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General Open Access Topics

As mentioned on the wiki homepage, the purpose of this wiki is to provide a home for community contributions from across Europe, to create a dynamic and updatable picture of open access activity in the EU.

Elsewhere on the wiki are pages dedicated to individual countries. This page is intended to provide an area where general topics can be developed.

Below are the topics we felt would be of interest to the community. As the wiki and this page develop we will add additional topics to reflect growing areas of interest. Do contact us with your suggestions http://helpdesk.driver.research-infrastructures.eu

DRIVER Guidelines

The DRIVER Guidelines were developed based on the DINI certification in Germany and DARE guidelines in the Netherlands with requirements specific to those networks removed. DRIVER partners involved in other repository networks, such as HAL in France and SHERPA in the UK, provided additional input to ensure that the DRIVER Guidelines are suitable for implementation by the entire European repository community. The DRIVER Guidelines are available from the Support website. A Wiki has been set up for the DRIVER Guidelines where you may contribute.

DRIVER Infrastructure and D-NET

DRIVER, the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research is proud to announce the software release D-NET v. 1.0. The first of its kind, this open source software offers a tool-box for deploying a customizable distributed system featuring tools for harvesting and aggregating heterogeneous data sources. A variety of end-user functionalities are applied over this integration, ranging from search, recommendation, collections, profiling to innovative tools for repository manager users. The official press release is available here. Please also see the DRIVER Infrastructure and Service Providers section of this wiki for further details.

Other Infrastructures and Services

(Here please add details of any other repository infrastructures or services)

OA & Repository Developments Worldwide

(Current trends and initiatives from around the world or your suggestions for the future)

DRIVER recently completed an "Inventory study into the present type and level of OAI compliant digital repository activities in the EU". The study which was managed by SURF, surveyed repository managers and associated institutional personnel on a range of issues relating to Open Access and repository development. Of the 27 EU countries, seven appear to have no institutional repositories, five are in the early stages of developing repositories while the remaining 15 countries have, to varying degrees, established institutional repositories. A separate wiki has been set up for comments relating to this study.

Repository Staff & Skills

In response to requests from the repository community, and with input from UKCoRR members, SHERPA has compiled a skills set and description of the common repository roles/jobs needed to develop and manage a UK institutional repository. The document can be found on the SHERPA website.

How do institutions in other countries manage their repositories and are the same skills needed? Please give examples from your country.

Repository Software & Associated Technologies

(Current state of development and suggestions for the future)

Across the EU the DRIVER Inventory study found that of the repositories surveyed, the most frequently used repository software packages were GNU Eprints, DSpace, and OPUS.

Embargoed papers: Many repositories accept papers with embargoes. Researchers become frustrated if they try to access an article through a repository and find it is not available. Hence it is useful if embargoed papers can be 'hidden' until the embargo expires. The Leiden Tool, was developed by the University of Leiden for their DSpace repository and allows embargoed papers to be 'hidden' until the embargo expires. Are there similar tools for other repository softwares?

Subject Repositories

(Existing subject repositories and suggestions for the future)

Advocacy & Awareness

(Strategies, difficulties and examples from around the world)

In trying to populate a repository it can be more successful to concentrate on encouraging researchers to deposit their recent publications rather than asking them to deposit all their publications to date. Many researchers will have difficulty finding copies of their older publications and this may cause them to give up searching even for the more recent publications.

Try to find researchers who are willing promote the repository to their colleagues, the message is often stronger when it comes from a researcher rather than a repository manager or librarian.

Highlight the successes of the repository. Use download or other statistics to show how often publications in the repository are accessed. Information like this can make good articles for inclusion in your institution's newsletters etc.

Have your say

(Anything can go here but keep it clean:-))

METADATA-ONLY RECORDS- problems and potential

In the UK very few repositories (~10%) are full text only i.e. do not have any metadata-only records. The inclusion of metadata-only records causes difficulties for search services who find it difficult to distinguish between records that link to full text and those that do not. The retrieval of metadata-only records by searches is frustrating and disappointing for researchers.

However the benefits of including metadata-only records must not be overlooked. Metadata-only records can allow the repository to act as a complete record of the research output of individual academics or of an institution. In the UK many repositories are now accepting metadata-only records to help with RAE process.

This issue is addressed by the DRIVER Guidelines through the inclusion of full text sets which will allow search and other service providers to distinguish between metadata-only records and those that link to full text.

Are metadata-only records an issue for repositories in other countries?

RESPONSE: While I don't have any figures at hand, my impression is that the issue is essentially the same in other European countries. However, I don't think the decisive question is really whether or not a full text is in the repository, but whether or not it is accessible to the researcher. If content is OA, it should be possible to provide the same kind of one-click access to remote sources that exists for locally stored material. The real problem is content that is either not OA or not digital. As a researcher who manages almost all his research and reading digitally, I find references to non-digital sources increasingly frustrating, but clearly that's not really an issue that DRIVER or the OA community can solve. The essential problem with non-OA content (and I know this doesn't apply to the repositories we are talking about here, as they are probably OA-only) is really that the facility helping me with retrieval (library catalogue, Google Scholar etc) doesn't "know" whether or not I'll have access to a given resource. That exact point was brought up last month at the PKP conference in Vancouver. Someone asked Anurag Acharya, the GS lead developer, if it wouldn't be possible to somehow discern between accessible and inaccessible search results. Anurag said that because it can't be determined with certainty whether or not a user will have access, GS takes the inclusive approach and shows sources where the full text may be unavailable, which is a frustrating experience for the researcher. What is needed is a flag in the DOI and URN of a resource that indicates whether it is freely accessible. This information can only be reliably provided by the publisher, anything else would be incredibly tedious. Having a lot of meta-data-only records in your repository is fine as long as the user has access to everything. To him it won't really make a difference where the resource is stored.

-Cornelius Puschmann

RESEARCHERS ASKED FOR THEIR OPINION: DRIVER USABILITY STUDY
The DRIVER Search service has been tested from September until November 2007 by about 80 researchers from three countries (UK, FR, BE) and the usability report is now online. The survey was led by the University of Ghent and the outcomes were as follows:

More than 60% would continue using the service, on the premise that the content grows continually
the user interface and search functionalities were perceived as satisfactory and efficient, many users asked for more user-specific ranking options
the added value for most researchers was the free access to 'grey' lieterature such as conference proceedings and PHD theses
multilingualism was not considered an important issue
New developments as export functions, interactive functionalities and cross-referencing to other platforms were given priority by the users.