International Open Access Week, 24–30 October 2011

Writing about web page http://www.openaccessweek.org/

This week represents the fifth annual International Open Access Week, a celebration of the movement aiming to make barrier-free access to information a “new norm in scholarship and research”.

Here at Warwick our commitment to Open Access is realised by the Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) a central University archive for open access versions of journal articles and theses. Through the commitment of the WRAP Team and the essential contributions from our research community we currently have more than 5600 full text items that in the last month attracted over 28,000 hits and 24,875 downloads of our items.

Obviously the success of WRAP would not be possible without the material our researchers and research postgraduates choose to allow us to make available to the world. So a big thank you to the researchers who have made this possible and for allowing the valuable results of your research to be open to all.

More information on open access and WRAP can be found on the Library pages.

Any Warwick researchers wanting to submit material to WRAP can do so from the submission page or by emailing the WRAP team. Also look out for future open access events to be held around the University in the new year...

Yvonne Budden : 24 Oct 2011 17:08 |  Tags: Open Access |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

SHERPA RoMEO and Publishers – RSP Event

Writing about web page http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/romeo-for-publishers/

Thankfully I'm new enough to the whole repository busy that I've never had to try to manage or populate an open access repository without the help of SHERPA's RoMEO service and I hope I'll never have to try! So an event presenting a number of new developments and the chance to engage with Publishers representatives was too good to miss out on!

The event itself gave two really clear messages: we are all on the same side and clarity is everything. The clarity message was raised again and again, all the various players in this community need clarity and consistency in who says what, what means what and what we can do with what (to badly paraphrase Bill Hubbard). Another message that came from both RoMEO and representatives of the Repository community (Enlighten Team Leader Marie Cairney) was that at the end of the day, as much as we care about Open Access, we don't mind being told 'no' as long as it's clear that that is what you are saying.

Some highlights from the sessions:

• "Change is coming" was the title of the latter part of Bill Hubbard's (Centre for Research Communication) presentation and highlighted the many areas (peer-review, end of the Big-Deal (?), social research tools (Mendeley etc.), demands for free access, cross-discipline research, possibility of institutions taking more control of the intellectual property produced by the institution and more) where we might be seeing change that affect the way we work in the next ten years. No doubt there will be others we haven't thought of yet.
• Azhar Hussain (SHERPA Services) continued the theme of opportunity by highlighting some interesting statistics for RoMEO. The service currently stands at 998 publishers covering 18,000+ journals and bringing in nearly 20,000 visits a month. Also highlighted was the growth of usage from within CRIS systems, something RoMEO is tracking closely.
• Mark Simon from Maney Publishing spoke about the reasons behind the companies decision to 'go green' as well as highlighting the fact that for Maney, as they broadly publish for learned societies, the copyright of published work often does not rest with Maney itself, but with the Society. Mark also highlighted the cost of their 'Gold OA' options (STM journals $2000, Humanities journals $800, Some tropical medicine journals $500) stating that the cost disparity was due to the cost of STM journals to produce and the fact that more people want to publish in STM journals.
• Marie Cairney (Enlighten, Glasgow University) spoke about some of the recent developments to Enlighten, including using the 'Supportworks' software to better track enquiries and embargoes. She also highlighted the changes to publisher policies over the years that have caused problems for her team, most of us can guess which ones she mentioned! Marie's final message was that the more clarity we can get on policy matters, the more deposits we can get.
• Jane Smith (SHERPA Services) spoke on a similar subject and touched on many of the common pitfalls that can occur when contacting Publishers to clarify policy. These included, no online policy, no single point of contact, two contradictory responses from different parts of the company and more. Jane ended with a plea for the publishers to let RoMEO know when their policy changes so they can get the information out as quickly as possible and for copyright agreements/policies to be written in clear English.
• Emily Hall from Emerald was up next. One point clearly highlighted from the outset was that Emerald was a 'green' publisher (it couldn't really have been any other colour!). Emily also spoke about the decision not to offer 'Gold OA' options (not felt to be good for the publisher or work for the discipline they mostly publish) and touched on issues with filesharing. (Trivia: Emerald's most pirated book 'Airport Design and Control 2nd Ed.') Emily did mention that Emerald haven't been able to 'see' the content in Mendeley (as of this morning listing more than 100 million papers) yet but they are looking for a way to do this. One thing that came out of the discussion at the end of the talk was an idea for publishers to return versions to authors with coversheets clearly indicating what they can and can't do with that version.
• Peter Millington (SHERPA Services) finished the presentations with a demonstration of a new policy creator tool developed to be used with RoMEO. This tool, based on the repositories policy tool created as part of the OpenDOAR suite of tools, would allow publishers to codify their policies into standardised language as a way of helping people to read and understand the policy of their publisher/journal. I for one hope publisher's start using this tool as standard. The prototype version of the tool is available now and can be found here.

