Open Source: "Making It Easier to Be Open: Johns Hopkins Engineers Innovative Platform for Repositories"

https://sparcopen.org/news/2019/making-it-easier-to-be-open-johns-hopkins-engineers-innovative-platform-for-repositories/

Source code: https://github.com/OA-PASS

University of Virginia: Hyku Open Source Institutional Repository Development Partnership Awarded $1M Arcadia Grant to Improve Open Scholarship Infrastructure

https://news.library.virginia.edu/2019/10/15/hyku-open-source-institutional-repository-development-partnership-awarded-1m-arcadia-grant-to-improve-open-scholarship-infrastructure/

"Institutional Repositories and the Item and Research Data Metrics Landscape"

Paul Needham and Jo Lambert have published "Institutional Repositories and the Item and Research Data Metrics Landscape" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

The success of COUNTER in supporting adoption of a standard to measure e-resource usage over the past 15 years is apparent within the scholarly communications community. The prevalence of global OA policies and mandates, and the role of institutional repositories within this context, prompts demand for more granular metrics. It also raises the profile of data sharing of item-level usage and research data metrics. The need for reliable and authoritative measures is paramount. This burgeoning interest is complemented by a number of initiatives to explore the measurement and tracking of usage of a broad range of objects outside traditional publisher platforms. Drawing on examples such as OpenAIRE, IRUS-UK, Crossref's Distributed Usage Logging and Event Data service and COAR Next Generation Repositories, this article provides a brief introduction and overview of developments in this area.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska"

Paul Royster has self-archived "Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska."

Here's an excerpt:

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy. Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support. Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time. A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Roles and Jobs in the Open Research Scholarly Communications Environment: Analysing Job Descriptions to Predict Future Trends"

Nancy Pontika has published "Roles and Jobs in the Open Research Scholarly Communications Environment: Analysing Job Descriptions to Predict Future Trends" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

During the past two-decades academic libraries updated current staff job responsibilities or created brand new roles. This allowed them to adapt to scholarly communication developments and consequently enabled them to offer efficient services to their users. The global calls for openly accessible research results has shifted the institutional, national and international focus and their constant evolvement has required the creation of new research positions in academic libraries. This study reports on the findings of an analysis of job descriptions in the open research services as advertised by UK academic libraries.

METHOD: From March 2015 to March 2017, job advertisements relating to open access, repositories and research data management were collected.

RESULTS: The analysis of the data showed that the primary responsibilities of the open research support staff were: to ensure and facilitate compliance with funders’ open access policies, maintain the tools that enable compliance, create reports and collect statistics that measure compliance rates and commit to continuous liaising activities with research stakeholders.

DISCUSSION: It is clear that the open research services is a complex environment, requiring a variety of general and subject specific skill sets, while often a role may involve more than one area of expertise.

CONCLUSION: The results of this study could benefit prospective employees and universities that wish to embed open research skills in their curriculum.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Understanding Connections: Examining Digital Library and Institutional Repository Use Overlap"

Mark E. Phillips, Pamela Andrews, and Ana Krahmer have published "Understanding Connections: Examining Digital Library and Institutional Repository Use Overlap" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The University of North Texas Libraries; Digital Collections are situated as a unified whole within their preservation infrastructure, with three separate user interfaces serving the content to different audiences. These separate interfaces are: The UNT Digital Library (DL), The Portal to Texas History, and The Gateway to Oklahoma History. Situated within each interface are collections, and hosted within these collections are digital objects. One collection, the UNT Scholarly Works Repository, specifically serves UNT's research and creative contributions and functions as the Institutional repository (IR) for the University of North Texas. Because UNT Scholarly works is seated as a collection amongst other collections, users can access faculty research, not just out of an interest in research from specific faculty members, but also as it ties into the user's broader understanding of a given topic. With flexible infrastructure and metadata schema that connect collections beneath the umbrella of the wider preservation infrastructure, the UNT DL employs full-text searching and interlinked metadata to strengthen and make visible the connections between objects in different collections. This paper examined how users navigated between other collections within the UNT IR, as well as within the UNT DL. Through this examination, we observed patterns between how users navigated between objects, understood which collections may have related to one another, examined why some unique items were used more than others, and viewed the average number of items used within a session.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"BC Digitized Collections: Towards a Microservices-based Solution to an Intractable Repository Problem"

