Category: Institutional Repositories

Version 9 of the Research Data Curation Bibliography Released

Digital Scholarship has released Version 9 of the Research Data Curation Bibliography. This selective bibliography includes over 750 English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions. Printed from the HTML page, it is over 130 pages long.

The Research Data Curation Bibliography covers topics such as research data creation, acquisition, metadata, provenance, repositories, management, policies, support services, funding agency requirements, open access, peer review, publication, citation, sharing, reuse, and preservation.

Most sources have been published from January 2009 through December 2017; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included. The bibliography includes links to included works.

Abstracts are included in this bibliography if a work is under a Creative Commons Attribution License (BY and national/international variations), a Creative Commons public domain dedication (CC0), or a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark and this is clearly indicated in the work.

The Research Data Curation Bibliography is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Journal Access Problem Note

The International Journal of Digital Curation server is having access problems today resulting in the following error message: "DB Error: Can't create/write to file '/var/tmp/#sql_565_1.MAI' (Errcode: 28)."

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"Leading Across Boundaries: Collaborative Leadership and the Institutional Repository in Research Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges"

David M. Seaman has self-archived "Leading Across Boundaries: Collaborative Leadership and the Institutional Repository in Research Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges."

Here's an excerpt:

Two methodologies—content analysis of IR web pages and surveys of library directors and IR developers—were employed to determine if IRs revealed evidence of collaborative leadership. The study populations were those members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Oberlin Group of liberal arts colleges that operated IR services by July 2014 (146 institutions overall). The research examined if IR format, size, age, nomenclature, or technology platform varied between ARL and Oberlin Group members. It asked if there is any difference in the perception of collaborative leadership traits, perceived IR success, or collaborative involvement with stakeholder communities between ARL and Oberlin Group members or between library directors and IR developers. The study found evidence of all six collaborative leadership traits being examined: assessing the environment for collaboration, creating clarity, building trust, sharing power, developing people, and self-reflection.

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Lots of Institutional Repositories Keep E-prints Safe

The seductive allure of a commercial mega repository is two-fold: (1) everything is conveniently in one place, and (2) a company is taking care of the dreary and expensive business of running it.

Everything seems fine: problem solved! That is until something goes wrong, such as the repository being bought and controlled by a publisher or being threatened by lawsuits by a coterie of publishers.

Then it's important to remember: it's a company, and companies exist to make a profit.

Heh, companies are great. I wouldn't have just had that tasty cup of coffee without them. But, we should be very clear about what motivates companies and controls their behavior. And we shouldn't be shocked if they do things that aren't motivated by lofty goals.

I know: institutional repositories are hard work. The bloom is off the rose. But they exist to serve higher education, not make money, and they part of the academic communities they serve. And they can't be bought. And their universities don't often go out of business. And there are a lot of them. And they are not likely to be attractive targets for lawsuits unless something has gone very, very wrong at the local level.

Copyright is complicated. No one is advocating that we ignore it and just shove e-prints into IR's willy-nilly. Getting faculty to understand the ins and outs of e-print copyright is no picnic, nor is monitoring for compliance. But the battle is easier to fight at the local level where one-on-one faculty to librarian communication is possible.

For self-archiving to flourish in the long run, institutional repositories must flourish. By and large, librarians establish, run, and support them, and they are the quiet heroes of green open access who will continue to provide a sustainable and reliable infrastructure for self-archiving.

"Penn Libraries to End Partnership with bepress"

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries has released "Penn Libraries to End Partnership with bepress."

Here's an excerpt:

In August, bepress sold their company to Elsevier, a business with a history of aggressive confidentiality agreements, steep price increases, and opaque data mining practices. In their acquisition of bepress and other companies like SSRN and Mendeley, Elsevier demonstrates a move toward the consolidation and monopolization of products and services impacting all areas of the research lifecycle.

We are worried about the long-term impacts from these acquisitions and are concerned that such changes are not in the best interests of the library community. Therefore, we feel obligated to begin exploring alternatives.

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COAR Annual Report 2016/17

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories has released the COAR Annual Report 2016/17 .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report contains information about strategy and outreach, annual meetings, activities of the Executive Board, Executive Director and Office as well as working and interest group accomplishments. Moreover, the report covers themes like marketing and communications, membership, publications and representation of COAR at major international and regional conferences.

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"Reflections on ‘Elsevier Acquires bepress’: Implications for Library Leaders"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Reflections on 'Elsevier Acquires bepress': Implications for Library Leaders" in the Ithaka S+R blog

Here's an excerpt:

If this is the case, libraries adopting standalone institutional repositories are moving in exactly the wrong direction strategically. Instead, thinking more in terms of a workflow as are Elsevier and the Open Science Framework (and to some degree Digital Science) may be the strongest strategy. If this is so, then the urgent question facing institutional repository managers and strategists is how quickly and thoroughly they can integrate into one (or more) such workflows. And, while such integration may not require the kind of platform-first multi-tenant approach to repositories that Digital Commons and OSF Preprints each seems to have developed, it seems like a strong design approach.

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"Workflow Development for an Institutional Repository in an Emerging Research Institution"

Jeanne Hazzard and Stephanie Towery have published "Workflow Development for an Institutional Repository in an Emerging Research Institution" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

We discovered that our faculty retain nearly none of their pre-print or post-print versions of their published articles, and so we are unable to archive those titles in the repository. Nearly 47% of the articles found were in green journals that allow only pre- or post-print copies. Most faculty were unable to produce versions of their work other than the publisher’s PDF, which many publishers restrict from upload into a repository.

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"Institutional Repositories as Infrastructures for Long-Term Preservation"

Helena Francke et al. have published "Institutional Repositories as Infrastructures for Long-Term Preservation" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

The study describes the conditions for long-term preservation of the content of the institutional repositories of Swedish higher education institutions based on an investigation of how deposited files are managed with regards to file format and how representatives of the repositories describe the functions of the repositories.

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An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts

Hui Zhang and Camden Lopez have published "An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts>" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Digital repository managers rely on usage metrics such as the number of downloads to demonstrate research visibility and impacts of the repositories. Increasingly, they find that current tools such as spreadsheets and charts are ineffective for revealing important elements of usage, including reader locations, and for attracting the targeted audiences. This article describes the design and development of a readership map that provides an interactive, near-real-time visualization of actual visits to an institutional repository using data from Google Analytics. The readership map exhibits the global impacts of a repository by displaying the city of every view or download together with the title of the scholarship being read and a hyperlink to its page in the repository. We will discuss project motivation and development issues such as authentication with Google API, metadata integration, performance tuning, and data privacy.

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"The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints"

Judy Luther has published "The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Significant events have occurred in rapid succession in the last year signaling that preprints, the author’s original manuscript before submission to a journal, will play a much larger role in the landscape. Developments with DOIs, changes in funder expectations, and the launch of new services indicate that preprints will no longer be limited to the hard sciences and social sciences.

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"Reference Rot in the Repository: A Case Study of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in an Academic Library"

Mia Massicott and Kathleen Botter have published "Reference Rot in the Repository: A Case Study of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in an Academic Library" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This study examines ETDs deposited during the period 2011-2015 in an institutional repository, to determine the degree to which the documents suffer from reference rot, that is, linkrot plus content drift. The authors converted and examined 664 doctoral dissertations in total, extracting 11,437 links, finding overall that 77% of links were active, and 23% exhibited linkrot. A stratified random sample of 49 ETDs was performed which produced 990 active links, which were then checked for content drift based on mementos found in the Wayback Machine. Mementos were found for 77% of links, and approximately half of these, 492 of 990, exhibited content drift. The results serve to emphasize not only the necessity of broader awareness of this problem, but also to stimulate action on the preservation front.

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"Practices of Research Data Curation in Institutional Repositories: A Qualitative View from Repository Staff"

Dong Joon Lee and Besiki Stvilia have published "Practices of Research Data Curation in Institutional Repositories: A Qualitative View from Repository Staff" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied.

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"Web Interface Security Vulnerabilities of European Academic Repositories"

Matus Formanek and Martin Zaborsky have published "Web Interface Security Vulnerabilities of European Academic Repositories" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

The given analysis summarizes the status quo of the level of security of web interfaces of selected European academic repositories in the field of library and information science. It focuses on the presence and qualities of the secure HTTPS protocol via SSL/TLS protocols. The security of the transmitted data is particularly important in the network environment of the Internet, especially if log-in user data is transmitted. Disclosure may have a direct impact on saved digital objects and their metadata which together represent the most valuable parts of systems of digital libraries and repositories. Furthermore, the paper points to the most noticeable vulnerabilities of protocols of web interfaces and presents practical recommendations for the expert public. These may contribute to the increase of the level of security of the discussed systems.

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"Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications"

Clifford Lynch has published "Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here.

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"Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library’s ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project"

Max Eckard, Dallas Pillen and Mike Shallcross have published "Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library's ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, ArchivesSpace and Archivematica have emerged as two of the most exciting open source platforms for working with digital archives. The former manages accessions and collections and provides a framework for entering descriptive, administrative, rights, and other metadata. The latter ingests digital content and prepares information packages for long-term preservation and access. In October 2016, the Bentley Historical Library wrapped up a two-year, $355,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to partner with the University of Michigan Library on the integration of these two systems in an end-to-end workflow that will include the automated deposit of content into a DSpace repository. This article provides context of the project and offers an in-depth exploration of the project’s key development tasks, all of which were provided by Artefactual Systems, the developers of Archivematica (code available at https://github.com/artefactual-labs/appraisal-tab).

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"Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories"

Patrick Obrien et al. have published "Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories" in the Journal of Library Administration.

