Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Chris looks after Open Research Online (ORO) on a day to day basis. He has worked in this role since 2011 and can advise on using ORO to maximise dissemination of research outputs and Open Access publishing generally.

ORO Annual Infographics 2022/23

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ORO OU Infographic

We have created infographics from ORO usage data. We have infographics for each faculty and IET, with some commentary on Downloads, Deposits and % Open Access for both the year 2022/23 and trend data going back to 2011/12.  PDFs and data are available at the end of this post.

PDFs for each faculty / Institute:

Library Services ORO Update 202223_OU

Library Services ORO Update 202223_STEM

Library Services ORO Update 202223_FASS

Library Services ORO Update 202223_WELS

Library Services ORO Update 202223_FBL

Library Services ORO Update 202223_IET

Full data is also available from a spreadsheet: Infographics Data 2023-09

Please get in touch if this data is useful to, or if you have any questions about them:

library-research-support@open.ac.uk

Open Research Online (ORO) – Annual Report 2021/22

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Our ORO Annual Report allows us to reflect on the continued use of this important research infrastructure both inside and outside the University.

 

Downloads. Over 2 million Open Access publications on ORO are downloaded every year from ORO.  Downloads come from across the globe increasing the dissemination of OU research.  Downloads increase annually as more open access publications are added to ORO.

Deposits. 3,000 publications are are added to ORO annually – these include legacy publications from new staff so this number isn’t a surrogate for current publication rates. Deposit of new publications to ORO is assisted by automated ingest of data from publisher alerts and the Jisc Router aggregation service.

Deposit numbers fluctuate within REF cycles, the total number of active researchers at the OU and (significantly) bulk ingest of legacy content (e.g. digitised theses).

Open Access. Over half the publications added to ORO are made immediately Open Access and this percentage increases as publisher embargoes on accepted versions in the repository expire.  We’ve seen Open Access steadily grow over the last 10 years and it is now mainstream practice.

We increasingly see more Gold Open access items being added to ORO as the OU agrees more transitional deals with publishers which allow OU affiliated corresponding authors to publish Open Access at no direct cost to the author.

As well as research publications via  traditional routes ORO is a great home for:

  • PhD & EdD theses
  • PGR Posters from the annual poster competition
  • Exemplar student projects
  • Reports (those published by the OU can be minted with a Digital Object Identifier in ORO)

Breakdown by STEM, WELS, FASS, FBL & IET can be seen below. The data is also available in an accessible spreadsheet: ORO Infographics Data 2022-09.

The year ahead.

Some highlights for the upcoming year.

ORCID integration. This year the ORO service will be updating the ORCID integration to support addition of items from the ORCID hub to ORO.

EDI work.  I’m exploring ways in which both the system and service can be more inclusive.  How can the repository be anti-racist.

Data quality.  We want to improve the user experience and the discoverabilty of the service. To do this we will benchmark and do systematic quality checking of content and weblinks.

New (and not so new) research collections.  Working in partnership with faculty and the University archive i’m wanting to host collections of unpublished research papers (e.g. Departmental Working papers).

 

Creating a mailbox alert for new items in ORO

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If you wish to be kept up to date on new items being added to ORO you can do so by pushing an RSS alert into your Outlook Mailbox. (If you don’t use Outlook you can use services like Blogtrottr to transform RSS alerts into email alerts.)

  1. Identify the set of items you want to be alerted on. You can choose to be alerted on all new items by department or a subset of items by faculty, or any way you can conduct an advanced search in ORO.
  2. Go to ORO Advanced Search and enter your search terms. In this example I have selected Item Type : Thesis AND Computing and Communications
  3. Image of ORO Advanced search page with thesis and Computing and Communications selected.Select “Search”. From the ORO results page go to the Subscribe to these results page. Right click on the RSS 2.0 icon and select “Copy Link Address”.
    Image of ORO Subscribe to these results pane.
  4. Now go to your Inbox in Outlook and navigate to the RSS Subscriptions subfolder.
  5. Image of RSS subscriptions subfolder in MS Outlook.Right Click on “RSS Subscriptions” and select “Add a new RSS feed”. The New RSS Feed dialog box will pop up and you can paste the url you copied from ORO. Click “Add”.
  6. This should return any relevant results and update in real time for new items added to ORO.

