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.