VERSIONS Project Workshop

London School of Economics and Political Science

10 May 2006

The VERSIONS Project

• VERSIONS : Versions of Eprints – user Requirements Study and Investigation of the Need for Standards

• Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital Repositories Programme

• London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) - lead partner

• Nereus – consortium of European research libraries specialising in economics – associate partner

• July 2005 to January 2007

Focus of the project

• Economics• Established pattern of using preprints• Importance of journals coupled with long lead times for publication• Builds on existing experience and partnerships with Nereus partners

• Eprints• Builds on experience of other projects and programmes• Not looking at data or other object types

• Europe• Cultural and IPR differences worth investigating• Builds on existing experience and partnerships with Nereus partners

Approach of the VERSIONS Project

• User requirements study• Talking to authors, researchers, librarians, repository software

developers, relevant standards communities, and other stakeholders• Attitudes and current practice• Interviews, online survey and evaluation of user study

• Publications lists analysis• Analysis of publications lists of 70 economists in Economists Online

repository, looking at availability of full text– By date of publication– By country– By publisher/self-archiving policy– Location of full text copy

Guidelines and standards

• Reaching consensus with stakeholders • Development of guidelines on good practice• Production of a toolkit for researchers• Recommendation of standards

Other initiatives on versions

• NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Versions of Journal Articles• Policy paper from February 2005 by Sally Morris• Two groups – technical working group and review group• Developing use cases• http://www.niso.org/committees/Journal_versioning/JournalVer_com

m.html

• JISC scoping study• RIVER : Scoping Study on Repository Version Identification,

commissioned by the JISC Scholarly Communications Group – to report in March 2006. Lead partner: Rightscom Ltd. Partners Library of LSE and Oxford University Computing Services

NISO/ALPSP Group – draft terminology

• Author’s Original• Accepted Manuscript• Proof• Version of Record• Updated Version of Record

Terms and Definitions (draft) posted 16 March 2006

JISC RIVER Project

• Has proposed a candidate set of terms (not a proposed standard) for expressing types of versions in relation to other objects:

DigitalCopy

DigitalVariant

DigitalRevision

DigitalEdition

DigitalEquivalent

(RIVER Report submitted to JISC Scholarly Working Group, 31 March 2006)

Initial results from interviews - 1

• Authors retain many versions of their work• Most of these are not seen as public versions• May actively seek to keep some versions out of the

public domain or to control their use• Very early drafts circulated between co-authors• Results that are early or tentative (conference presentations)• Evidence of rejected journal submissions

• Delay in publication of peer-reviewed articles may contribute to the use of other dissemination outlets

Initial results from interviews - 2

• Posting papers in multiple locations – administrative effort to update in each location – role for repositories

• Collaboration with co-authors requires additional effort to manage versions

• Use of date is crucial; simple way to identify latest version of others’ work would be excellent – a ‘non-obvious task’ at present, though see Southampton approach

• As readers – finding broken links in articles is problematic

• As cited author – broken links and citations to versions other than published - problematic

Initial results from interviews - 3

• Essential to be able to identify the definitive version(s) and to point to journal article for citations

• As authors citing others’ work in publications• Adds weight to argument through citing published articles rather than

work in progress• Administrative burden of checking citations when article is submitted

and again after acceptance

• Trade-off between wide dissemination and control over versions – control over versions may be learned through experience

Initial results from interviews – 4

• Do authors have a copy of their final author manuscript versions?• Repository administrator reports that in some cases authors do not

have these – this will be tested further through the survey• Authors tell us that they do not always have a final version that is a

verbatim copy of the published version – final corrections and updates to articles may be done as hard copy corrections to publisher proof (PDF) and faxed back

• Authors may often keep all versions but cannot quickly identify or locate the latest manuscript version – personal resource management issues

Possible solutions for version identification 1

• Terminology approaches• NISO/ALPSP idea of naming different stages in the revision process• RIVER idea of naming versions to express the differences between

one version and another

• Date-based and numeric systems• Version numbers – along lines of editions of a book, software release• Date and date/time bases systems

• Version control systems• Version control in the repository software

• Descriptive approaches• Author annotations and free-text descriptions – human readable

Possible solutions 2

• Linking records• IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) –

hierarchical presentation• Dublin Core element - relation• Dublin Core refinements

– hasVersion, isVersionOf• Other tagging of records

• Textual comparison of documents• See MediaWiki and other version control systems

• Signposting• To published journal version • To latest version of an eprint• Refereed/non-refereed flags (Eprints approach)• To author-approved latest version of pre-print (for full elaboration of argument,

proof, supporting data)

When to capture version identification data

• Deposit (Authors)• Metadata creation/editing (Library/repository staff)• Post-deposit – harvesting, textual comparison

(Machine)

Thank you for your participation!

• Contacts• VERSIONS Project

– Frances Shipsey (f.m.shipsey@lse.ac.uk)– Louise Allsop (l.allsop@lse.ac.uk)– versions@lse.ac.uk– www.lse.ac.uk/versions

• The Library at LSE– www.lse.ac.uk/library

• Nereus– www.nereus4economics.info