The breakout session that followed the presentations asked us to consider four questions (and some of our answers):

1. How can RoMEO help Publishers? (Track changes to policy, Visual flag for publishers to use on their websites to indicate the 'colour' of the journal, act as a central broker for enquiries so one service has a direct contact to the publisher that can be accessed by all creating a RoMEO Knowledge Base of all the enquiries for all repositories to use)
   
2. How can Publishers help RoMEO? (Nominate a single point of contact, create a page for Repository Staff similar to their pages for 'Librarians', ways to identify academics (see previous blog post), clarity of policy)
   
3. What message do Publishers have for Repository Administrators? (Thank you for the work done checking copyrights, don't be scared to talk to us, always reference and link back to the published item.)
   
4. What message do Repository Administrators have for Publishers? (Clarity (please!), make it clear what is OA content on your website, educate individuals on copyright, communicate with us!)
   

A full run down of the answers to those four questions can be found at the link above.

The final panel discussion raised interesting questions that we didn't really find answers for! Issues on multimedia items in the repository; including datasets in the repository or finding ways to link the dataset repository to an outputs repository - DOI's for datasets (see the British Library's project on this topic); and the matter of what to do in the case of corrects and/or retractions being issued by publishers. The last one at least gave me some food for thought!

The event was another valuable day from the RSP featuring lively discussions on current situations and challenges facing the repository community and an invaluable opportunity to meet and have frank discussion with the Publishing Industry representatives. I think both groups got a lot out of the day along with the realisation that we have a lot more in common than might seem obvious at first glance.

Yvonne Budden : 09 Aug 2011 17:38 |  Tags: Advocacy Events Funders Open Access Publishers Sherpa Romeo |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

IRIOS Workshop – Part Two: Comment and Workshops

Writing about web page http://www.irios.sunderland.ac.uk/index.cfm/2011/8/1/IRIOS-Workshop-Parellel-Sessions

One thing I took away from the workshop session was that both systems ROP and IRIOS were doing the right things and going in the right directions but weren't quite there yet. A big concern to me as an IR manager (and as a former Metadata Librarian) was that the IRIOS system creates yet more unique identifiers (see later in this entry for further discussion of unique IDs). Also automation of the project linking to outputs can't come fast enough, especially for services like WRAP where we spend a not inconsiderable amount of time tracking down funding information from the papers. However we could also benefit from taking information from systems such as this, which tie the recording of information about outputs much more closely to the money, which is always a motivator for people to get data entered correctly!

I think it is telling that more and more of these 'proof of concept' services are being developed using the CERIF dataformat (after R4R I'm looking forward to hearing about the MICE project early next month) but the trick with a standard is that it is only a standard if everyone is using it. I don't think we are quite there yet, I think this coming REF has been such an uncertain process so far that I think there is a lot more chance of CERIF being the main deposit format in the next REF. (If I'm still here for the next REF I'll have to reflect back on this and see if I was right!)

The afternoon of the work shop was taken up with a number of workshop discussions on a range of topics, below are a few of the notes I took in the two discussions I took part in. To see the full run down of all of the discussions please see the link above.

