the fullness of time. Arguing excessively about it now will succeed only in slowing down its natural development.

A slightly belated posting on this, as it has already been featured in the news section of the University’s main website, as well as an Intranet news item. But, just in case these have passed you by, or you are an external reader of this blog, I am very proud to announce the fact that ORO now houses over 10,000 research articles. The 10,000th item was recently deposited by Professor Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and is a journal paper on the subject of mobile learning. Here is a link to the paper in ORO, which (I’m pleased to say) is a fully open access item: http://oro.open.ac.uk/16987.

Ordinarily, the publisher of the journal in which this paper was published (Cambridge University Press) allows author final drafts to be deposited in Open Access institutional repositries such as ORO, with the final published PDF permitted after a one-year embargo. However, given the special significance of this paper to ORO, Cambridge University Press kindly allowed us to deposit the final published version straight away.

So, congratulations to Professor Kukulska-Hulme for providing the 10,000th item, but also I think a very big thank you is in order for everyone else who have been contributing content for ORO recently. In the year I’ve been managing ORO I have been very pleasantly surprised by its growth and the willingness of OU researchers to engage with ORO and build it into their publishing routines.

For interest, the official press release relating to this story can be viewed here: 090702-oro-hits-10000-items.doc.

Many OU readers of this blog will know that, for some time, I’ve been producing a monthly top 10 of the most-viewed articles on ORO, both for journal and non-journal items. I’ve now decided to upload the top 10 lists to the blog every month, making it easier for anyone to view the information whenever they want. I’ll tag each posting with the category “top 10″, which might be useful if anyone wants to look at changes in the lists over time without having to trawl through the site looking for the relevant postings. Here are the top 10s for June 2009: oro-article-views-06_2009.doc.

Les Carr, an academic at the University of Southampton and Director of EPrints (the repository software used by ORO), has recently taken a look at the productivity of institutional repositories based on their numbers of “active days”. In other words, using the amount of days in a year that items have been deposited and processed by a repository, rather than the total number of items the repository contains, as a measure of its success. I wholeheartedly agree with Les that a successful repository is a sustainable repository, and that size is not necessarily the best indication of this. Indeed, I have written about this before on this blog in ”Why size doesn’t matter but self-archiving does“.

The good news is that, according to Les’ analysis, ORO is the 6th most hard working repository in the UK, with 219 days of activity out of a possible 233 (taking into account weekends and bank holidays). Personally, I’m really pleased to see ORO in this light, and, as Les mentions in his post, we can view this as a very real indication of ORO’s ‘vitality’ and ‘embededness’ within the OU.

This morning I gave a talk on ORO to the Health & Social Care Group of the Health & Social Care Department of the Health & Social Care Faculty (I think I’ve got that right!). Thanks ever so much to Sarah Earle for inviting me, and to Caroline Holdaway for organising the laptop, data projector etc.

Anyway, perhaps inevitably, even though I managed to talk and answer questions for almost an hour, there was quite an important aspect of ORO that I forgot to mention, and that is how you (either as individuals or groups) can link to, or get feeds from, ORO.

Thinking first about linking to ORO, I neglected to show you how nice your publications lists should now look. This is thanks mainly to our technical person (Miriam) who has painstakingly edited the code which underpins the reference style used for ORO. (Miriam has been very patient with me requesting italics, full stops, commas, en rules instead of dashes etc. – thank you Miriam!).

So, if you look at Sarah’s publications, for example, you will see that not only are they all nicely ordered chronologically, but also that each item conforms pretty well to Harvard-style referencing. The thinking behind this is that you can then consider adding a link from your staff homepage, comfortable in the thought your publications are all formatted in a standard way. Plus, each article will have a link to the full text (if supplied) and the definitive published version.

‘Feeds’ are ways of getting information out of ORO. For example, it would be possible to set up an RSS feed of the latest articles from the Health & Social Care Group added to ORO and have this embedded into an appropriate area of your department website. This kind of thing would need involvement from your IT department, but it is entirely do-able and certainly worth thinking about. If anyone is interested in this kind of thing, send me an email and we’ll try to set up a meeting between the appropriate techies!

