Open Research Online

One of the many advantages of ORO is the role it can play in raising the profile of OU research. By this, I don’t only mean at the University scale, but also at Faculty, Department, Centre, Research Group, and individual researcher level too.

As such, we have had many people come to us and ask if we can create a publications feed for their website. The answer is yes, it can be done in a variety of ways, but up until now we’ve tended to work with people making these requests on a case-by-case basis, which of course can be very time-consuming.

However, now (as of today), it is a lot easier for you (or your website editor) to embed a publications feed, driven by ORO, without much (if any) involvement by us! From any set of search results, or indeed from any browse page within ORO, you will now see “Embed as feed” towards the top of the page with a “+” sign next to it. Clicking on the “+” will reveal a string of code which, when copied into the code for your site, will create a publications feed based on that page.

The standard feed this code creates is the ten most recent publications, in descending order by year of publication. I would suggest this, together with a link through to ORO to view all publications matching the criteria, would be a very nice feature on any OU-research-based website. And remember to make use of ORO’s Short URL service when linking through to a set of publications, particularly if it has been generated from a search.

Clearly, some people may want feeds ordered or styled in different ways, and in these cases you may still need to come back to us for help. However, we are addressing that too! Pretty soon we will also be rolling out a feed API for ORO, allowing developers to play around with the raw data, perhaps changing the citation style, the order of results, the number of results displayed, and so on. Also on the cards is some new functionality to allow individual articles to be tagged with Research Group information, thus enabling feeds for Research Groups to be created off the back of that information. Keep any eye on the blog for further announcements!

Finally, to help people understand how to use this new functionality, we’ve produced a short screencast demo which can be found in a new “Video Tutorials” section of the ORO help pages. More screencasts demonstrating other features of ORO will be added over the coming weeks and months!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 8:02 am by Nicola Dowson and is filed under Advocacy, ORO, Repository features, Research tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.