Image of populated ORO results in email folder in Outlook.

PDF Version of instructions: Creating a Mailbox Alert for new Items in ORO [PDF]

Open Research Online (ORO) Update 2020-21

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Deposits in 2020-21

There were 3,103 deposits to ORO in the 2020-21 academic year.  Importantly, that’s not the same as published research outputs of OU research staff and students in the academic year, which would be around 1,200.  The reason the number is greater is because ORO includes:

  • PhD theses
  • Student projects
  • Publications deposited in 2020-21 but published earlier (or later!)
  • Items published by current OU staff who were not affiliated to the OU at point of publication

The deposit rates across faculties both reflect the different sizes of the faculties and different practices in scholarly communications across the faculties.  Simply put, AHSS disciplines have fewer, longer form single authored research outputs, whilst in STEM disciplines there will tend to be more short form multi-authored papers.

Deposits – 10 year trend data

When you look at the trends, the significant story is the peak in 2019 when the library digitised 1,600 PhD level theses and added them to ORO.

Consistent deposit of items across the years has been supported by our adoption of mediated deposit via Jisc Router and publisher alerts – we no longer rely solely on authors to add their papers to ORO.

Downloads

ORO continues to receive a significant number of downloads of Open Access content.  According to IRStats2 (the native ePrints counter) of downloads ORO received over 2 million downloads of Open Access content last year.  But remember many of these will be downloads from web bots, let’s not confuse a download with a human actually reading a paper!   Another count from IRUS, that provides more rigorous filtering of bots, provides a more conservative estimate of 880,612 downloads over the same period.

Downloads – 10 year trend data

Not surprisingly, trend data shows an increase in downloads (however you choose to filter them) over time.  Inevitably as the repository grows in size, counts of downloads will grow year on year.  These are the impressive results of having a repository indexed by Google and Google Scholar.

Open Access

ORO strives to be a valuable University asset in providing Open Access to the research outputs of OU research staff and students.  Last year 52% of items added to ORO were immediately Open Access, these will either be:

Gold Open Access – where the published version is freely available from the publisher and added to ORO,

Green Open Access – a non-final version (often the accepted version), will be available in a repository like ORO.

When looking at Faculty breakdown it’s apparent how Open Access remains contingent on the dominant modes of scholarly communication within academic disciplines.  Books and book chapters remain harder to make Open Access than journal articles.

Open Access – 10 year trend data

Nevertheless, ORO trend data show a growing increase in Open Access over time.

The dip in the last 2 years is due to publisher embargoes on Green Open access papers added to ORO.  Often, commercial publishers will prescribe embargoes of up to 12 months for STEM and upwards of 24 months for AHSS disciplines.  This embargoed content is not counted here as Open Access as it’s not freely available, however once the embargoes end they will count as Open Access (at least for the purposes of these ORO data!)

This upward Open Access trend in ORO deposits has been bolstered by the Open Access mandate on OU PhD theses and the digitisation of legacy theses.

University and Faculty Infographics

All these data (and more!) are available in PDF renditions.

University 2020-21 Update

FBL 2020-21 Update

FASS 2020-21 Update

STEM 2020-21 Update

WELS 2020-21 Update

IET 2020-21 Update

A day in the life: Chris

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The picture below was drawn about 5 years ago at a workshop on User Experience Research & Design at Cranfield University facilitated by Andy Priestner.

The task was to draw your working day and then use the drawing as a reflection aid.  So, 5 years later, when we were asked to write a blog post about our working day, I thought I’d dig it out.

