Leveraging the Institutional Research Repository: harnessing the drive for

quality assessment

Enabling Interaction and Quality: Beyond the Hanseatic League8th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems

12 May 2006

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk http://irra.eprints.org

Jessie M.N. Hey, Leslie A. Carr, Pauline SimpsonUniversity of Southampton Libraries and School of Electronics and Computer

ScienceUniversity of Southampton, UK

Bergen feels a little like home except for the mountain

We compete on cruise ships, however!

University of Southampton – granted Royal Charter 1952

Research–led multidisciplinary university 20,000 students 5000 staff 3000 researchers

University of Southampton Institutional Research Repository: e-Prints Soton for short!

Outline

• A little history – a research repository grounded in local needs

• The TARDis route map• Scaling up• Preparing for research assessment• Towards a sustainable repository for

local needs and feeding into the national research information environment

From ‘esoteric knowledge’ to a real institutional research repository

From embarkation to escalation…..

Soon 12th anniversary of Stevan Harnad’s ‘Subversive Proposal’ leading to

the open access vision for scholarly material

• See also Harnad, S. and Hey, J. M. N. (1995) Esoteric Knowledge: the Scholar and Scholarly Publishing on the Net. In Proceedings of Networking and the Future of Libraries 2: Managing the Intellectual Record, Proceedings of an International Conference, Bath, 19-21 April 1995,  110-16. Dempsey, L., Law, D. and Mowlat, I., Eds.

• The vocabulary has moved on and the climate is being transformed

the work of researchers in our own institution is still often unavailable to us ……and we also get emails from across the world when we haven’t yet got the full text…. but that’s incentive to produce it

Southampton influences

• Original EPrints software created at Southampton to enable the vision - now used by around 200 institutions worldwide – also spawned other software choices

• EPrints: "World's best practice for an institutional repository" Prof. Arthur Sale, Univ. of Tasmania

• Some Southampton (Soton) departments have culture of deposit (but not all were OAI compliant and searchable together)

• Electronics and Computer Science use the software for the school publications database – now a repository with daily deposits (will be incorporated into e-Prints Soton)

• For now can use ePrints UK or OAIster to search both

• National Oceanography Centre was keen to adopt

The proactive school to emulate…. see the regularity and variety of output

Scanning the very latest deposits we find examples of:

• Journal article• PhD• Book chapter• Newspaper article• Poster• Speech at conference• Technical report

• Total records in this database approx.10,000

An Institutional Research Repository for Southampton

• Institutional Repository for Research set up (e-Prints Soton) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk with TARDis project to investigate issues for the then new concept (within JISC funded FAIR programme)

• Southampton University Research e-Prints - working closely with individual ‘schools’ – found that depends so much on publication culture and working practices

• TARDis project: Feeding back into EPrints software good citation and information management practice experimenting with best balance of assisted and self deposit

• Distinction: has capacity for adding full text (e-Prints) if available– Electronic copies of any research output e.g. journal articles, book

chapters, conference papers even multimedia

• TARDis: Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure• FAIR: Focus on Access to Institutional Resources

University central recording of research – reactive not proactive

Central recording mechanism via Corporate and Marketing Service – MS Word lists“the Research Report provides a comprehensive list of publications by University

staff “Progressed to pdfs - 1998 to 2002 on the webNeed an easier, more proactive way with full text potential

The UK and quality assessment for new funding

• Neil Jacobs’ talk today on Why no CRIS? Suggests funding structure is key but also suggests possible benefits to present to stakeholders in support of a CERIF based CRIS in the UK

• Research Assessment Exercise 2008 – both

huge opportunity for engagement and complexity challenge at the same time

Route map to Open Access from TARDis project – were making steady progress around the circle

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University of Southampton: high level endorsement

Prof Philip Nelson

DVC for Research and Enterprise

• University request for all potential RAE outputs to be deposited

• Funding to boost IR support for the RAE

• Aim for IR to be fully embedded as tool for research support

• Endorsement from DVC for Research and Heads of Schools

Building on Southampton Press Release 15 Dec 2004

‘We see our Institutional Repository as a key tool for the stewardship of the University's digital research assets,' said Professor Paul Curran, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University. 'It will provide greater access to our research, as well as offering a valuable mechanism for reporting and recording it.’

