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)."