The ORO team are running a drop-in session next week on Thursday 11th March in the Digilab between 10:00-11.30.
Want to know how to deposit items or talk to us about a technical ORO query then come along to this session and a member of the team will be on hand to answer any questions you may have about ORO.
No need to book, just turn up!
Last Thursday I attended a ’Repository Softwares Day’, organised by the Repositories Support Project (RSP). Held at the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester, the event comprised a good mix of presentations and exhibits from key software developers such as EPrints, DSpace, Fedora, and so on.
Microsoft were there, talking about their complete cycle of solutions for the scholarly community. So, from tools to assist academics in researching and writing their paper, through to publishing platforms for hosting e-journals, and then finally their open-source repository software.
In terms of the repository end, I was left wondering whether there is room for more software – certainly in the UK, where EPrints and DSpace are very well established. Of more interest, in my opinion, was hearing about their article authoring add-in for Word 2007. Installing this enables the user to create very well structured technical documents (e.g. journal papers) in a way that captures additional metadata and semantic information at the authoring stage. The add-in also makes use of SWORD (Simple Web Service Offering for Repository Deposit), meaning an author could potentially deposit their article in whatever repository they choose from within Microsoft Word at the click of a button, assuming the repository is SWORD-compliant. This carries benefits for both the author (through ease of deposit) and Repository Managers/Administrators (possibly more full text). We will certainly be looking at making ORO SWORD-compliant in the coming months so as to take advantage of these features.
Another tool that I came away from the day feeling quite excited about is SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints). I’d read bits and pieces about this plugin for EPrints (the software underpinning ORO) prior to attending this day, but I was really grateful of the opportunity to see an actual presentation on it. Basically, installing the plugin would give us three new features for ORO: the ability to comment, to bookmark, and tag individual eprints. The various permutations of who can and can’t add / see comments and tags are explained in the SNEEP Wiki pages; again, I expect us to look into the possibility of installing SNEEP for ORO in the coming months.
The final major point of interest from the day for me was hearing and learning more about the various CRIS (Current Research Information System) solutions on offer. I’m going to mention Symplectic here, not because I’m endorsing the product, but simply because I attended their presentation, so it’s the one I feel most informed about currently. I was particularly impressed by Symplectic’s Publications Management System, which automatically gathers publications information from key databases such as Web of Science and ‘asks’ academics by email whether the publications it has found belong to them. If the academic clicks ‘yes’ then the article can automatically pass through to their repository, giving them the option to attach full text beforehand. More needs to be known, but one can see how a system like this could take away a lot of the data entry needed to populate a repository – an element typically cited by academics as the biggest barrier to depositing their work. However, the depositor is still making a conscious decision to put their work in their repository, but at the click of a button rather than by filling in lots of data fields manually.
All told, this was an extremely informative and thoroughly enjoyable day!
Today I attended an interesting event on repository services, organised by the RSP (Repositories Support Project) and hosted by the University of Bath. The services featured were not only of interest to repository administrators and managers, but also of relevance to researchers. Specifically, I’m talking about content searching services; so, the ability to cross-search the content of multiple open access repositories.
We were given demonstrations of these services by the speakers; specifically, OpenDOAR, ROAR, BASE, DRIVER, and Intute. All of these are very good tools for researchers, enabling you to search across multiple platforms for open access content. I couldn’t help but wonder though, while I and many other repository staff in the audience are aware of these services and have played around with them to see what they can do, how many academics actually think of using repository search engines like these? If you’re a researcher and you can’t find what you’re looking for within the bounds of your university’s subscriptions and other information resources, or, dare I say it, Google, would you think of visiting a service that searches across open access repositories? Did you even know that such services exist?
A few weeks ago (the 28th of November to be exact), I attended ‘Towards the REF: Defining Bibliometric Requirements for Research Assessment’. The event was the latest in a series organised by King’s College London and supported by HEFCE. It was very well attended (200+); perhaps indicative of the uncertainty that still surrounds it. With the RAE results only days away it is probably bad timing on my part to be blogging about the REF; however, it is a reality and we (researchers and research administrators) do need to be thinking about it. I thought it was well worth circulating some of my notes from the day, as well as jotting down some thoughts about the part ORO has to play in all of this.