Here's an excerpt:

A primary impact metric for institutional repositories (IR) is the number of file downloads, which are commonly measured through third-party Web analytics software. Google Analytics, a free service used by most academic libraries, relies on HTML page tagging to log visitor activity on Google's servers. However, Web aggregators such as Google Scholar link directly to high value content (usually PDF files), bypassing the HTML page and failing to register these direct access events. This article presents evidence of a study of four institutions demonstrating that the majority of IR activity is not counted by page tagging Web analytics software, and proposes a practical solution for significantly improving the reporting relevancy and accuracy of IR performance metrics using Google Analytics.

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"Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to Re-think the Institutional Repository?"

Richard Poynder has published "Q&A with CNI's Clifford Lynch: Time to Re-think the Institutional Repository?" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

Moreover, today we can see that the interoperability promised by OAI-PMH has not really materialised, few third-party service providers have emerged, and content duplication has not been avoided. And to the exasperation of green OA advocates, author self-archiving has remained a minority sport, with researchers reluctant to take on the task of depositing their papers in their institutional repository. Given this, some believe the IR now faces an existential threat.

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"Scraping Scientific Web Repositories: Challenges and Solutions for Automated Content Extraction"

Philipp Meschenmoser, Norman Meuschke, Manuel Hotz, and Bela Gipp have published "Scraping Scientific Web Repositories: Challenges and Solutions for Automated Content Extraction" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Many researchers are interested in accessing the underlying scientometric raw data to increase the transparency of these systems. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and present strategies to programmatically access such data in scientific Web repositories. We demonstrate the strategies as part of an open source tool (MIT license) that allows research performance comparisons based on Google Scholar data.

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"TRY IT OUT: DSpace 6.0 Release Candidate #3 Available"

DuraSpace has released "TRY IT OUT: DSpace 6.0 Release Candidate #3 Available."

Here's an excerpt:

The third release candidate of 6.0 is now available for download and testing. 6.0-RC3 (Release Candidate #3) is a pre-release of 6.0, and we hope that the 6.0 final release will follow closely in its footsteps. . . .

We believe the 6.0 release is nearly production-ready, but could use your help in verifying there's nothing we've overlooked.

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"Deploying Islandora as a Digital Repository Platform: a Multifaceted Experience at the University of Denver Libraries"

Shea-Tinn Yeh et al. have published "Deploying Islandora as a Digital Repository Platform: a Multifaceted Experience at the University of Denver Libraries" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The Library Technology Department at the University of Denver was tasked with implementing an Islandora open-source framework for its Special Collections Department because the current host was being retired. Although Islandora's front-end is tailored for librarians, its back-end is complex, and built upon many subsystems. A failure in any of the subsystems guarantees a domino effect and a chain reaction which can obfuscate the root cause of the issue. Though product documentation and support communication channels exist, many of the problems we faced were unique to our specific hardware and software configuration. The development team had to learn fast, and be innovative, agile, and systematic in order to work with such a complicated system. This article describes the tactics used in this repository development effort, as well as the library's stakeholder relationship management.

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DuraSpace and LYRASIS Boards Approve "Intent to Merge"

The DuraSpace and LYRASIS Boards have approved an "Intent to Merge".

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The respective boards unanimously approved an "Intent to Merge", which means the organizations, having done a careful initial investigation, will move into a public phase to consider an official plan and pathway for the potential coming together, including a full analysis of member benefits. The decision to eventually come together is not yet final. In this public phase of investigation, each organization seeks feedback from members of their organizations and will investigate carefully the value of all services, projects, membership models and organizational cultures to ensure a smooth transition for members of both organizations should a merger agreement occur.

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Putting Down Roots: Securing the Future of Open Access Policies

Knowledge Exchange has released Putting Down Roots: Securing the Future of Open Access Policies.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The summary report; 'Putting down roots: Securing the future of open access policies' includes an analysis of a wide range of OA services and policies currently in use and presents:

  • an analysis of the common elements found in the current OA policies adopted by research funders and institutions
  • a set of case studies that illustrate the direct or indirect dependency of OA policies on key services
  • the views of stakeholders on the key services that enable compliance with OA policies
  • use cases, presented in accessible formats and language for a non-technical audience
  • a set of priorities for action if OA policies are to be successfully implemented

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"Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories"

Richard Poynder has published "Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories" in Open and Shut?. This is part one of a planned two-part post.

Here's an excerpt:

First, I want to discuss how many of the documents indexed in "open" repositories are in fact freely available, rather than on "dark deposit" or otherwise inaccessible

Second, I want to look at the so-called eprint request Button, a tool developed to allow readers to obtain copies of items held on dark deposit in repositories.

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Dspace@MIT: 17,400 Articles Deposited and over 3.3 Million Downloads

MIT's Dspace@MIT has had 17,400 articles deposited and over 3.3 million downloads.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A new milestone was reached in collecting articles under the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy : 43% of the articles published by faculty since they adopted their Policy are now being shared through the Open Access Articles Collection in Dspace@MIT.

As of the end of July 2015, downloads of the 17,400 articles deposited in relation to the Policy topped 3.3 million, with over 83,500 downloads during the month.

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