Evaluating the I-WIRE project

Overview of the project

The I-WIRE Project was a two-year JISC funded project to establish a quick deposit tool that would enable academic and administrative staff to deposit publication data and full text items easily into Cardiff University's institutional repository, Online Research @ Cardiff (ORCA), with the ultimate aim to make ORCA a central function in the day to day research management processes at Cardiff. The project took a user centric approach to gathering requirements, with individual interviews with stakeholders and group discussions with academic authors. 

The project's output, Manage My Publications, is integrated into Cardiff University's intranet with three choices of deposit route: quick deposit, which asks for the minimum amount of publication data to be entered and is auto-populated as much as possible for ease of deposit; DOI deposit, which used CrossRef to automatically populate the publication data; and Web of Science deposit, which similarly searches the Web of science database for an author's publications. All three were developed from user suggestions, as was the Selected Publications feature.

Alpha testing began in December 2010 with members of Information Services staff, and continued in January 2011 with volunteer testers from academic schools. Beta testing with selected schools began in March, and a gradual rollout over the academic year.

Challenges Faced

The project was late starting due to a lengthy recruitment process which resulted in the scope of the requirements gathering phase being reduced, but with effective management this was overcome.

The project was required initially to work with a pre-existing IBM system. As the project progressed it became apparent that components of this system would not be fully available within the project's timescales, so an alternative technical solution was proposed. This caused some delay to the technical development on the project.

As usual, issues surrounding copyright and publisher's open access policies threatened to prove a barrier to engagement with the project and the repository. Strictly speaking, such concerns, while valid, are outside the scope of the project and user education will be part of the planned advocacy project.

Lessons Learned

The successful delivery of the quick deposit tool, Manage My Publications, can be attributed in part to the fact that the project was engaged with users from the start; having user requirements drive projects like these is essential for success.

A dedicated project team, plus representatives from different academic and administrative communities on the Project Management Group, was essential in the success of the project, ensuring that it did not 'drift' and that issues were kept firmly in scope.

Strong communications, both internally and externally, were also a key part of the project. The team raised awareness of the project and its goals and developments by regular agenda items at high-profile committees and working groups, presentations at library service briefings and at national and international conferences, and by maintaining a website, blog and Twitter account.

Looking forward

The project has fulfilled its objective of delivering a quick deposit tool and received very good feedback from users. There are a number of issues however that need to be considered and addressed in the next few months in order to successfully embed the tool in the University's research management processes:

While deposit has been made easy for users, the mediated approach means that there needs to be a suitable level of staff resources available to ensure the quality of the data entered into ORCA.

An Advocacy and Embedding Project has been approved by the University Library Service and our next steps are to discuss with subject librarians how they can help to publicise ORCA and Manage My Publications within their individual academic schools.

The integration of Manage My Publications with existing and varied school workflows and systems needs to be carefully considered and managed.

The ongoing maintenance and support of the complex systems used in Manage My Publications is essential.

For further detailed information on the outcomes of the I-WIRE project, please follow the link to the external evaluation report: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/resources/iwire/Evibase%20Summative%20evaluation%20of%20the%20IWIRE%20project.pdf

This is the final blog entry for the official I-WIRE project but we will be keeping you up to date with the rollout of Manage My Publications and further developments with ORCA. Watch this space!
 

Open Access: The impact for libraries and librarians

I was fortunate enough to be able to take some time out of our busy testing phase last Friday to visit the Repositories Support Project's event in London on Open Access and the impact for libraries and librarians.  I was drawn by the content and the speakers, and my instinct was right as it turned out to be compelling from start to finish.  Here are the points that resonated with me and my world.

Bill Hubbard of SHERPA opened the event by defining Open Access, its background and drivers. Bill went on to give his view of where the academic community is with Open Access.  The scope has always been more than outputs alone: it includes data, grey literature (e.g., lab note-books) and arts media amongst other things, but there is currently a big gap between 'open to read' - the focus of most repositories - and 'strong' Open Access that includes use and re-use of data.

While there have been a number of drivers on the road to Open Access, including the serials crisis, Open Access is a component of the overall shift in academic practices and is something that the community is shifting to 'because it can'.  Change is coming, indicated by the academic use of Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube, Mendeley and personal web pages.  Bill states that all three units that operate in the academic model - Academics, Funders and Institutions - are in favour of Open Access.  The structures, services and processes are in place to support Open Access.  Repositories add value to the processes by providing control and authority over content.

Alma Swan gave a very thorough overview of the JISC funded and well publicised economic case for Open Access, including John Houghton's modelling and the work that Alma has undertaken with institutions in the UK, Australia, Netherlands, Denmark and the US.  Anyone familiar with the work will know that research intensive institutions don't always come out well in the model, in fact they can see a potentially negative financial impact where Gold Open Access (pay-to-publish) costs rise above a certain level.  Alma acknowledged this and emphasised that the UK can save money overall and we need to discuss at a community level how the overall saving is managed so that individual institutions are not disadvantaged.  These discussions are already taking place between research funders and institutions.

One of the questions at the end of Alma's talk highlighted that Subject Repository costs weren't included in the Houghton model as apparently no one can see their sustainability; whereas Institutional Repositories are sustainable due to the institutional imperative.  In Alma's view, Subject Repositories should harvest their content from Institutional Repositories and not take direct ingest.

Wim van der Stelt of Springer provided a publisher's perspective on Open Access.  He expressed his bemusement that Open Access is an academic's cause but championed primarily by librarians!  He went on to assure the room full of (mostly) librarians that Springer is different, has an 'agnostic business model' and is driven by customer demand, and so is working with libraries on Open Access, pioneered the 'hybrid journal' and is a 'green' publisher on SHERPA's RoMEO database.  The internet has helped change the publishers role from purely distribution since the 50's and Springer has adapted to this.  However, the pay-to-view and pay-to-publish systems will need to co-exist for some time as the Gold route to Open Access is growing, but not quickly enough.

The development of the University of Glasgow's repository was covered in a case study from Susan Ashworth, providing a fascinating insight into the university's work since 2001 to create a culture of Open Access, not just an institutional repository, and to evolve the repository into a central publications management system. 

Key drivers for this work have been increasing citations, presenting a public view of the university's research profile, demonstrating compliance with funders mandates, managing publications and preparing for the REF.

Sue pointed out that building relationships with the university research office and academic departments has been fundamental to the repository's success.  There is also a strong national initiative in the form of the Open Access Team for Scotland, and talk of a Scottish council to help create a climate of opinion on the importance of Open Access.  A Scottish Open Access declaration was made in 2004, spurring all universities on to set up repositories and put mandates in place.  Glasgow's mandate was issued in 2008, partly influenced by the library's experience of collecting publication data for the RAE.  The mandate covers new publications from 2008, requesting bibliographic data as the minimum, and also providing a standard form of address to aid citation analysis.

The university clearly recognises the importance of its repositories.  It has three, making the management of different types of outputs more straight forward, and all three are harvested by the university's library catalogue discovery tool.

The university's research and strategy committee is given regular reports, generated using ROAR and Google Analytics.  These reports show that the full-text ratio is growing from the current ten per cent.

Sue talked briefly about the Gold route to Open Access.  Glasgow has a pay-to-publish fund but anticipates this being difficult to argue for in the next financial year, and expects academics to cover these costs in their grant applications.

Glasgow is currently conducting a mini-REF exercise using a modified version of EPrints that allows academics to rank their top four outputs with some supporting text attached to the publication record, and to record 'esteem' and 'impact' information.  Academics can change these records at any time but it provides a good view in the lead up to REF, and has also seen an increased rate of self-deposit, some with full text.
Important lessons for Glasgow have been the importance of advocacy, relationships, acknowledging the variety of user needs (the repositories support multiple deposit methods), making use of external influences and linking the work to central institutional requirements.  Which led on nicely to a question about the better driver for self-deposit: the mandate or REF?  In Sue's opinion, while the mandate was instrumental in triggering the Open Access debate at the university, the REF preparation has resulted in deposits.

David Carr of the Wellcome Trust provided a funder's perspective.  Maximising access to outputs is central to the Wellcome Trust's mission, and it was recognised in the early 2000's that traditional academic models were not consistent with this goal.  The trust made it mandatory in 2006 for their funded outputs to be made Open Access and is working with the major Scientific, Technical & Medical publishers to achieve this.  There are challenges: improving compliance, persuading researchers of the benefits, improving payment mechanisms, clarifying publishers' policies and flipping the model from subscription to 'author-pays'.  Questions at the end of David's presentation demonstrated a strong opinion that the funders need to take a much stricter line in enfforcing their policies.

Chris Middleton of the University of Nottingham talked about the institution's approach to funding Open Access publishing.  A survey in 2009 showed that 14% of institutions had a central Open Access fund and that there is generally a low awareness of such funds amongst academics.  Chris also pointed out that it's difficult to budget for these funds as they are sensitive to author up-take.

A presentation of the role of professional librarians in repository management was given by Jackie Wickham of the RSP.  There has been a phenomenal growth in this area in the last five years, partly driven by the global move to Open Access, central government support and JISC funding, preparations for REF and providing a service to academics.  A recent survey conducted by the RSP identified that communication skills and perseverance are key skills for librarians working with repositories, as anyone involved in this area will know!

Paul Ayris of UCL provided the European perspective on things, and talked about some of the european initiatives such as the Open Access theses gateway DART-Europe, LIBER and LERU.  Importantly, the Gold Open Access route has been acknowledged at a European level as being too expensive and difficult to justify in the current economical climate, so the community is at an interesting cross-roads for the Gold and Green routes.  At the end of Paul's presentation, Ken Chad suggested that portals and aggregators should make more use of 'attention data' and that this could be a growth area where institutions' services could be developed to rival those of Google.

Bill Hubbard closed by stating that the community is moving to Open Access 'because it can'.  The whole academic model can be changed.  It is up to funders to set the direction through their funding and programmes, institutions to enable and facilitate, and researchers to research.

That's my take on the event, but you don't have to take my word for it as the presentations are now on-line. 

Scott

Latest News

Merry Christmas everyone!

Since our last blog in early November, we have been refining the 'ORCA Lite'* portlet, and addressing some essential technical issues regarding the 'My Publications' tab - as this was a major requirement that came out of our stakeholder engagement phase, we felt it was very important to get this right before launching the portlet for testing.

This week, however, we have started some end user testing with colleagues in Information Services, and so far the feedback has been positive. Comments include:

• 'Well done for getting this far! Overall looks great and is very easy to use.'
• 'Overall very easy to deposit, so far no issues with the process itself.'
• 'I have to say again how impressed I am with the portlet - love it!'

We are planning to involve more end user testers in January, before piloting with a few academic schools in February and March. We will keep you updated with our progress!

*We have been calling the portlet 'ORCA Lite', but are now having last-minute doubts about the name! While it is catchy, we are unsure that it fully captures the extent of the service offered - does it imply less functionality rather than offering a different but not reduced user experience? Any thoughts on this would be very welcome, so please comment!

Oh, and Happy New Year!

A Successful Demo

Yesterday we gave a demo of the ORCA Lite portlet to the Director of Information Services and the University Librarian and we are pleased to report that it was very succesful. They were extremely impressed with the work that has been done to date, and with the look and feel of the portlet. As with previous 'show and tell' sessions, the DOI deposit tab went down particularly well!

Key points raised were:

• Acknowledgement that the portlet design has been driven by user engagement, so is geared towards giving researchers and users the functionality they require.
• ORCA Lite has a nice, simple look and feel for the end user.
• The simplification of a complex set of functions is testament to the amount of work and creativity that has gone into ORCA Lite.
• The importance of getting the right senior stakeholders on board was stressed, in order to take advantage of ORCA Lite's simplicity to drive home the message of what has been achieved, and how it can benefit the research community, both inside Cardiff University and potentially the wider academic community.
• it is also important to disseminate the project outcomes and outputs to maximise the investment across the HE sector hopefully with the assistance of JISC.

In all, both were delighted with the work done and believe ORCA Lite will add great value to the university.

We on the project team are thrilled with this great feedback, but now have to buckle down and get on with getting the portlet ready for the first phase of end user testing, and also in engaging with the relevant stakeholders in order to increase impact and take-up of ORCA Lite.

Cited!

The Cardiff University Librarian has drawn our attention to a reference to the I-WIRE Project in an article by Rosemary Russell and Michael Day (of the University of Bath), entitled ' Institutional Repository Interaction with Research Users: A Review of Current Practice' in the journal New Review of Academic Librarianship (Vol 16, supp. 1, pp. 116-131). This is a special issue on dissemination models in scholarly communication, and this article focuses on the importance of institutional repository projects consulting all potential users and stakeholders, particularly researchers. Our comprehensive user requirements exercise that we blogged about previously (see entries on I-WIRE requirements from 10th, 16th and 22nd March 2010) has been referenced as good practice.

The University Librarian states that this is great recognition for the project and is an excellent endorsement of the approach adopted at Cardiff. Needless to say, this has made our week! We will be showing the ORCA Lite portlet to both the University Librarian and the Director of Information Services this week, so hope for more postive feedback to share.

Showing and Telling

Just back from showing the demo version of our quick deposit ORCA Lite portlet to a forum of Research Administrators.  Great to recognise nearly half of the faces from our user needs analysis phase this time last year!  As sustainability of the project's outcomes begins to shift to the forefront of our minds, I took the advocacy road and have hopefully started the Research Administrators thinking about how they can encourage Researchers in their Schools to use ORCA Lite.  We'll be working with the Research Administrators more in the future under our longer term Advocacy project.

Questions at the end touched on the more subtle and complex challenges that the project has identified, such as the over-lap between ORCA and ResearcherID, and the approach to integration with already established publication management systems in some of the Schools; subjects that can't be addressed within the current project's timescales but are at the top of our list of potential future work.

One more demo scheduled before we let people get their hands on ORCA Lite for themselves: Alpha testing is planned for November and December.

October update

We have been rather quiet on the blogging front of late, so here is a quick update of where we are with the I-WIRE project.

We are busy putting the finishing touches to the ORCA Lite portlet before we start end user testing with our volunteers in late November/early December. There is one major hurdle that we need to overcome before starting testing, and that is finding a way to allow researchers to indicate their selected publications (most recent, for example, or most cited) that will in turn allow them to populate web pages, appraisal documents or funding applications with this chosen data. This was one of the major requirements that came out of the Requirements Capture phase, and so it is important that we solve this. A member of the EPrints team at Southampton is coming down early next month to work with the development team on this.

Any thoughts on this are very welcome!

Chuffed!

You may be wondering about the title of this blog, but 'chuffed' was one of the reactions we got when we gave a demonstration of our proposed portlet version of ORCA (which we are calling ORCA Lite) to the Deputy University Librarian and the Head of Technical and Operational Services for ULS, who are two of our internal stakeholders in the project. 'Bowled over' was another phrase used! Both were very impressed with the clean look and the functionality of ORCA Lite, and especially so with the ease of the DOI deposit tab.

We also gave a demo to the Head of Library Service Development, who also gave very positive feedback. She was very impressed with the work achieved so far, and particularly with the DOI deposit function (that's definitely a hit!). Two very useful suggestions she gave us were:

• would it be possible for the author to choose more than one school to be attached to the ORCA record? Interdisciplinary work and collaboration between two or more schools is of increasing importance and impact in academia. It is possible that having an 'Add Another School' button (similar to that for multiple authors) could be the answer.
• A field to indicate the funding body (if applicable) would be useful.

Overall all three internal stakeholders were very impressed with the work done so far. We are definitely heading in the right direction.