Chris Mayo et al. have published "BC Digitized Collections: Towards a Microservices-based Solution to an Intractable Repository Problem" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Our Digital Repository Services department faced a crisis point in late 2017. Our vendor discontinued support for our digital repository software, and an intensive, multi-department, six-month field survey had not turned up any potential replacements that fully met our needs. We began to experiment with a model that, rather than migrating to a new monolithic system, would more closely integrate multiple systems that we had already implemented—ArchivesSpace, Alma, Primo, and MetaArchive—and introduce only one new component, namely Mirador. We determined that this was the quickest way to meet our needs, and began a full migration in spring of 2018. The primary benefit of a microservices-based solution for our collections was the potential for customization; we therefore present our experiences in building and migrating to this system not as a blueprint but as a case study with lessons learned. Our hope is that in sharing our experience, we can help institutions in similar situations determine 1) whether a microservices-based solution is a feasible approach to their problem, 2) which services could and should be integrated and how, and 3) whether the trade-offs inherent in this architectural approach are worth the flexibility it offers.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Evaluating Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall in an Institutional Repository Workflow "

Ashley D. R. Sergiadis has self-archived "Evaluating Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall in an Institutional Repository Workflow."

Here's an excerpt:

East Tennessee State University developed a workflow to add journal publications to their institutional repository and faculty profiles using three tools: Zotero for entering metadata, SHERPA/RoMEO for checking copyright permissions, and Unpaywall for locating full-text documents. This study evaluates availability and accuracy of the information and documents provided by Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall for journal publications in four disciplines.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Quality Issues of CRIS [Current Research Information System] Data: An Exploratory Investigation with Universities from Twelve Countries"

Otmane Azeroual and Joachim Schöpfel have published "Quality Issues of CRIS Data: An Exploratory Investigation with Universities from Twelve Countries" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Collecting, integrating, storing and analyzing data in a database system is nothing new in itself. To introduce a current research information system (CRIS) means that scientific institutions must provide the required information on their research activities and research results at a high quality. A one-time cleanup is not sufficient; data must be continuously curated and maintained. Some data errors (such as missing values, spelling errors, inaccurate data, incorrect formatting, inconsistencies, etc.) can be traced across different data sources and are difficult to find. Small mistakes can make data unusable, and corrupted data can have serious consequences. The sooner quality issues are identified and remedied, the better. For this reason, new techniques and methods of data cleansing and data monitoring are required to ensure data quality and its measurability in the long term. This paper examines data quality issues in current research information systems and introduces new techniques and methods of data cleansing and data monitoring with which organizations can guarantee the quality of their data.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Improving the Discoverability and Web Impact of Open Repositories: Techniques and Evaluation"

George Macgregor has published "Improving the Discoverability and Web Impact of Open Repositories: Techniques and Evaluation" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In this contribution we experiment with a suite of repository adjustments and improvements performed on Strathprints, the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, institutional repository powered by EPrints 3.3.13. These adjustments were designed to support improved repository web visibility and user engagement, thereby improving usage. Although the experiments were performed on EPrints it is thought that most of the adopted improvements are equally applicable to any other repository platform. Following preliminary results reported elsewhere, and using Strathprints as a case study, this paper outlines the approaches implemented, reports on comparative search traffic data and usage metrics, and delivers conclusions on the efficacy of the techniques implemented. The evaluation provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to technical aspects of a repository can result in significant improvements to repository visibility, resulting in a greater web impact and consequent increases in content usage. COUNTER usage grew by 33% and traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar was found to increase by 63% and 99% respectively. Other insights from the evaluation are also explored. The results are likely to positively inform the work of repository practitioners and open scientists.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap