EDINA newsline
March 2009: Volume 14 Issue 1
A great deal of investment has been made to encourage the emergence of repositories over the past year or so, and the next year will likely be one for some appraisal, not only in the UK but internationally. This applies not only to institutional repositories (and subject repositories) intended to provide a means for sharing research papers through open access self-archiving (so-called "Green OA"), but also repositories sharing learning materials and research datasets. Many of these are doing things at the network level that are not readily done at local level.
The term "repository" is being used increasingly widely, perhaps overmuch, to describe databases held in all types of science data centres, and databases that are curated and held in stewardship to support the wide variety of research data services provided by the two JISC national academic data centres, EDINA and Mimas. The usage in this context relates to facilities for sharing: at the minimum, supporting deposit, keep-safe and access.
This seems a good time to highlight the contribution that EDINA is making to the development of repository provision and thinking.
We welcome your feedback on our repository initiatives: Jorum, ShareGeo and the Depot. Review these below and let us have comments via our Helpdesk
Developed and hosted with Mimas, Jorum was one of the first of JISC's network level repositories, and contains online learning materials. The service now has the challenge of supporting JISC and the Academy in their joint work to promote and enable sharing as part of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme during the 12 months beginning April 2009.
The Jorum Team have responded with three licensing regimes, including JorumOpen, which uses Creative Commons. There are also a number of support actions being devised to assist the projects funded under the OER Programme.
The website has recently been refreshed following user feedback and the shift in its mission, with links to the new Community Bay for discussion and collaboration: the place to air views about issues such as sharing OER. The website also contains up-to-date news, and user guides are available, together with highlights of the many featured resources within Jorum and podcasts for download.
Not all sharing is with "open" material: EDINA has been pioneering development of sharing within a licensed community, and ShareGeo is a trial geo-repository service which has evolved from the GRADE project. This was devised to support sharing of Ordnance Survey data and mapping downloaded from Digimap across institutions.
Accessed from the Digimap Collections main page, in the Find and Share section, this facility enables registered users of Digimap to exchange geospatial datasets with one another in ways that respect the conditions of the licence.
Geospatial datasets in a number of formats (raster, vector and tabular), derived or user-generated, can be shared, covering Great Britain but also for anywhere in the world.
The Depot was commissioned by JISC to support the JISC RepositoryNet initiative, to ensure that all researchers in the UK had some way of depositing their published output, whether or not there was an institutional repository (IR) in operation. Working with SHERPA, EDINA took this remit and developed an online facility with a re-direct function (where the researcher had an IR) and a deposit function (where the researcher did not).
The project funding has come to an end, prompting a review of the future for the Depot as an online facility to support Green OA.
We would like your feedback during March on the role you see for the Depot: see the Depot article in this edition for further details.