End User Testing

Last week, we began to demo our proposed portlet version of ORCA to some of our stakeholders, and the feedback has been very positive, confirming that we are aligned with our stakeholders' requirements. Outlined below are the key messages that we took from the interviews:

• All participants have said that the portlet looks very quick and easy to use, and that it would not take up excessive amounts of their time to enter minimum data.
• Researchers understand the importance of open access, and the part it can play in increasing the impact of Cardiff research
• Ease of access to publication data is key
• Being able to extract research data from the portlet to use in various reports would be a big time saver for them.
• The portlet version of ORCA would be particularly useful for reports, conference proceedings and working papers which are usually hidden away on web pages.
• A feed to web pages would be a good incentive to authors and beneficial to the academic school.
• Keywords are important to ensuring an article is targeted at the right audience, and to getting the article to the top of the search result list
• An indicator that the item has been refereed would be valuable

We are very pleased to receive such good responses! We also received good feedback from our colleagues in the INSRVeducation team yesterday. We have four more 'show and tell' sessions planned for August with more colleagues from Information Services and with some of our other academic and research administrator stakeholders in the academic schools, and are also giving a demonstration to fellow library staff on 1st September. So look out for more feedback when we get it!

OR2010 Madrid

The 5^th International Conference on Open Repositories was recently held in Madrid this year, and as part of our dissemination programme, the I-WIRE team (Scott, myself, Repository Manager Tracey and Technical Lead Jim) attended. We contributed a poster on ‘Integrating the Institutional Repository with a Portal Environment’, and Scott and Jim gave a presentation on the technical challenge of building a portlet version of the institutional repository ORCA. We were pleased with the reception of both, and the team made valuable contacts with other developers and projects. We all very much enjoyed Madrid – a beautiful city which we wished we could have explored more of (although we did make it to the Prado and to the Bernabeu stadium on the night of the World Cup semi-final!)

From Cardiff to Madrid (via Gregynog)

Things are very busy on the I-WIRE front at the moment. We finished the design stage at the end of last month, have had approval for our portlet design from our project management group, and are now in the Toolset Development phase.

Our poster proposal has been accepted for the Open Repositories Conference in Madrid next month, so Scott and I have been working very hard on our poster. (I have also been working very hard on the conference registration, but that's another story!) We had the poster printed two weeks ago and are very pleased with it. The poster, along with Scott and Tracey, has taken a detour to the annual Gregynog Colloquium this week, where Scott and Tracey presented a paper on 'Encouraging author self-deposit at Cardiff University' which was well recieved. It was due to be filmed, but because of a technical fault this didn't happen - much to Scott and Tracey's relief! Hopefully, we will recieve some useful feedback on the poster before Madrid.

I-WIRE word cloud

Great fun with Wordle today.  I'm pleased that our word cloud shows the user firmly at the centre of the project.

Workflow and Portlet Design

The I-WIRE High Level Design and Technical Specification has just gone to our Project Management Group and IT team leads for review and approval.  Here are the key design decisions and overview of the solution that the project will be developing and testing over the Summer.

Portlet and Integration

The simplified deposit workflow will be surfaced in the MWE (Modern Working Environment) Portal via a portlet developed and hosted using IBM WebSphere.  The portlet will be connected to ORCA using SWORD for deposit, and using the EPrints API and EPrints 3.2 REST interface for other functions.

Portlet Layout

The portlet will contain the following tabs, which are explained further below:

• Quick Deposit
• DOI Deposit
• Web of Science Import
• Search ORCA
• Browse ORCA
• My Publications

The landing-tab (default) will be My Publications, and the portlet will initially carry the title ‘ORCA Lite’ in order to differentiate it from the full ORCA service which provides a different user experience.

All of the above is subject to end user feedback during the development phase, and further concept proofing in one of the MWE environments during the early part of the development phase.