Drawing with red locks, blue flashes and two long black thick curly lines.

A Working Day – 5 years ago

What does it mean?

The red squares represent long involved pieces of work. They might include:

  • Regular reports we generate on Open Access publishing at the OU
  • Quality Assurance work on ORO
  • Updating and monitoring workflows around ORO
  • Discussions with peers from other universities regarding developments to scholarly communications e.g. ORCIDs, Plan-S
  • Work based research e.g. how can ORO be more complete and current?
  • Designing and delivering training around our offer
  • New developments for ORO e.g. digital preservation and expanding the scope of what is included in ORO

The blue flashes are small bits of work like enquiries or requests for information that pop up and need pretty much immediate attention:

  • Enquiries from research staff about ORO and Open Access
  • Support to library staff using ORO
  • Doing stuff my manager tells me to do 😊

The long black lines represent my commute, a 6-mile cycle from Newport Pagnell. The commute topped and tailed my working day – it provided a break between home and office life, a chance to reflect on the working day.

Reflecting on the picture

And that was a useful reflection.  5 years ago, it made me think about:

  1. Ring fencing time for some of those big tasks
  2. The importance of the commute

How has that changed?

Well mid-pandemic it’s quite hard to pin down, some days I’m working from home, others I’m in the office. Working from home and working in the office feel very different, so there have to be two pictures.  Beside that there is some commonality with 5 years ago, but some big differences too.

Drawing with red blocks, green and blue flashes with two thick black curly lines.

In the Office – Pandemic

Drawing with red and blue overlapping blocks, green and blue flashes scattered across the drawing.

Working from Home – Pandemic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The red squares remain, but the substance of them is a bit different – there is less development stuff going on and more operational. I can live with that, but I hope it will change.  The squares also spill out across the day – my working hours are interrupted by parenting – so there remain pieces of work that I need to pick up later in the evening when the house is quiet.  So those red boxes spill outside of ‘usual’ office hours.

The blue flashes have decreased, my colleagues have picked up a lot of those, thank you guys.  That’s helped me finish those big REF red boxes.  But again, those flashes may occur in the office or at home.

But that’s where things further diverge:

Where there is a black line it serves as an (albeit imperfect) frame to the day and an important mental break from the mess of home/life working.

Blue squares appear when I’m working from home – these are underlying domestic things that I find really hard to dispel when I’m at home: washing, cooking, home schooling – all these things I know have to get done at some point during the day and distract my working day.

Blue flashes appear – they are those little domestic incidents involving small people that require immediate attention.😬

Reflecting on the new pictures

  1. The commute is a massive boon to my mental health
  2. The office allows me to focus on the work
  3. Life is just more complicated and messy for many of us

I don’t know how I can act on that final reflection, how can it be less complicated or messy at the moment? I don’t know.  Maybe, as well as being OK not to be OK, it’s also OK to be messy and OK to be unsure.

 

Minting Digital Object Identifiers at The Open University

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Digital Object Identifier logo

Digital Object Identifier logo

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are the de facto standard in identifying research publications and data on the web.  They work by providing a unique identifier to an object (a research paper or dataset) which does not change even if the url that locates that object changes (e.g. if a journal article changes publishers).  DOIs should provide a persistent access point to your paper or data.

DOIs are often minted by academic journals or other academic platforms where research publications and data are published. The Open University already mints DOIs for research data uploaded to its research data repository: Open Research Data Online and now DOIs can be minted from its publications repository: Open Research Online.

Open Research Online (ORO)

DOIs can be issued for any publication where the OU is a publisher (or co-publisher) and a (co-)author is a member of OU staff.  We are not issuing DOIs where The Open University is not primarily (or in part) responsible for the publication (e.g. we are not issuing separate DOIs for an accepted version of a paper where a DOI already exists for the published version on the journal website.)