Universal Researcher IDs (URID)

It was generally accepted by all in the discussion that unique IDs for things, be they projects, outputs, researchers or objects were a good idea in terms of data transfer and exchange. They must be a good idea as there are so many different ones you can have (in the course of the discussion we mentioned more than eight current projects to create URIDs). Things are much easier to link together if they all bear a single identifier. However when it comes to people the added issue of data protection rears its head and can potentially hamper any form of identification if it is 'assigned' to the person. A way round this was suggested to allow people to sign up to identifiers, thus allowing those who wish to opt out to do so. Ethically the best route perhaps but unless a single service was designated we could end up with a system similar to the one we have now where everyone is signing up, but not using a whole array for services. The size of the problem is the size of the current academic community and global in scope. Some of the characteristics of URIDs we came up with were they just be; unique (and semantic free - previously mentioned privacy issues), have a single place that assigns them, have a sustainable authority file, not be tied to a role. One current service in place that fulfils many of the above criteria is the UUID service, however this falls down in that there is no register of assigned IDs so people can apply for multiple IDs if they forget them (and lets face it the likely hood of remembering a 128 number is kind of low) ... and we're back in the same situation again. I'm not sure there is a single perfect solution to this problem, though my life would be easier if there was!

REF Considerations

This was a free form discussion that covered the REF, REF preparations and 'Life after the REF' in various guises. HEFCE are currently tendering for the data to be used in the REF at the moment, needless to say the two services bidding are the expected two, Thomson Reuters and Scopus, but HEFCE will only be buying one lot of data. Bibliometrics were touched upon in relation to the REF, is it better to have two people select a really highly cited paper or choose two lower cited papers? Discussions on the HESA data, checking the data once it comes back from HESA, possibilities of mapping the future HESA data to the REF UoA for long term benchmarking rather than a single point hat goes out of date very quickly. Do people's CRIS systems really hold all of the data required for a return? What are the differences between the impact as measured/requested by HEFCE and the Impact measured by RCUK? Selection policy and training, the possibility of sector wide training, possible best practise mentioned in the idea to train a small core group of people who would handle all of the enquires centrally. Would it be possible for institutions to get the facilities data on a yearly basis rather than just before the REF and then have to try and chase people who may not remember/have left to try and verify the data?

One interesting comment from the discussion was the news that NERC, at least, has seen a big increase in the number of grant applications including a direct cost for Open Access funding. Interesting particularly is that there had been a number of comments made to me that researchers didn't want to do that are they feared making their grant application too expensive.

All in all the day was very interesting for me as an introduction to a 'world beyond publications' (as I was attending both for myself and for a member of our Research Support Services department) and as an indication of what we need to do to go forward.

Yvonne Budden : 08 Aug 2011 17:00 |  Tags: Advocacy Authors Events Open Access Ref Reflections Research Data Research Management |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

IRIOS Workshop – Part One: The Presentations

Writing about web page http://www.irios.sunderland.ac.uk/index.cfm/2011/7/28/IRIOS-Workshop-Presentations

The IRIOS (Integrated Research Input and Output System) workshop at the JISC Headquarters was designed to demonstrate the preliminary look of a system designed to take information from the RUCKL funders on Grant awards and combine it with the information from University's IRs and CRIS systems. The event was attended by research managers, representatives of four RCUK funders and repository managers and all of the presentations can be seen at the link above.

The event kicked off with a video presentation from Josh Brown of JISC discussion the RIM (Research Information Management) programme of projects. One interesting statistic was that it is estimated the £85mill/year is spent on submitting grant proposals and administering awards. Once again the savings that can be realised with the use of the CERIF data format was raised and the point that REF submissions can be made to HEFCE in CERIF was highlighted as a sign of the growing importance of the standard. IRIOS was highlighted as a step towards a more integrated national system of data management. Josh closed with the news of a further JISC funding call to investigate further uses of CERIF due to be announced soon.