Mediated Deposit

All items deposited using the portlet will be reviewed by the University Library Service Cataloguing Team for completeness, and the bibliographic data supplemented where necessary, before being made available in live ORCA.  The publisher’s copyright policy will also be checked to ensure compliance.  This mediated approach to deposit is essential to ensure consistency and accuracy of data, particularly important as future projects are likely to integrate ORCA with other research related processes and systems, in particular for the REF.

Alternative approaches to the review process (e.g., review by exception) can be explored as a separate project if the volume of new deposits becomes too big to manage on a one-by-one basis.

Quick Deposit

The Quick Deposit tab will capture from the user the minimum bibliographic data required for the Cataloguing Team to supplement the data, whilst keeping effort to a minimum for the user.  If a user decides that the minimal bibliographic data is not enough for a particular deposit and they wish to populate the full bibliographic data themselves (abstract, keywords, etc.), they will be able to select an Advanced Deposit link to ‘full’ ORCA that will take them to the extended deposit screens that are currently in existence and will continue to be available in parallel to the MWE Portal-based deposit route.  Single Sign On will be implemented to avoid the user having to log-in to ORCA if they chose the Advanced Deposit from the portlet.

The IdMan unique person identifier will be added to each Cardiff author automatically during the deposit process.

DOI Deposit

The DOI Deposit tab will allow the user to enter a DOI and retrieve the associated bibliographic data from the CrossRef service.  The search result will be displayed to the user for checking before submitting to ORCA, and a full text file can be added by the user at this point if desired.

The Cardiff authors associated with items returned by the search will have to be identified and their email addresses added by the Cataloguing Team during the review process. The addition of email addresses will also trigger the addition of IdMan identifiers via a planned overnight automated process.

The project team will explore if duplicate items can be identified at this point by a lookup of the DOI in ORCA at the same time as retrieving the data from CrossRef, in which case the user would be prevented from depositing the duplicate item.

Web of Science Import

The Web of Science Import tab will allow the user to search Web of Science using an author name and optional date range.  The user can identify and select individual publications from the list presented, and a full text file can be added for each individual publication.  This service could help a user to retrospectively populate ORCA with their entire publication lists, where their discipline is covered by Web of Science.

As with the DOI Deposit, the Cardiff authors associated with items returned by the search will have to be identified and their email addresses added during the review process. The addition of email addresses will also trigger the addition of IdMan identifiers via the planned overnight automated process. 

Organisational Data

The School(s) associated with a particular item will be selected by the user during deposit.  It is not desirable to automatically populate this as the current affiliation for an author may not have been valid at the time the publication was written.

Research Centres and Research Groups will not be included in ORCA by the I-WIRE project due to the huge variations between them and the potential for inconsistent data.  This will be kept as a candidate for a potential future project.

Embargos

Due to the additional fields that would be needed to capture embargo type and date, a user that wishes to specify an embargo for a publication’s full text item, and optionally its bibliographic data, will need to select the Advanced Deposit link to ‘full’ ORCA.  Embargo functionality will function as it does for the current ORCA, i.e., the Cataloguing Team will decide during the review process what steps are to be taken.

My Publications

The My Publications tab will present the logged in user with a list of their publications.  Long lists will be navigated by either a scroll-bar within the portlet, or via multiple navigable pages containing a sub-sets of the full list.  The preferred approach will be explored during user feedback in the development phase and could be steered by any constraints with the Portal technology.

The user will have the option of exporting their publication list to a file.  Within the I-WIRE project, this will export the entire list.  The ability to select a sub-set of publications for export is seen as complex due to the required caching of a user’s selection across multiple pages (if pages are used), and therefore is being kept as a candidate for a potential future project.

The user will also have the option of selecting their top publications on an individual publication basis.  A marker will be available in the standard data feed and may be used by Schools to identify selected publications for profile web pages.  Each selection - either checking or unchecking an item - will update the ORCA database in real-time.  The portlet will not implement any constraints on the number of items selected as each School is likely to have a different requirement, therefore, it is up to the School to decide how to deal with any constraint violations, e.g., ignoring anything after the first 6 selected publications.  This function will require an extension to the ORCA database to introduce an attribute that allows marking of a publication on an author basis to cover scenarios where there is more than one Cardiff author associated with one publication.