Theses

DOIs have been minted to all OU awarded theses in ORO and will be minted for all newly awarded OU theses.  DOIs exist for theses either with full text or bibliographic information only.  Theses will be minted with DOIs automatically.

Other OU Published materials

Other OU published materials can have DOIs minted on request. We expect research reports published by The Open University to be the other prime use case for DOIs, but we will consider issuing DOIs for any OU published outputs on a case by case basis. Publications can already exist in ORO or be new additions – but they have to be in ORO!

Items already in ORO

To request a DOI for an item already in ORO:

  1. Click Report Issue / Request Change in an ORO record and in the workflow add a note requesting a DOI in the “Notes to Library Staff”, or
  2. Contact the Library Research Support mailbox with details

New items

To request a DOI for new items add a note in the “Notes to Library Staff” at point of deposit to indicate a DOI is required. ORO staff will issue a DOI which will be made public when the record is made live in ORO.

Open Research Data Online (ORDO)

One of the major benefits of storing your research data on ORDO is that you receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for every output published, giving you a permanent, citeable link. This ensures you get the recognition for all your research materials, whether they support a publication or not, and means your data can be more readily shared and discovered by others.

DOIs are automatically created for every output published on ORDO (with the exception of permanently embargoed items), and there is the option to create a metadata record and link to datasets deposited or published elsewhere that have not been assigned a DOI.

Not ready to share your data just yet? You can even reserve a DOI, meaning you can add the link to article data access statements ahead of publication. For more information and support on using ORDO, visit the Library Research Support webpages.

Research Groups in ORO

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Publications in ORO can be tagged with a Research Group – this enables the publications of any research group to be searched for, grouped, and listed on a single webpage in ORO.

Image of Big Scientific Data and Text Analysis Research Group pubications listed in ORO

Adding a Research Group to a new record

Once a Research Group has been added to ORO it will appear in a drop down list in the deposit workflow in ORO. 

Image showing picklist of research groups in ORO deposit workflow

If you deposit a publication and know it should be associated with Research Group select that Research Group when creating the record in ORO. 

Adding a Research Group to an existing record

If a publication is already ‘live’ in ORO a Research Group can be added by the depositor or an OU co-author by clicking the Submit Changes (Authors/Depositor only) link on the top right of a publication record.  This will allow you to edit the live record and a Research Group can be added. 

Image showing Submit Changes option in a live ORO record

Changes to multiple records (e.g. when a Research Group is first created in ORO or the publications of an author) can be arranged by contacting library-research-support@open.ac.uk 

Can I automatically add a Research Group to all publications (new and old) by an author?

No, the way Research Groups are designed in ORO has changed so this cannot occur.  Previously Research Groups were associated with an author so all publications by an author were automatically tagged with the associated Research Group.  This did not work (especially for inter-disciplinary Research Groups) as the publications record of a single author frequently did not sit neatly within the subject domain of a single Research Group.  

The functionality was re-designed so Research Groups must be actively selected for each publication. Whilst this means Research Groups cannot be added automatically to any publication, it does allow any Research Group to be added to any publication regardless of author. 

Can I add more than one Research Group to a publication?

Yes, a publication can be associated to more than one Research Group. To do this select the required Research Groups by holding the Ctrl button whilst clicking on multiple Research Groups (PC User). 

Using publications tagged with a Research Group to feed another web page

Publications tagged with a Research Group in ORO can dynamically feed another web page e.g. a page on the Research Group website.  

One option is to use the “Embed as feed” link from the right-hand menu and follow the instructions. 

Image showing RSS icon on ORO Research Group listing

Note: These use RSS feeds and are therefore restricted to displaying outputs in reverse order of addition to ORO. 

How does ORO define a Research Group?

It doesn’t – Research Groups are self-defining.  A Research Group can be created in ORO on request, no threshold of what a Research Group constitutes needs to be met before it can be created in ORO. Similarly, ORO does not attempt to hold a definitive list of Research Groups at the OU.