Simon Kerridge (Sunderland) was up next to discuss the landscape and background of the project and the need for interoperability and joined up thinking between a number of different University departments if we are to make the most of an increasingly competitive environment. He also spoke of the ways in which IRIOS might feed into the RMAS (Research Management and Administration System) project further enhancing the cloud based system. Simon finished by touching on the challenges (research data management and unique researcher IDs anyone) and opportunities for the future (esp. the JISC funding call).

Gerry Lawson (NERC) was up next with a whistle stop tour round the RCUK 'Grants on the Web' (GoW) systems. Starting with a stern warning that if the funders and institutions don't find a way to match up the data held by both parties commercial services will find a way to fill the gap (for example Elsevier's SciVal is already starting this process), thus putting both parties back into the situation where we have to buy our own data back. Other products are also making a start on this process, as can be seen in the UK PubMed Central's grant lookup tool. Gerry made the vital point that all of the information is available but linking it is going to take work. The RCUK 'Grants of the Web' system is a start in this process as it brings together all of the grants by all RCUK funders in a single system. The individual research councils then use this centralised data to populate their individual GoW interfaces with each interface being set up to the specifications of the individual research councils. With one exception, AHRC, grant data about individual funded PhDs is not included in the GoW systems due to the RCUK preference for handling funded PhDs through their network of Doctoral Training Centres. Gerry closed saying there was a real desire from the RCUK to start linking outputs with funding grants (and expanding into research data and impact measures) especially in relation to monitoring compliance with Open Access mandates. Challenges still remained; a need for a common export format (CERIF); authority files for people, projects, institutions; the issue of department structures within institutions changing over time etc.

Dale Heenan (ESRC), ably assisted by Darren Hunter (EPSRC), discussed the RCUK 'Research Outcomes Project' (ROP). The project was based on the ESRC's Research Catalogue (running on Microsoft Zentity 2.0) extended to meet the needs of the four pilot councils, AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC. (Worth noting that MRC and STFC use the e-Val system). The ROP system is designed to create an evidence base to demonstrate the economic impact of funded research and also designed to attempt to reduce duplication of effort. Upload of data can come from a range of stakeholders, grant holders (PIs or their nominated Co-Is), institutions, IRs etc. and can cover individual items or bulk uploads. Management Information is provided using Microsoft Reporting Services. Future challenges for the system include ways to automate the deposit of research outputs, development/adoption of standards such as CERIF, ways to pull data from external services like Web of Knowledge, PubMed Scopus etc.

The main presentation for the day is of the IRIOS demonstrator by Kevin Ginty and Paul Cranner (Sunderland). The IRIOS project is a 'proof of concept' demonstrator of a GoW like service using the CERIF dataformat and is based on the 'Universities for the North East' project tracking system (CRM). One feature of the service is that four levels of access (hidden, summary, read only, write) can be assigned to three distinct groups (global, individual, groups of users) allowing a fine level of dynamic control over the data contained in the system. All grants and publications have a unique ID that is automatically generated by the system and any edits mad in the current system do not feed back to the system that originated the data. Currently the system is only accepting manual linking of grant to output but there are plans to look into automation of this process. In the future it might be possible to import data from larger databases like Web of Knowledge but information gathered by the research councils indicates that only 40% of outputs are correctly attributed to the grant that funded the research.

If you would like to try the demonstrator version of the IRIOS system details on how to login can be found here.

Comments on the presentations and information on the workshops is to follow in part two.

Yvonne Budden : 08 Aug 2011 16:00 |  Tags: Cris Events Funders Interoperability Metadata Open Access Ref Research Data |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

WRAP reaches 5000th item!!

Writing about web page http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/36226/

Following the announcement in February that we had reached 4000 items WRAP’s growth continues to be impressive and is now supported by the development of the University of Warwick Publications service. Visitors are coming from more than a 160 different countries every month and in June 2011 WRAP items were downloaded more than 21,000 times.