Browse

The Browse tab will offer browse by author name, item type, school and year.  Item type and school will be further grouped by year due to the volume of items associated with them.  A scroll-bar or hyperlinked grouping will be implemented to aid navigation.  An icon will be included in the publication lists to easily indicate the presence of an associated full text file.

Search

The Search tab will offer a keyword or phrase search.  The tab will include a link to full ORCA for the Advanced Search, offering many more fields that help limit and focus the search results.  However, the experience of by the team has shown that the Simple Search will usually return the desired results.

Reuse of Bibliographic Data

The primary method of retrieving bibliographic data from ORCA for reuse will be calling the data feed by constructing an HTTP GET URL and calling it from either a web browser (manually), or from an application on a system (programmatically).  The result of the call will be bibliographic data presented in the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, and a data dictionary document will be provided to help the Schools understand and use the data feed in their systems.  It will be possible for the Schools to convert the JSON feed to a data format of their choice for processing in their own systems and databases.

The HTTP GET URL can include filters to limit the results by item type, school, author, email address and year.

The IdMan unique person identifier will be included in the data feed.  The data feed will also include the ‘selected’ publications marker introduced by the project to help Schools indicate top publications on author’s profiles in their web pages.

A JavaScript version of the feed that retrieves a publications list for a specified individual author’s email address will be made available to authors for inclusion in their own personal web pages.

Importing Data

Importing publication lists will continue to be supported by the current mediated process that takes publications lists from the Schools and validates the data before loading it into ORCA.  Apart from the Web of Science tab, bulk import will not be surfaced in the portlet.

Deposit to Multiple Repositories

The ability to submit an item to other repositories at the same time as ORCA is being explored by the project team.  While PubMed Central would be the most obvious choice, it does not offer a SWORD client.  The benefit of a SWORD client has been notified to PubMed Central, but in the meantime a deposit to the arXiv subject repository will be explored by way of a drop down list in the Quick Deposit tab that allows the optional selection of arXiv.

Integration with Research Publication Management Systems

The User Needs Analysis phase of the project identified a number of Schools that have implemented - or are in the process of implementing - Publication Management systems.  This provides opportunities to integrate ORCA with the Publication Management systems and associated processes that are in use in those Schools.  However, the variety of systems and their different levels of maturity would be too wide for the project to tackle on an individual basis without putting it at severe risk of not delivering a usable solution within the project’s timescales.

Consideration has been given to the opportunity for integration, particularly as this could help the project with one of its key objectives of delivering an enhanced deposit workflow that is firmly embedded in the research management process.  This will be balanced with delivering an enhanced workflow and toolset that meets the needs as far as possible of Schools that do not have any Publication Management system in place.

The I-WIRE Project Management Group agreed that the project team should explore integration with MEDIC’s implementation of the Symplectic Elements Publication Management system, as MEDIC are one of the project’s partners and a member of the Project Management Group.  This is being conducted in parallel to the delivery of the I-WIRE solution.

Managing Duplicates

ORCA management information reports will be used by the Cataloguing Team to identify duplicate items.  At first a manual process, this will - over time - provide a set of rules that could be automated to run directly against the database in the future, and reduce the effort associated with this activity.

Citation Count Data

Access to citation count data is increasingly important for authors, and the portlet would be a convenient place to show this data alongside an author’s publications, without having to log-in to separate databases such as Web of Science.  However, until there is more clarity on the citation data that the REF will be utilising, and the method of retrieving that data, this development will be kept out of scope of the I-WIRE project and kept on the list of potential projects that specifically support the REF.  This will avoid the possibility of any re-work when this area is better understood.

ResearcherID

A number of Thomson Reuters services are available to institutions to assist in the management of publication data and help improve and maintain the quality of the data.  The ResearcherID service is one that is particularly high profile and relevant as it provides a globally unique researcher or author identifier which in turn can be used to retrieve publication lists and citation data from Web of Science, and a host of other Web of Science bibliometric data.

