Neil Stewart, Digital Repository Manager

Laura Radford, Digital Repository Administrator

CRO Information Session, Wed 30 January 2012

Institutional Repositories: City Research Online & open access

Today’s session•Open access: what is it?•Policy & infrastructure•OA at City•What we learnt•The future

•Feel free to interrupt, ask questions!

Why open access? Research wants to be free!• Growing recognition in last 10+ years that the internet

& web services can cause this to happen.

Benefits• Move away from research hidden

behind subscription pay-walls.• Widest possible audience for

research.• Open access citation advantage.• Social justice- lowering the “digital

divide”.• Open access = better science,

developed more quickly

Currently

In the Future

• focussed on peer-reviewed journals.

• Open data.• Open monographs.

Green vs. Gold Open Access

Green open access Gold open access

•Author self-archives “author final” version in an institutional repository (IR) or subject repository.

•An embargo period is often applied.

•Copyright, versioning of papers both issues for academics.

•Getting academics to do it- to mandate?

•“Author pays” model- though rarely out of academics’ own pockets!

•Articles from a fully Gold or “hybrid” journal are made open.

•Problem of funding for Gold, publishers “double dipping”, creation of a market for Gold journals.

The policy & infrastructure landscape• 208 UK IRs developed in past

10 years!• Significant growth in subject

repositories (ArXiv, PubMed, SSRN, RePEc)

• Both the Finch Report & the RCUK policy favour Gold, to the detriment of Green: Green repositories to be used for “grey literature, theses and datasets”.

• Likely to be a “mixed economy” for a long while yet (?)

Hot Topics• Elsevier boycott• Finch Report on opening

access to UK research outputs

• Research Councils UK revised open access policy

• Aaron Swartz & JSTOR

City Research Online (CRO): the basicsOur set-up• Symplectic Elements Current Research Information

System (CRIS), contains c. 25,000 publication records.• Eprints open access full text repository, contains c.

1,400 papers.Developments to date• Establishing a presence on City’s main website.• Using data held in the open access repository to feed

web services.• Developing use of the CRIS to support REF 2014.• Storing and serving City’s electronic PhD theses.• Social media usage.• Pushing papers to RePEc automatically.

CRO at CityWho we work with (other than library colleagues!)• Academic colleagues• CRO Steering Group (representatives from across the

university)• Senate Research Committee• Pro VC for Research & Enterprise, Research Office

(Research Excellence Framework (REF), RCUK open access policy)

• Information Services (staff profiles)• Admins in the Schools (advocacy, administration,

theses)

We have a policy!• Adopted as of January 2013- now compulsory to add

papers to CRO.

Lessons learnt (1): general lessonsAutomating metadata harvest and transfer is good.

It saves on cataloguing time, and means you can concentrate on doing more interesting things.

Using hosted services is also good, since they tend to be secure and stable, and allow for nimble development.

Branding is important. We quickly learnt that our users get confused when we used brand names- using the service’s name in a thoroughgoing way is very important. Only refer to software names in the context of technical explanations!

Lessons learnt (2): managing systemsHaving two systems doing similar things can be difficult:• Managing systems integration.• Managing a tripartite relationship.• Explaining the way in which systems interact to users.

But it also has its advantages:• Allows for the automated metadata transfer.• Different systems can be used for different purposes- differentiation!

• As a result of this differentiation, separate development of the two systems can be engaged upon.

• Though Eprints now has CRIS-like functionality, Symplectic Elements has been designed from the ground up as a CRIS.

CRO’s futureWe try and provide a broadening range of useful services

for our “customers”.

CRO has four major work packages:• Research data management• Open access journal publishing• Archiving and serving working paper series• Author profiling services

Other stuff: discovery, Altmetrics, linking with ArXiv, new starters.

Killer application will be to do more with the data we hold, not least Staff Profiling services for City.

What we do day to day• General service management• Answering enquiries (academic & library colleagues, others)

• Technical & administrative troubleshooting• Thinking strategically- service development• Advocacy: training, awareness raising, publicity• Current awareness: keeping up to date with open access & repository developments

• Conferences, external meetings, other events• Other things you expect to do at work: email, meetings etc.

Thanks! Questions?

City Research Online:

http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/

http://cityopenaccess.wordpress.com/

publications@city.ac.uk

@City_Research