Digital Repositories – Page 2

"Do Disappearing Data Repositories Pose a Threat to Open Science and the Scholarly Record? "

Only little more than half of the research data repositories in the sample have detailed strategies they use to mitigate data loss. It is important to note that none of the strategies analysed offers a permanent solution; instead, infrastructure maintenance requires continuous efforts. The burden of infrastructure maintenance and data preservation is currently placed on individual repositories alone; preservation systems comparable to those for scholarly texts, such as CLOCKSS, are not widely spread and can be difficult to realise.

http://tinyurl.com/3snrhxpk

"Decades of Transformation: Evolution of the NASA Astrophysics Data System’s Infrastructure"

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the primary Digital Library portal for researchers in astronomy and astrophysics. Over the past 30 years, the ADS has gone from being an astronomy-focused bibliographic database to an open digital library system supporting research in space and (soon) earth sciences. This paper describes the evolution of the ADS system, its capabilities, and the technological infrastructure underpinning it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09685

Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in Europe

In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. As a first step, a survey of the European repository landscape was undertaken in February-March 2023. The survey found that, collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are used for sharing articles that may be pay-walled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on.

However, in order to ensure the European repository network is fit for purpose and able to support the evolving needs of the research community, the survey also identified three areas in particular that could be strengthened: maintaining up-to-date, highly functioning software platforms; applying consistent and comprehensive good practices in terms of metadata, preservation, and usage statistics; and gaining appropriate visibility in the scholarly ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, the current climate offers exciting opportunities for repositories. Many funders are actively promoting the repository route for articles because of their role in supporting equitable access to content (i.e. no fees to access or deposit). The value proposition for open science is growing and repositories are increasingly recognised as the main mechanism for collecting and providing access to a wide range of other research outputs. Add to this, the nascent, but growing, interest in the publish-review-curate model in which repositories have a central function, and it seems they are well placed to expand their current role in the ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10255559

"Jupyter Notebooks and Institutional Repositories: A Landscape Analysis of Realities, Opportunities and Paths Forward"

Jupyter Notebooks are important outputs of modern scholarship, though the longevity of these resources within the broader scholarly record is still unclear. Communities and their creators have yet to holistically understand creation, access, sharing and preservation of computational notebooks, and such notebooks have yet to be designated a proper place among institutional repositories or other preservation environments as first class scholarly digital assets. Before this can happen, repository managers and curators need to have the appropriate tools, schemas and best practices to maximize the benefit of notebooks within their repository landscape and environments.

This paper explores the landscape of Jupyter notebooks today, and focuses on the opportunities and challenges related to bringing Jupyter Notebooks into institutional repositories. We explore the extent to which Jupyter Notebooks are currently accessioned into institutional repositories, and how metadata schemas like CodeMeta might facilitate their adoption. We also discuss characteristics of Jupyter Notebooks created by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to provide additional insight into how to assess and accession Jupyter Notebooks and related resources into an institutional repository.

https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/17751

"Islandora for Archival Access and Discovery"

This article is a case study describing the implementation of Islandora 2 to create a public online portal for the discovery, access, and use of archives and special collections materials at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The authors will explain how the goal of providing users with a unified point of access across diverse data (including finding aids, digital objects, and agents) led to the selection of Islandora 2 and they will discuss the benefits and challenges of using this open source software. They will describe the various steps of implementation, including custom development, migration from CONTENTdm, integration with ArchivesSpace, and developing new skills and workflows to use Islandora most effectively. As hindsight always provides additional perspective, the case study will also offer reflection on lessons learned since the launch, insights on open-source repository sustainability, and priorities for future development.

https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/17929

"ResearchGate and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Announce New Journal Home Partnership for Science Partner Journals"

AAAS, a leading publisher of cutting-edge research renowned for its Science family of journals, launched its Science Partner Journal (SPJ) program in 2017. Consisting of 14 high-quality, fully open access journals produced in collaboration with international research institutions, foundations, funders, and societies, the SPJ program will now expand its reach through Journal Home on ResearchGate. . . .