Today we announce that WRAP’s 5000^th item is:

Mercer, Justine (2009) Junior academic-manager in higher education : an untold story? International Journal of Educational Management, Vol.23 (No.4). pp. 348-359. ISSN 0951-354X http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/36226/

Authors are encouraged to submit their journal articles to WRAP online at: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/irsubmit

Visit WRAP: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk

Find out more about WRAP: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications

Yvonne Budden : 27 Jul 2011 15:37 |  Tags: Advocacy Benchmarking Milestones Open Access Statistics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Secure Future for Research Data

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/alumni/knowledge/themes/03/secure_future/

Quick link to flag up my contribution to the Warwick Knowledge Centre‘s fortnightly theme of dealing with data.

A Secure Future for Research Data

They asked me for an 800 word article on the pros and cons of storing and accessing research data, which in my hands gained a slight open access slant to it!  A little bit ‘research data 101′ for any practitioner but aimed at being a sort introduction the kinds of issues raised by data, awareness raising being the name of the game at the moment.  Any questions or comments and I'd be happy to hear them!

Yvonne Budden : 16 Mar 2011 16:12 |  Tags: Open Access Research Data |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

e–Copyright and the Implications of the Digital Economy Act

Writing about web page http://www.nglis.org.uk/diary.htm

"e-Copyright and the Implications of the Digital Economy Act", an NGLIS evening event, Iron Duke, Mayfair, London.

This event, led by Professor Charles Oppenheim, focused on two major challenges of the moment; copyright in the digital environment, particularly web 2.0 applications and the newly passed Digital Economy Act.  The format of the presentation was very much discursive so below I've tried to pull out some of the important points.  It is worth reiterating Prof. Oppenheim's disclaimer; he is not a lawyer (and nor am I!) and thus neither of us can take any responsibility for anything you may choose to do with the information reported here.

• Copyright law has not kept up with the development of the internet and is in many cases arcane and not 'fit for purpose'.  However people are either very risk averse or far too free, a law that is either viewed with contempt and/or ignored by a whole generation is obviously not working.  There are two reviews of copyright law under way; the Hargreaves Committee set up by David Cameron following discussions with Google and a House of Commons Select Committee.  However very little can be done to amend copyright law in this country as we are subject to EU directives in this area.
  
• Crucial thing that distinguishes Web2.0 is the fact that it includes an element of participation/interaction, this is where it causes issues in terms of copyright.  In copyright law any item that is authored by multiple people (and it is impossible to distinguish who has written what) and you wish to copy it you must clear the copyright will all authors.  In the case of Web2.0 just identifying the authors can be a struggle and if even one of the authors refuses permission you can not use the item.  Wikipedia gets round this by asking all contributors to sign up to T&Cs that means that they assign copyright to Wikipedia and thus copyright is cleared through a single source.  Worth considering if you are planning to create a wiki!
• When asking for permission to copy; No means no, Yes means yes and No reply means no!  In law you cannot just say "Unless I hear otherwise I'll go ahead...", hence the problem people have had with the Google Books project.  The issue of orphan works is also important here, this was meant to be addressed in the Digital Economy Act but that section was cut.  This is an increasing problem due to the rising number of digitisation projects under way and with the desire to make archive material publicly available.
  
• The area  where the internet gets people in trouble with copyright law is the protection copyright gives from the 'communication to the public', which means electronic communication to two or more people.  Copyright also does not allow for 'format shifting', an essential area in terms of digital preservation, another indication it is not fit for purpose.
  
