Open Research Online

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long-term engagement from individuals is ensured because academics will not want their faculty profiles to look out of date.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.

Prompted by there being four in this month’s top downloads, I’m going to use this post to remind people about eTheses. Supervisors: if you have any students close to completion, encourage them to think about depositing an e-version of their thesis in ORO. Also, if you have copies of past students’ theses that you want to make more accessible, consider depositing these too. Remember to ask the author’s permission first though, assuming you are still in touch with the person. ORO takes PhD, EdD and MPhil theses, and it really is a great way to make these hidden treasures of research more openly available and more widely used. What’s more, eTheses in ORO will soon be regularly “harvested” by the British Library’s EThOS service, generating even more visibility for our postgraduate research. More information is available in the ORO help pages: http://oro.open.ac.uk/help/helpeth.html. Meanwhile, back to topic, here is the complete list of top downloads for August: ORO downloads 08_2010.

ORO’s growing lists of PhD, EdD and MPhil theses are now also available via the DART-Europe E-theses Portal, a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses.

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.