EDINA newsline
June 2012: Volume 17 Issue 2
This year is proving to be a very interesting one for Open Repositories and for the support that EDINA is providing to their success. Repositories are now an important means for academic outcomes to be made available more widely from universities and colleges: they are central to the Open Access agenda that is changing the nature of scholarly communication and they play a supporting role for research reporting.
The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories, OR2012, is being hosted at the University of Edinburgh this year from 9–13 July, with EDINA co-organising. The programme has been published and registrations are exceeding expectations.
OR2012 will provide a showcase for the UK RepositoryNet+ (RepNet) project.
Having invested in a succession of projects to foster institutional capacity and the production of tools and facilities, JISC wishes to establish a socio-technical infrastructure and curation service to assist managers of institutional repositories in their tasks, sustain universities in moving towards Open Access and support improvement in research information management. The task of bringing that to fruition has been given to the RepNet project at EDINA.
The set-up phase is now complete, and the project will be in the “build and launch” phase until March 2013. This includes collaborating with UKOLN, who are to manage a related “Innovation Zone”.
Working with JISC Innovation, the project team made contact with the key providers of service components, and OR2012 will also provide an opportunity to launch services from the first wave of funding by JISC. A team based at the University of Nottingham will contribute with information on funders’ and publishers’ policies through the RoMEO and JULIET databases; EDINA will assist deposit into institutional repositories with the Repository- Junction Broker (RJB) and Organisation and Repository Identification (ORI) services (see below); and Mimas will provide benchmarking and reporting functionality through the development of Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS-UK) from demonstrator to a full service.
EDINA’s contribution to RepNet is based on the Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project outcomes. Two independent tools will be developed as separate projects from the discovery and delivery functionality of the OA-RJ.
The Organisation and Repositories Identification (ORI) project will design a middleware tool for identifying academic organisations and their associated repositories. It will harvest data from several authoritative sources in order to provide information on over 23,000 organisations and 3,000 repositories worldwide. APIs will be provided to query the harvested content.
The Repository Junction Broker (RJ Broker) project will deliver a middleware tool for handling the deposit of Open Access research articles to multiple subject and institutional repositories.
The RJ Broker will parse the metadata of an article to determine the appropriate target repositories and transfer the publication to the registered repositories. It is intended to minimise efforts on behalf of potential depositors, and thereby maximise distribution and exposure of research outputs.
The RJ Broker project has been funded for a year as part of the phase one development of UK Repository Net+. The ORI project was awarded six months’ funding.