Initial discussions with Thomson Reuters have identified ResearcherID as an opportunity to improve data quality in ORCA as a separate activity to the deposit workflow, and it will therefore be explored outside the I-WIRE project.  There may be an opportunity in the future to include this data in the deposit workflow but it is not yet understood enough to be able to be committed to within the I-WIRE project timescales.

Automated Email Reminders

One of the suggestions made during the latter part of the User Needs Analysis phase was for email reminders to authors that hadn’t updated their publication lists for some time.  More analysis with authors would be needed to understand the timing and frequency of these reminders, as the time span between publications can vary immensely between disciplines and authors, and the function would therefore need to be configurable to meet these different user needs.  Such user configuration would add a level of complexity to the portlet that should be addressed by a future project in order to keep the I-WIRE delivery as risk-free as possible, and to gain feedback from users on what the valuable future features would be.

The following diagram illustrates the scope of the solution being delivered by the I-WIRE project in terms of functions, and the systems and primary data flows supporting those functions.

An Update from I-WIRE

We haven't blogged for a while, so this is to give an update on where we are at the moment.

We are coming to the end of our 3rd design iteration; just one more iteration and set of User Stories to go, and then we will be asking the Project Management Group to approve our findings and design at the next board meeting in May. Then its on to WorkPackage 4, the Technical Development Phase. We have a meeting with the Research Administrator and two IT developers from one of our partner schools today, so are hoping for useful feedback on the current design.

We are also hoping to soon hear whether our poster proposal has been accepted for the Open Repositories International Conference that is taking place in Madrid in July - fingers crossed!

Design Decisions for Deposit User Story

As the I-WIRE Project is now half way through the Workflow and Toolset Design work package, it's worth taking some time out to summarise some of the design decisions that have been made by the team to date.  These decisions relate to the Deposit User Stories, as they have been the primary focus of our initial design iterations.

Mediated Deposit Process

We will continue to review all deposits before moving them to the live repository.  In the short term, this will require the same level of staff in the University Library Cataloguing team as we currently have.  In the longer term, as volumes grow due to the launch of the enhanced deposit process, and a planned University mandate, the team will need to explore other review methods using management information reports and a 'review by exception' approach.

Due to the importance of the repository in supporting REF, and the potential future integration with other research systems and processes, the continuation of this approach is seen as key in maintaining the quality of the publication data.

Minimal Data Entry

Minimal data entry is a top priority requirement from Academics.  We have agreed a minimal data set that will provide enough information for the Cataloguing team to check and enhance the data at the review stage:

Article Title, Author(s), Journal/Conference/Book Title, Year, School, URL

Plus the Publisher and ISBN for books and book sections, and the Patent Applicant for patents.

Publisher and ISSN will be automatically retrieved from the RoMEO database for journal articles.

Authors email addresses will be auto-completed from a lookup table, and their associated Unique Identifier will be populated in the background.

The portal will include a link to the full ORCA service for Academics that want to populate more than the minimum data themselves.

Searches

To make things even easier for Academics, were are aiming to provide two additional services in the portal:

• DOI Deposit will retrieve the full set of data from the CrossRef database using the DOI supplied by the Academic.
• Web of Science Import will enable an author to search for their publications, check those that are returned and import the basic metadata into the repository.

Both of these methods will also allow a full text file to be added to the deposit.

Research Centres and Groups

We have explored but decided not to pursue the inclusion of Research Centres or Groups in the I-WIRE Project:

"Any ORCA outputs designation other than School (which is the University's constitutional unit of currency) is problematic.  There are huge variations in Research Centres and if we ask people to 'self-declare' attribution to a Research Centre we will get very very messy and inconsistent data.  Alternatively, if we produce a drop down list of research centres for people to choose from it will not be complete and we have no way of validating that they are in fact members of the Centre.  There is a level of complication here that would be hard to unpick if we get it wrong from the start, so we have agreed to have this as a developmental option after the implementation (of I-WIRE)."