The day started off with a useful update from Graeme Rosenberg of HEFCE. One of the key things I picked up here was a move away from a twin-track approach, i.e. with Sciences largely assessed by bibliometrics and Arts & Social Sciences more by peer review. In fact, Graeme told us, the idea is to have a ‘family of tools’ that can be used for all disciplines, with bibliometrics being just one part of that ‘family’. Of course a burning question for HEFCE here is how to combine all elements of the ‘toolkit’ to provide a single indicator of research quality.
HEFCE seem to have great confidence in the potential of bibliometrics to contribute towards the REF. The basic idea is to establish a citation rate per paper, normalised against the average for that field, and then aggregate to produce an indicator. The indicator could then be used by expert panels as part of a wider portfolio of evidence.
A pilot study involving around 20 institutions was set up and has recently been completed. HEFCE expect to publish the results in the summer of 2009. Thereafter, further consultation will take place in Autumn 2009, with outcomes in early 2010. Another bibliometrics exercise will then follow, and the full REF exercise itself will take place in 2013 in order to drive funding from 2014 onwards.
Jonathan Adams from Evidence Ltd – the consultancy contracted by HEFCE to oversee the bibliometrics pilot exercise – gave a progress report presentation. A key theme that came out of what Jonathan was saying was the definite need for institutions to have either an institutional repository or a robust central publications database (a point reflected in a later presentation by Stuart Bolton – a consultant to JISC and HEFCE employed to look at the ICT implications of the REF). It is clear that either of these two methods is going to be crucial for collecting data for the REF. Also, it seems an advantage is to be had if your repository or database is somehow linked to your HR systems. ORO, of course, is linked to PIMS, which undoubtedly puts us in quite a strong position.
Jonathan highlighted some key issues that need to be addressed by analysis of the pilot exercise data. For example: will the REF cover all staff or selected staff? Will papers be linked to institution or individual researcher? Do you include staff that were present at an institution but have since moved on (and vice-versa)? Will the REF look at all publications by an individual or selected publications?
Wendy White and David Arrell from Southampton and Portsmouth Universities respectively spoke of their experiences of being involved with the REF pilot. Southampton have a very well established institutional repository and used it to gather together all the information needed, whereas Portsmouth do not and relied upon their RAE database. Wendy mentioned the importance of Southampton’s mandate in making sure their data was rich enough to gather all the information required. David, on the other hand, implied Portsmouth still have a decision to make in terms of whether or not to develop their repository or go with some other kind of publications database. Again, the message is that one or the other seems necessary.
Also of note from the day was Dr Henk Moed’s appraisal of citation data sources. Dr Moed is a bibliometrics expert from the University of Leiden and was commissioned by HEFCE to compare the two major commercial databases available for performing bibliometrics analysis: Thomson’s Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus. The basic conclusion of the work was that Scopus is a more than adequate substitute for Web of Science in terms of subject coverage. HEFCE are yet to decide which database to go with, or indeed whether to use a combination of the two.
All in all, the main take-home message for me was that HEFCE are still not clear on the exact detail of the REF (selected researchers or all researchers; selected publications or all publications; institutionally-linked or researcher-linked publications), but they did recommend that having a publications database or institutional repository in place would make it a lot easier for institutions to make their REF submission. So, it is looking as though ORO will have a dual role to play when it comes to the REF:
1. Open Access. As described above, a large part of the REF’s ‘family’ of research assessment tools is going to be bibliometrics. That is, how well cited your work is will be considered as a measure of quality, whether you agree with it or not. It follows, therefore, academics need to be thinking about citations; specifically, what can be done to maximise them. Making the full text of your work openly accessible through your institutional repository can help with this. It breaks down subscription barriers and makes your research visible to fellow academics that might not otherwise have access to it through their institution.
2. Research administration. Although the scope of the REF is not yet known, it is clear that having a central publications database or institutional repository available to collate the information required for our submission is key. As far as administration is concerned, the ‘worst case scenario’ would surely be having to submit all publications for all researchers present at the institution during the REF-defined period. If this possibility becomes a reality, making sure ORO is properly populated now has to be a priority.