Paul Curran is now Vice Chancellor at Bournemouth University and is pushing forward with their own repository

Research Repository integrated into planning

• Strong links with the overall University RAE management – the RAE CRIS

• From data sub-group to a full member of the University RAE Planning Group

• Research repository an integral part of data collection and evaluation

• Member of Planning Dept with key responsibility for the RAE attends our bi-weekly repository meetings

Deep liaison

• Challenge of getting “deep” levels of liaison e.g. technical staff, School RAE Manager, School editors, Deputy Heads of School Research, Heads of Schools

• Even bigger challenge of engaging with all staff for RAE output selection

• RAE deadlines are taken seriously but problem of awareness of roles and timescales for stages e.g. metadata evaluation

Challenges

• Clarifying areas of responsibility - the IR is not a reason for others to give us poor quality bibliographic information

• There are always Schools who are less engaged and resistance to the open access movement is still as factor

• Workflow – some Schools want most of their papers to choose from creating a heavy demand for metadata validation in a short timescale e.g. 3000 records

• Diversity of disciplines – performances, artefacts, software and the full range of RAE types added to software

Metadata team for current high input workflow

• 1.6 FTE core staffing (1 as team manager and trainer)

• For RAE currently 4.6 FTE additional temporary staffing and equivalent of 1.8 FTE seconded from library activity (4 staff)

• Staffing has some fluidity – training investment and QA risk

Team effort to increase records for RAE practice run later in year

Workflow challenge

• Checking accuracy of metadata, verifying publication, adding subject headings (Library of Congress) and adding DOIs and other appropriate full text links

• Tight timescale, a lot of records need to go through quickly – RAE is going hand in hand with ongoing work

Processing 200 a day – mix of self archived and bulk import

Additional software functionality for workflow management

• Enhanced sort facilities for the editorial review/submission buffer

• Statistics for editor’s work to monitor workflow and for Quality Assurance

• Added function so inadequate records can be sent back to nominated School contact from the editorial review – once an output is selected for the RAE from the live records automatic flag for missing RAE metadata

Progress on original IR route map from TARDis project – RAE now a full part of this integration

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Towards broader RAE support in the UK

• e-Prints Soton both contributes and learns from the UK wide IRRA (Institutional Repositories and Research Assessment) project (funded by JISC)

• Based on experience of earlier dry runs in Electronics and Computer Science School (see Hitchcock, CRIS 2004)

RAE modules for EPrints and DSpace repository software

• The EPrints RAE software is available as an independent download for EPrints repositories.

• The DSpace RAE software is available for trial as a hosted service.

• Bronze release Jan 2006

IRs as the core of assessment: IRRA workflow

Which are my papers? Can I correct them?

• Had linked deposit to Information Systems id/password for scalable deposit and now author editing is facilitated

• Now, for RAE, must require authors to link to staff ids to ensure unique person claims papers

Selection of papers for RAE and reports for group

Problems to correctMeasures of esteem to enter

The service with RAE support:

• Many thanks to the dedicated University of Southampton Institutional Research Repository, library based, team

• especially Wendy White - IR manager and RAE liaison

• Simon de Montfalcon – workflow/metadata team leader

• Adam White and Seb François – technical support

• and EPrints Services

For further information

•http://eprints.soton.ac.uk (exemplar IRR)•http://irra.eprints.org/ (for RAE software modules) •http://eprints.org (EPrints software) •http://tardis.eprints.org/papers (for earlier papers)

Thank you -Jessie Hey, Leslie Carr, Pauline Simpson

And watch this space for our progress towards true Open Access and keen, experienced academic depositors