ResearchGate will create dedicated journal profiles on the platform that will be prominently featured on all associated articles and touchpoints on ResearchGate, significantly boosting the visibility of these titles with highly relevant authors and readers.

Authors of articles in the SPJs will enjoy the added benefit of having their content automatically added to their profiles on ResearchGate.

https://tinyurl.com/53ehxhzu

"Open Access Movement in the Scholarly World: Pathways for Libraries in Developing Countries"

Open access is a scholarly publishing model that has emerged as an alternative to traditional subscription-based journal publishing. This study explores the adoption of the open access movement worldwide and the role that libraries can play in addressing those factors which are slowing its progress within developing countries. The study has drawn upon both qualitative data from a focused literature review and quantitative data from major open access platforms. The results indicate that while the open access movement is steadily gaining acceptance worldwide, the progress in developing countries within geographical areas such as Africa, Asia and Oceania is quite a bit slower. Two significant factors are the cost of publishing fees and the lack of institutional open access mandates and policies to encourage uptake. The study provides suggested strategies for academic libraries to help overcome current challenges.

https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515231202758

"US Repository Network Launches Pilot to Enhance Discoverability of Open Access Content in Repositories"

In November, the US Repository Network (USRN) will launch a pilot project aimed at improving the discoverability of articles in repositories. This pilot project involves the use of services from CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the UK, to evaluate and improve local repository practices. Additional technical support will be provided by Antleaf Ltd.

As part of the project, CORE will aggregate the metadata and full text of articles from a subset of US repositories, allowing them to be findable through a centralized discovery service with prominent links back to the original full text of the repository. At the same time, the project will assess current practices related to metadata quality, the tracking of Open Access deposits, the use of PIDs, technical support for OAI-PMH, and the adoption of more recent protocols, such as FAIR Signposting. At the level of the centralized aggregation, CORE will enrich the existing US metadata with information from its larger international aggregation. A Dashboard service for participating institutions will be provided, enabling them to assess, validate and monitor their practices.

https://tinyurl.com/2utfpvj3

"Repository Staff Perspectives on the Benefits Of Trustworthy Digital Repository Certification"

This paper reports on the results from a qualitative study that asks whether and how staff members from TRAC certified repositories find value in the audit and certification process. While some interviewees found certification valuable, others argued that the costs outweighed the benefits or expressed ambivalence towards certification. Findings indicate that TRAC certification offered both internal and external benefits, such as improved documentation, accountability, transparency, communication, and standards, but there were concerns about high costs, implementation problems, and lack of objective evaluation criteria.

https://tinyurl.com/bddmuwjy

"FAIR EVA: Bringing Institutional Multidisciplinary Repositories into the FAIR Picture"

The FAIR Principles are a set of good practices to improve the reproducibility and quality of data in an Open Science context. Different sets of indicators have been proposed to evaluate the FAIRness of digital objects, including datasets that are usually stored in repositories or data portals. However, indicators like those proposed by the Research Data Alliance are provided from a high-level perspective that can be interpreted and they are not always realistic to particular environments like multidisciplinary repositories. This paper describes FAIR EVA, a new tool developed within the European Open Science Cloud context that is oriented to particular data management systems like open repositories, which can be customized to a specific case in a scalable and automatic environment. It aims to be adaptive enough to work for different environments, repository software and disciplines, taking into account the flexibility of the FAIR Principles. As an example, we present DIGITAL.CSIC repository as the first target of the tool, gathering the particular needs of a multidisciplinary institution as well as its institutional repository.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02652-8

"Where Is All the Research Software? An Analysis of Software in UK Academic Repositories"

This research examines the prevalence of research software as independent records of output within UK academic institutional repositories (IRs). There has been a steep decline in numbers of research software submissions to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework from 2008 to 2021, but there has been no investigation into whether and how the official academic IRs have affected the low return rates. In what we believe to be the first such census of its kind, we queried the 182 online repositories of 157 UK universities. Our findings show that the prevalence of software within UK Academic IRs is incredibly low. Fewer than 28% contain software as recognised academic output. Of greater concern, we found that over 63% of repositories do not currently record software as a type of research output and that several Universities appeared to have removed software as a defined type from default settings of their repository. We also explored potential correlations, such as being a member of the Russell group, but found no correlation between these metadata and prevalence of records of software. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings with regards to the lack of recognition of software as a discrete research output in institutions, despite the opposite being mandated by funders, and we make recommendations for changes in policies and operating procedures.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1546

