Monthly Archives: April 2015

Top 5 reasons to use ORO

Inspired by Isabel’s “Share and share alike: Top 5 reasons to share your research data” post I’ve come up with my own “Top 5 reasons to use ORO”.  As is the custom, in reverse order…

5. Maintain your academic profile.

The ORO author view page is a page that lists all your research publications. Rather than re-list all your publications on your personal webpage or a page on a research networking site – you can use the ORO list.

Additionally, ORO is used to feed the publications page on your OU People Profile.  Making sure all your publications are in ORO keeps these pages up to date.

4. Comply with Open Access Policies.

HEFCE

The policies are coming thick and fast!  The new OU Open Access  Policy and HEFCE Open Access policy for the next REF shift the emphasis from Gold Open Access to Green Open Access.

Both require the deposit of Author Accepted Manuscript versions of journal articles and conference items (with an ISSN) at point of acceptance by the publisher.  HEFCEs visual (right) is a nice simple way to see what is required and when.

Making ORO part of you publication workflow means you will be eligible for future REF exercises.

3.  Increased citations.

But some of the best reasons to use ORO are that you benefit from it directly

One big benefit is that making your research Open Access means more people read it and more people will cite it.  A recent study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has shown that papers self-archived in their Institutional Repository are cited 22% more than articles that hadn’t been self-archived.

2. Increased dissemination

downloads

Similarly, ORO has a statistics package that records all the downloads of full text items archived in ORO.

Did you know that in 2014 ORO recorded over 1 million downloads of full text papers from ORO? Some individual papers are downloaded 1,000s of times annually.

You can access your personal download counts from the IRStats2 webpage and then filter by author.

Download counts can be used to aid grant applications, report research dissemination back to funders and can support career progression.

…and top this week…

1.Open Access is a good thing

wall

Using ORO to make research outputs Open Access means that everyone, inside and outside the academy, has access to research publications.

In a 2013 Taylor and Francis survey of T&F Authors 36% disagreed or strongly disagreed that they had access to “most of the articles they need” – remember these are published authors so this is the information gap inside academia.

Reaching a paywall to research outputs for readers outside the academy is the norm and has led to innovations like the Open Access button which identifies publications behind paywalls and attempts to locate Open Access copies.                                                                                           Curiosity by simonas gutautas

But of course using ORO is an intervention in itself; use ORO to remove the paywall.

New metadata fields in ORO

We’ve made 2 new metadata fields live in ORO; Date of Acceptance & Date of First Availability. These fields are available for Journal Articles and Conference Items.  We’ve built these new fields so that we can comply with HEFCE’s requirements for future REF exercises.

HEFCEFrom April 2016 articles and conference items (with an ISSN) submitted to the REF need to have been deposited in a repository at point of acceptance with the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM).  In order for us to record that an output complies with this requirement we need to capture the Date of Acceptance.

Additionally, we need to record the length of publisher embargoes.  HEFCE requires maximum embargo periods of 12 months for REF Main Panels A & B, and 24 months for REF Main Panels C & D.  So the Date of First Availability will be the date a publisher’s embargo starts.  In ORO we’ll set embargo end dates in accordance with listings on Sherpa Romeo.

To make your publications “REFable” please deposit them in ORO at point of acceptance with the AAM and complete these new pieces of metadata.  Any questions please contact lib-oro-team@open.ac.uk.

 

Share and share alike: Top 5 reasons to share your research data!

Recently, there has been an explosion of interest in data sharing: funders, universities and governments have been creating policies and advocating the importance of making data available alongside research publications to validate results and encourage re-use.

If you’re not sharing your data yet, in this blog post I’d like to try and convince you to do so by highlighting some key benefits. I never can resist a countdown, so here’s my…

 …Top 5 Reasons to Share your Research Data!

 5. Because your funder tells you to

data sharing

RCUK released their Common Principles on Data Policy 2011, the European Comission launched a pilot action on open access to research data earlier this year and many other funders (including Wellcome Trust and DfID) also have expectations on their funded researchers to share research data. For a (non-exhaustive) overview of research funders who expect data sharing see: Overview of Funder Requirements (intranet link).

Failure to comply with these policies could result in refusal to fund future research either for yourself or for your institution, so make sure you’re aware of your funder’s requirements.

 4. So you can use your own data again in the future

By preparing your data for sharing with others, you will benefit by being able to identify, retrieve, and understand the data yourself after you have lost familiarity with it, perhaps several years hence.

 3. Because it can improve your reputation as a researcher

Those who make use of your data and cite it in their own research will help to increase your impact within your field and beyond it. Users of your data may include those in other disciplines, sectors, and countries. Furthermore, there is evidence that studies that make their data available receive 9%-30% more citations than those who do not.

 2. To allow verification of results

Making your data available to allow independent verification of results ensures the scientific integrity of your research, thus helping to maintain your reputation.

The have been a number of high profile cases where researchers have falsified results resulting in retraction, loss of credibility and in a few cases, criminal prosecution. Read more about “data massaging” in my post on the DataStories blog.

 1. Because “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else” 

kettle lamp

The coolest thing to do with your kettle will be done by someone else! – Kettle Table Lamp – Jonas Merian

(Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation)

A favourite quotation of anyone working in Research Data Management, this sums up my number 1 reason to share your research data.

Sharing data can lead to innovation and ground-breaking advances in research, and the more we share, the more innovative we can be. To emphasise this point, here are a few of my favourite examples of success in data sharing:

For more information on sharing data, visit the data sharing pages on the RDM intranet site or email rdm-project@open.ac.uk

ORO Downloads & Benchmarking

Up until recently I used to email monthly benchmarking of ORO  to members of the research community here at the OU.  I still think it’s useful to see how we are doing so I’m going to post some figures here and some discussion.

ORO continues to be one of the most popular Institutional Repositories by downloads as recorded by the IRUS service.  The Top 20 IRUS download figures for March are:

Top 20 march

So again ORO is high on the list of participating repositories and keeing very good company with repositories from institutions with a higher research capacity than the OU.

But these counts don’t take into account a couple of things.  Firstly, how many items are in the repository.  ORO has nearly 28K items but some repositories have over 100K items and UCL has over 300K items it!  Secondly, what percentage of full text items are actually in the repository (some IRs are full text only so are 100%) whereas others are hybrid and will have a percentage of something like 10-30% (ORO has 26%).

So what happens if you do something very simple like divide the number of downloads by the number of items in a repository?  Well you get something like this (data from IRUS and OpenDoar from March 2015):

Click to enlarge (PDF available here: Downloads per repository)

downloads per repository

So full text repositories record downloads of 5-22 per item – and these will be the repositories at the bottom of this graph. Hybrid repositories will be getting 1-6 downloads per item, you’ll see ORO gets around 3, and will be at the top and middle of the list.

What’s interesting (to me) is that there is no step in the graph between hybrid repositories and full text repositories, rather they merge.  In fact some hybrids have a better download per item than full text repositories.  Moreover, why is there such variation within either full text repositories (5-22) or hybrid repositories (1-5).

What does it tell us about the performance of some repositories over others?  Are they more visible to google? Are the materials in those repositories more likely to be downloadable?  I don’t know.

What I’d love to see are figures of % Open Access for Institutional Repositories – aggregated by a service like IRUS.  If we had this data we could do some more sensitive benchmarking.  Understanding how some institutions get more full text into their repository AND make it visible to  the reader would benefit the whole community and consolidate the position IRs increasingly have in scholarly communications.