Increasing the full-text deposits in your institutional repository

The Repositories Support Project (RSP) Increasing the full-text deposits in your institutional repository event took place on Wednesday 12th June at Charing Cross Hotel. The elegant venue gave the event a relaxing atmosphere, with incredibly helpful hotel staff; beautiful chandeliers; quiet classical music playing in areas; and candle-lit corridors in the evening. The delegates were mostly from a wide range of UK Higher Education institutions. A delicious lunch with a variety of choices was served in the Hotel’s Brasserie; this gave delegates the valuable opportunity to chat to one another, share ideas and issues about their institutional repositories, and to discuss the ways they were attempting to increase full-text deposits.

There were seven excellent presentations in total that focused on: implementation of self-archiving in institutional repositories, deposit tools, and depositing workflow. Balviar Notay spoke about JISC’s focus on deposit projects. The key-note speaker was Les Carr, his presentation on full-text deposits in the current scholarly communications environment was very enthusiastic, entertaining and thought-provoking. Muriel Mewissen discussed RJ Broker, Steve Hitchcock’s presentation was on DepositMOre. John Norman’s presentation included a video showing how DURA works in practice. Richard Jones spoke about Sword, and Bo Middleton’s presentation covered RePOSIT.

The day culminated in a lively ‘break-out’ session where delegates worked in groups to discuss: “What strategies are followed currently in your institution to increase deposits: technical, organizational and policy issues” – each group fed their responses back to the room, and these in general seemed to demonstrate common problems experienced by many repository managers, and therefore the solutions suggested could be usefully applied to many too, making this a worthwhile event.

You can download all presentations and notes from the break-out sessions here. Delegates tweeted throughout the day and all twitter feeds are collected in storify. Overall, this was a useful informative day; delegates gave positive feedback praising both the event speakers and the event organizers.

Implementing Open Access Funders’ Policies

The Repositories Support Project (RSP) ‘Implementing Open Access Funders’ Policies’ event was held at Goodenough College, London, on the 23^rd May. The striking venue of “The Great Hall” resembled ‘The Great Hall’ at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, minus the Sorting Hat and Dumbledore (lots of wooden floors, tables, and portraits on the walls); instead it was filled with delegates who were in the main, from a diverse range of UK HEIs. At the refreshment breaks and lunch-time, delegates made the most of the chance to chat with one another to share thoughts about the presentations, make useful contacts, and exchange information about how they would implement the policies and ideas from the RSP event at their institutions.

RSP Institutional Repositories Summary Data: An update

In May 2011 the Repositories Support Project (RSP) sent a survey to HEI repository staff to collect information about their repositories, such as the software used, staffing, content, and departmental repository responsibilities.  Each university’s specific information was included in the RSP Wiki for Institutional Repositories, and a summary data page was created. Around November 2001, the survey had 75 responses and from then until March 2013, about twenty more UK universities joined the survey. The updated summary data are now online.

Supporting and enhancing your repository: A joint RepNet/RSP workshop

A joint RepNet/RSP workshop on enhancing Institutional Repositories (IRs) and their metadata sets was held at the BCS in London on January 21st, 2013.  The event provided an overview of the UK RepositoryNet+ Project current status and aims for the future, plus presentations on the just-released draft RIOXX Metadata Application Profile and on the CrossRef set of APIs for enabling automatic metadata collection into IRs. CrossRef ‘DOI Lookup’, and FundRef features will be looked as part of the developing RIOXX application profile guidance.

Journal Research Data Policy Bank (JoRD)

* A guest post by Jane Smith, SHERPA Services Development Officer

 

JoRD will shed light on the policies devised by academic publishers to promote linkage between journal articles and underlying research data.

This initiative, is funded by JISC as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme; it runs from July to December 2012. This work is being carried out by the Centre for Research Communication, University of Nottingham, working with Research Information Network  and Professor Paul Sturges.

Some thoughts on institutional repositories

At the beginning of July, the Repositories Support Project (RSP) team visited the University of Lincoln, to discuss developments for their institutional repository (The Lincoln Repository) and identify recommendations and improvement strategies. On my way back to Nottingham, on the train, my mind kept thinking of all the issues that were raised in the meeting. Some of these issues presented in this blog posting are successfully implemented by The Lincoln Repository, while some others may be not; the rest of the text will not focus on the case of the University of Lincoln Repository, it will only present my thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value.

Building a successful national network: how we did it in the UK and where we’re going

The Repositories Support Project is hosting a workshop on “building a national network” at the Open Repositories 2012 (OR2012) conference, on Monday July 9th, 1:30pm. This workshop will showcase research repositories in UK higher education. It would demonstrate how widespread the network is, how coordinated the UK is as a community, what the Repositories Support Project has done to encourage this, the role of United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories and what JISC has done in terms of a national approach to support and development.

Delegates from outside the UK will have the opportunity to get an in depth understanding of the repository network in the UK and also to talk to repository staff about their experiences.

Workshop outline

•   Introduction by JISC to the programmes which have supported repository development over the last seven years and to future plans for repository development and support in the UK – including the UKRepositoryNet+ service.
• Examples of JISC funded Support projects: SHERPA and RSP
• Support for institutions: the University of Glasgow case study
• The role of UKCoRR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories)
• There will then be a number of concurrent sessions where UK staff will use their institutions as a case study to engender discussion about what can be achieved. They will focus on two main themes:
  •  The integration of research repositories with university systems, processes and policies especially those connected with research management.
  •  Projects and initiatives to promote the repository within the institution in order to increase the deposit of full text items. This will have multi-disciplinary focus and include arts and humanities content as well as STEM subjects.

Register here. 

Contact: Jackie Wickham [Jacqueline.wickham@nottingham.ac.uk], RSP Coordinator, tel:0115 8466389