Zenodo Mandates Document Submission to a Community and Peer Review

What’s more, content submitted to Zenodo would be published automatically within the repository before and whether or not it was accepted into a community. Now, when a researcher goes to publish their outputs, they must select their community and submit their work for peer review, before it is made public. Community curators will then review the content to see if it fits within the community even have the capability to improve and correct the metadata to ensure that it meets quality standards. Once the metadata is approved, it will then be published in Zenodo and, consequently, integrated into the OpenAIRE Graph.

https://tinyurl.com/5y79y2nb

Paywall: "FAST Headings in MODS: Michigan State University Libraries Digital Repository Case Study"

Since 2016, the [MSUL] digital repository has been using Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) subject headings as its primary subject vocabulary. . . The MSUL FAST use case presents some challenges that are not addressed by existing MARC-focused FAST tools. This paper will outline the MSUL digital repository team’s justification for including FAST headings in the digital repository as well as workflows for adding FAST headings to Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) metadata, their maintenance, and utilization for discovery.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2023.2213708

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Implementation of a Federated Information System by Means of Reuse of Research Data Archived in Research Data Repositories"

At universities, research data is increasingly stored in research data repositories according to a data management plan (DMP) and thus made available for further use. The challenge of reusing hundreds, thousands, or millions of data sets is to obtain an overview of the data in a short period of time and to search through all the data. The high variability of the formats used to store research data requires a new approach to data reusability that focuses on the visualisation and searchability of archived research data, which can also be combined with each other. In this article, we present a practical DMP that describes how information systems can be created on demand by reusing research data archived in research data repositories and how these systems can be merged into a federated information system. As a result, in our projects, information systems have been created in minutes or a couple of hours with few resources. The initial effort to create a federated system remains; however, this allows federated searches to be performed. Extending a federated system to include other information systems can then be accomplished by making a few configurations and manageable adjustments to the source code.

https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2023-039

"Disappearing Repositories — Taking an Infrastructure Perspective on the Long-Term Availability of Research Data"

Currently, there is limited research investigating the phenomenon of research data repositories being shut down, and the impact this has on the long-term availability of data. This paper takes an infrastructure perspective on the preservation of research data by using a registry to identify 191 research data repositories that have been closed and presenting information on the shutdown process. The results show that 6.2 % of research data repositories indexed in the registry were shut down. The risks resulting in repository shutdown are varied. The median age of a repository when shutting down is 12 years. Strategies to prevent data loss at the infrastructure level are pursued to varying extent. 44 % of the repositories in the sample migrated data to another repository, and 12 % maintain limited access to their data collection. However, both strategies are not permanent solutions. Finally, the general lack of information on repository shutdown events as well as the effect on the findability of data and the permanence of the scholarly record are discussed.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06712

"DSpace 7 Benefits: Is It Worth Upgrading?"

With the release of DSpace version 7, a natural question that arises is whether the new version offers enough new functionalities to motivate system administrators to upgrade. This paper briefly describes the most important changes, including new features and bug fixes, included in DSpace 7.4 and prior minor versions. The next parts of this paper explore our estimate that there are several thousand DSpace-based systems globally that will likely have to be upgraded in the near future. The main reason for this need is that older versions of DSpace (including 5.x) have reached the end of their developer support period or are reaching it in mid-2023. Based on our own upgrade experience, we propose suggestions and recommendations on migrating from the previous DSpace 6.3-based environment to the new one in a case study that concludes this article.

https://tinyurl.com/32t7ac9m

Paywall: "Proactive Institutional Repository Collection Development Techniques: Archiving Gold Open Access Articles and Metadata Retrieved with Web Scraping"

This article describes a method for copying open access articles and corresponding descriptive metadata from open repositories for archiving in an institutional repository using Beautiful Soup and Selenium as web scraping tools. This method quickly added hundreds of articles to an IR without relying on faculty participation or consulting publisher policies, increasing repository downloads and usage.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2240190

"Publishers, Internet Archive Agree to Streamline Digital Book-Lending Case"

The proposed order would require the Archive to pay Lagardere SCA’s (LAGA.PA) Hachette Book Group, News Corp’s (NWSA.O) HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons (WLY.N) and Bertelsmann SE & Co’s (BTGGg.F) Penguin Random House an undisclosed amount of money if it loses its appeal.