• The Digital Economy Act (DEA), which was passed in wash-up, has some very concerning provisions for Libraries and other services that offer free wi-fi access.  The idea is for there to be a 'three-strikes' rule on the infringement of copyright, on the third infringement a persons internet access is stopped.  Obviously this is more of a problem when it does not target individuals but libraries or local authorities!  The Act has been passed but not currently implemented.  The current government has made a commitment to maintain the law but when Nick Clegg asked people for the list of the laws they would most like to see repealed the DEA came top.  The Act is currently undergoing a judicial review, bought by two of the country's top ISPs, to verify if the Act is even legal in its current form.
• 'Cloud computing' was another area discussed, in this case more in the terms of the Data Protection Act.  While is very useful and valuable development in terms of technology if you are planning to take advantage of it to hold personal data you need to be aware that this could cause you to violate data protection.  This is because under data protection you make the commitment to ensure that anyone you contract to or sub-contract to also have adequate data protection provisions/laws.  Therefore as the US is not deemed to have good enough data protection laws if you contract an American cloud service to hold anything to do with personal information you have violated data protection.  This is a problem with a number of countries and the fact that if you start trying to limit the geographical location of your data you are no longer getting the advantage of hosting it in the cloud in for first place.

All this was covered and much more, a very interesting evening and much food for thought!  Although it was nice to hear that I'm not the only person who thinks that the current copyright law we have needs throwing out and people need to start again with a blank sheet of paper rather than constantly trying to amend a broken law.  But in the light of the issues with the internet and the kind of global information flows we are currently seeing any new law has to be agreed and applied globally, focussing on the needs of everyone trying to use the information rather than just protecting commercial interests.

Yvonne Budden : 03 Feb 2011 11:00 |  Tags: Cloud Computing Copyright Digital Economy Act Events Web2 0 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

WRAP Reaches 4000 Items!

Writing about web page http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk

Yvonne Budden : 02 Feb 2011 16:36 |  Tags: Advocacy Benchmarking Events |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Management: Smoothing the Way

Writing about web page http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/

This event, at RIBA, looked at creating an environment of 'joined-up' thinking about research. A area that many of the institutions attending had all made a start on, at least between the Library and the Research Support Offices, but that all needed to expand to include all the actors in the research cycle, from the research funders down.

The introduction helped to set the scene and emphasised the problem that too often the research management we have at the moment is too narrowly focused and does not take into account the full breadth of the issues that are inherent in 'research'.  Especially the fact that you cannot look to manage research if you are not also managing teaching.  One speaker even posed the question of whether it is even possible to 'manage' research!  Overall it was felt that a dialogue needed to be begun between all the areas involved in supporting research to stop the wasteful duplication of effort that is often present currently.

Three of the case studies introduced a collection of different approaches to 'research management', through a broad and integrated IR (Glasgow), through the Research Information System (Newcastle) and using a full CRIS (St Andrews).  The final case study looked at paying for open access publication (Nottingham) as a way of looking at the ways the University can support the dissemination part of the research cycle.  The funders were representatives from the Wellcome Trust and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and looked at the issues they had in ensuring compliance for their open access policies.  Despite the ease of compliance for Wellcome trust funded research through publishers and UKPMC they still only have a compliance rate of 50%.  The Wellcome trust emphasised their current activities in working with publishers to ensure compliance through this route (currently 85% of the Wellcome funded research in UKPMC came from publisher deposit).  As well as the things that the institution could be doing in terms of advocacy and awareness raising with their academics, particularly in terms of the funding available within institutions (Warwick readers can find details of the Wellcome Trust open access fund here).  Gerry Lawson from NERC looked at the issue form the perspective of a single funder and looked at the possibility of monitoring compliance through IR harvest (interesting as NERC mandates deposit to NORA, but useful for other funders).  This was proposed to take place in the beginning few months of 2012 to cover all outputs from 2011.  If this really is the case the funders will need to start confirming that this is the case soon to allow institutions to prepare!

The group and panel discussions focussed on two questions:

• What do we need to know?
• What do we need to do next?

This lead to some very interesting points:

• Research funders are restricted in the ways they can give money to a institution;
  
• Libraries are happy to administer central OA funds but want some guidance from the faculties/departments as to criteria as to where to allocate the limited funds;
  
• Can funders really do more, after all the open access requirement is part of the contact that academics sign;
• Funders really need more figures on spend on OA publishing to to take the argument with the publishers (subscription charges in relation to revenue for open access) forward;
  
• Would it help if RCUK and HEFCE pushed for the REF2020 to only grant eligibility to OA papers (80% of the submissions to the RAE2008 could have been made OA through their existing journal (but how to pay for this!));
  
• Standardisation needs to be a much bigger priority to allow these diverse systems to talk to each other better;
  
• Are sanctions from the funders the best way to push up compliance?  Is there a happy medium available?;
• Possibility of extending the writing up period?  RLUK and ARMA to look to creating a request to RCUK to move this forward.