It is often said that making your work available in an open access repository like ORO provides wider exposure to your research and a better chance of being well cited. I firmly believe this, and I refer again to a recent study that seems to support this hypothesis. More peer-reviewed research from information scientists and bibliometricians is certainly needed, but there is also a lot to be said for anecdotal evidence as well.

Ray Frost is Professor of Inorganic Materials in the School of Physical & Chemical Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. In a recent post on QUT’s Library News for the School of IT we read that Professor Frost has found that regularly depositing his work in QUT ePrints (QUT’s equivalent of ORO) actually saves him time, simply because he no longer has to deal with numerous requests by email for individual personal copies of his papers. Furthermore, the amount of citations Professor Frost’s work receives has increased markedly since 2005, which also happens to be the year he began to make his work available open access through QUT ePrints.

So, depositing a record of your publications in ORO is good, but attaching the full text as well is even better. We always provide a link to the published version, but this is only of use to people who have a subscription to the journal in which you have published, either personally or through their institution. Just because we are lucky enough to have access to a vast number of journals here at the OU, that doesn’t mean to say University X down the road or University Y overseas will. Depositing the full text of your research in ORO breaks down subscription barriers and opens it up to many more people that otherwise would never have been able to read it. And, as suggested by Professor Frost, you may also subsequently reap the rewards in terms of citations as well.

This morning I popped along to the Physics & Astronomy leg of the CEPSAR coffee morning to give (what was supposed to be) a short presentation on ORO. As it turned out there were quite a few questions and quite a bit of discussion, meaning all in all I was there for about 45 minutes instead of my allotted 15. I don’t think anyone minded though. I didn’t spot anyone falling asleep anyway.

After initially fearing the worst when a few people put down their coffees and scarpered when the title slide of my presentation appeared on-screen, I was pleased to see 15 or so people grab a chair and settle down to listen to what I had to say.  Bearing in mind we’ve also recently presented to PSSRI and E&ES, I think we can consider CEPSAR well and truly ORO’d for the time being.

Knowing that phisicists and astronomers are very used to using subject-based repositories and services like arXiv and ADS I paid quite a lot of attention to addressing the issue of ‘why deposit in yet another database?’ Actually, no one asked this question directly, but I still felt it was worth making this particular audience aware of the additional advantages to be had by depositing in your institutional repository. For me, there are three answers to this question:

1. To help showcase your institution’s research. Bearing in mind that I still come across people that weren’t aware the OU actually does any research, this is perhaps more important for us than many other institutions. Nevertheless (and I guess this depends on how allied the individual researcher feels to their current employer), I believe all academics should help where possible to contribute to their institution’s ’shop window’.

2. To be able to output from and link to ORO. For example, RSS feeds for your department, research centre, or research group; or perhaps a link through to your publications list on ORO from your own personal website. The point here is that ORO is not a static dumping ground. We’re thinking about and working on new ways to develop ORO as a service all the time. Unless your publications are in you won’t be able to benefit from these developments.

3. The citation advantage of Open Access. I spoke about recent research that suggests a significant citation advantage to making your work available Open Access. Yes this can be achieved by depositing your work in arXiv, but I suspect you improve your chances even further by also depositing in your institutional repository. Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

I was asked, quite rightly, about the time that all this takes – depositing in multiple repositories. To address this I included in my presentation a demo of how easy it is to import journal articles into ORO using the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which nearly all online journal articles possess these days. In doing so, I also allayed fears that we expect our depositors to enter manually every single author of the paper, which, for physicists and astronomers can be quite a significant amount. The DOI import function will only pull in the first author, but that’s enough to deposit; library staff that are checking and verifying submitted items will do the rest.

All in all I felt most people seemed to find the presentation useful. Not only were there some interesting questions and discussion points, but some useful feedback as well. For example, when I mentioned that we are in the process of developing a cover sheet for full text items on ORO one member of the audience suggested we brand each page of the document (as arXiv does for instance), as many people might just bin the front page from a print-out. I’ll certainly discuss this further with my ORO colleagues as we develop this over the next few weeks.