Open Research Online

We will be upgrading the software (EPrints) used by ORO on Monday the 18th of May. You may therefore experience disruption to the service for most of the morning that day – in particular if you are trying to deposit items (the system may fail to recognise you as a user), but also when browsing or searching the site. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, but everything should be back to normal by the afternoon.

OU users of ORO (i.e. depositors) will notice some changes to the look and feel of their User Area. For example, you will now see one or more icons to the right of each item in your User Area. These are:

1. A magnifying glass over a document (= ‘view item’).
2. A red cross over a document (= ‘destroy item’).
3. A pencil over a document (= ‘edit item’).
4. A green tick over a document (= ‘deposit item’).

Furthermore, you can now customise your User Area. At the moment, the standard fields you see for each item are:

1. Last modified date.
2. Title.
3. Item type.
4. Item status.

By clicking on the ‘Add Column’ list at the bottom of your User Area you can now manage which fields you see.

Sticking with the customisation theme, it is now also possible to customise the browse views of ORO. For instance, if you browse by OU Author/Editor, find your name and click on it, you can group your publications in date order, by article type, or by author. You can also ‘jump to’ a particular grouping further down the screen, and you can create an RSS feed from a browse view (it was previously only possible to create a total-site RSS feed, or from a set of search results).

For those of you that have sat through one of my presentations on ORO recently, you may have been expecting a PDF converter with this upgrade, enabling you to convert documents to PDF on-the-fly while depositing. Unfortunately, following some testing, we were not entirely happy with this facility and so we’ve switched it off. However, please be reminded that you can upload any file type to ORO (so, Word files, image files etc.) and we will convert them to PDF for you before making them live. So, in actual fact, I don’t think this facility will be too sorely missed.

One final feature to tell you about is a new field that can be populated called ‘Related URL’. Up until now, the only URL we’ve added to each record is a link through to the online published version. Following the upgrade it will now be possible to add in additional URLs relevant to the item you are depositing. For example, you could link back to your staff page, or perhaps a research group website. Furthermore, if you want a related URL added to all of your items on ORO, we should be able to do this as a ‘batch edit’ from behind the scenes – a new administrative feature of the upgraded software.

If you have any questions about the new features or the upgrade please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the ORO Team.

In the last week or so I have had two very interesting email exchanges with academics here at the OU around the topic of depositing full text versions of their work in ORO, i.e. making their publications available Open Access. In both cases, I had noticed that the persons concerned had recently published journal papers, and so I emailed requesting that they deposit copies of their articles in ORO, explaining in five simple steps how this can be done in a matter of seconds using the DOI import function – something I do on a regular basis, as many of you reading this blog will already know.

The first person replied to say that he fully supported Open Access to scholarly research, but on the flipside one must bear in mind that if all articles published by the journal in question were openly available then it would undoubtedly spell out the end for the journal’s existence, and he and his authors would loose their publishing outlet. (I’m very tempted at this point to outline a detailed response to this, but I’ll hold fire so as not to dilute the intended theme of this post).

The second person replied to say that he was very willing to deposit a record of his paper in ORO, but that he was concerned about “antagonising the Editors of the journal” by making a full text version of the article openly available, especially given that he had been so impressed by the efficiency of the editorial process. (Again, tempted though I am, I shall hold back on responding to this for the time being).

On the face of things, these two responses seem very similar; both expressing a certain concern for the journals (and thus the publishers) with which they placed their papers. However, upon reflection, I believe there to be a subtle but significant difference between the two, and one which perhaps provides an interesting insight into how academics’ concerns over Open Access might change depending on their seniority.

Let me explain…

The person who made the statement about Open Access possibly spelling out the end for his journal of choice is, I think it’s fair to say, at a more advanced stage of his research career than the person who was concerned about antagonising his journal’s Editors. Consequently, this person has published a lot of papers and clearly has a long history with the particular journal concerned. This, then – I believe – is concern fueled by loyalty. On the other hand, the younger, early-career researcher, is perhaps still at a stage where publishing with a reputable and ‘high impact’ journal is an overwhelming priority, and thus doing anything that might (as he put it) antagonise the Editors would be tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot. This, then, is concern fueled by apprehension.

So, when thinking about barriers for Open Access from the point of view of the depositing author (note: I am talking specifically about open access archiving in repositories here, not open access publishing), then perhaps there exists this spectrum of concern, ranging from apprehension in the younger researcher at one end to loyalty in the experienced academic at the other. If this is true, then surely there must be a midpoint where authors are neither fearful of nor loyal to their publishers! Perhaps these are the people we should be targeting to embrace Open Access!

I should probably now go on to outline my response to the concerns about Open Access raised by the two individuals mentioned above, but at the risk of turning this post into a thesis I think I’d better do that under a separate heading in the coming days…