The order would also permanently block the Archive from lending out copies of the publishers’ books without permission, pending the result of the appeal.

https://tinyurl.com/yc5j2vb8

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Record Labels Hit Internet Archive with New $400m+ Copyright Lawsuit"

Record labels including UMG, Capitol and Sony have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States targeting Internet Archive and founder Brewster Kale, among others. Filed in Manhattan federal court late Friday, the complaint alleges infringement of 2,749 works, recorded by deceased artists, including Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby.

https://tinyurl.com/43b4c3w6

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"eLife and PREreview to Enhance the ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ Ecosystem Through Adoption of COAR Notify"

The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research.

https://tinyurl.com/36emyk9b

"The Status of Open Access Repositories in the Field of Technology: Insights from OpenDOAR"

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was "research articles" and "electronic thesis and dissertations."

https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-11-2022-0119

"ResearchGate and Wiley Expand Partnership to Encompass Majority of Publisher’s Open Access Portfolio"

Under the agreement, 519 journal titles, including the entire open access portfolios of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and all Hindawi titles, will now benefit from an enhanced presence on ResearchGate through its new Journal Home offering.

With Journal Home, all version-of-record content from these titles, including newly published articles, will be syndicated to ResearchGate. Additionally, dedicated journal profiles are activated and made accessible throughout the ResearchGate platform with each journal prominently represented on all its associated article pages and at all other relevant touch points with members.

https://tinyurl.com/54ftv8am

"Build, Access, Analyze: Introducing ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub)"

ARCH helps users easily conduct and support computational research with digital collections at scale — e.g., text and data mining, data science, digital scholarship, machine learning, and more. Users can build custom research collections relevant to a wide range of subjects, generate and access research-ready datasets from collections, and analyze those datasets. In line with best practices in reproducibility, ARCH supports open publication and preservation of user-generated datasets. ARCH is currently optimized for working with tens of thousands of web archive collections, covering a broad range of subjects, events, and timeframes, and the platform is actively expanding to include digitized text and image collections. ARCH also works with various portions of the overall Wayback Machine global web archive totaling 50+ PB going back to 1996, representing an extensive archive of contemporary history and communication.

https://tinyurl.com/z9c83dut

Japanese Preprint Server: "Guest Post — A Year of Jxiv — Warming the Preprints Stone"

However, this anomaly was corrected with the launch in March 2022 of Jxiv — the first fully-fledged Japanese-born preprint server — by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), one of the largest public funders of research in the country that sits under the administrative and policy behemoth, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). . . . JST also manages J-STAGE, the national online platform for Japanese journals launched in 1999, which hosts more than 3,500 journals containing almost 5.38 million articles, as well as J-STAGE Data launched in 2020.

https://tinyurl.com/388vd3y3

"Is There a Case for Accepting Machine Translated Scholarly Content in Repositories?"

Multilingualism is a critical characteristic of a healthy, inclusive, and diverse research communications landscape. However, multilingualism presents a particular challenge for the discovery of research outputs. Although researchers and other information seekers may only be able to read in one or two languages, they may want to know about all the relevant research in their area, regardless of the language in which it is published. Conversely, information seekers may want to discover research outputs in their own language(s) more easily. To facilitate this, COAR Task Force on Supporting Multilingualism and non-English Content in Repositories has been developing and promoting good practices for repositories in managing multilingual and non-English content. In the course of our work, the topic of machine translation (MT) has sparked a heated discussion within the Task Group and we would like to share with you the nature of this discussion.

https://bit.ly/42D1nbF