Sadly the discussion ran out of time but produced some much needed enthusiasm to look at taking some of these points forward in the future.  All round a very valuable day (and chance to meet some new faces from the research support side of things) and many thanks to the CRC for organising.  The was a suggestion to run the day again due to the huge demand for places, if they do I would highly recommend it!!!

Yvonne Budden : 31 Jan 2011 10:00 |  Tags: Advocacy Events Open Access Research Management |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

WRAP Book Club: Entry 1

Writing about web page http://liber.library.uu.nl/

This entry is the first in an (hopefully long) series of entries on interesting articles and books in and around the institutional repository sector.  I'm starting with an area that I am still struggleing with as a Repository Manager, that of benchmarking.  I was asked in a recent interview with our Knowledge Centre where WRAP was in terms of the 'repository scene' and I couldn't really give her an answer that I was happy with, added to the fact that benchmarking is something that I have looked at again and again in the past few months meant that the article I found in the recent issue of Liber Quarterly was particularly timely:

• Cassella, Maria (2010). Institutional repositories : an internal and external perspective on the value of IRs for researchers' communities. Liber Quarterly, 20(2), p. 210-225.

A perennial problem for repository managers if that as all repositories are slightly different, it what they collect, how they are administered and what they do with their content once they have it.  This makes it very difficult to hold a repository up against another repository and work out exactly how to rank one above the other in terms of performance.  So far the best that can be done is locate a single repository on a sliding scale of similarity and to benchmark it against itself.  Maria Cassella's article introduces a set of fourteen internal indicators and a further three external indicators to try and formalise the process of repository benchmarking.  These indicators are based on and rooted in Kaplan and Nation's 'Balenced Scorecard' (BSC) methodology which is already used in various measures of Library performance.

The measures proposed by Cassella fall into four broad categories:

• The Customer Perspective;
• The Internal Perspective;
• The Financial Perspective and
  
• The Innovation and Learning Perspective.

These performance indicators are intended to allow repository manages to "align their repository strategies with the institutional mission and goals and to identify priorities in performance measurement" (Cassella, p.214).  Many of the PI's that are suggested are things that, I'm sure, many repository managers are already recording in terms of who is depositing into the repository at what rate and the levels of external use that these items are getting.  Some of the PI's suggested are very interesting, for example she suggests that one things that should be measured is the number of 'value-added' services offered is used as a measure, which fits in well with the prevailing trends in the repository world, where the 'value-added' is being increasingly seen as if not more important then at least as important as the core functions of visibility and preservation.  Two of the 'financial' indicators I found very interesting, recently the 'cost per deposit' has become a focus of much discussion but Cassella goes one step further and suggests that another measure that would be interesting to keep is the 'cost per download'.  This she states will allow repository managers to "evaluate the scholarly efficiency of repository collections" (Cassella, p. 219) but she does allow that recording accurate sets of statistics has long been a problem.

Some of the measures suggested, disappointingly, assume you are using a certain type of software.  For example a measure of the 'number of active collections' in a repository is going to be impossible to record at a level lower than department for many people using the standard EPrints set up, as we are doing with WRAP.  Also some of the external measures are not quite as developed as I would have liked.  For example Cassella suggests that one of the external measures should be "Interoperability", which I agree is an important measure, but Cassella never quite articulates fully exactly what she means by interoperability and whether or not it should be an active or a passive measure.

Overall I found the article very thought provoking on the issue of benchmarking, and some of the measures I plan to add into my regular statistics collection, but there is definitely more work waiting to be done in this area.

Yvonne Budden : 08 Nov 2010 16:13 |  Tags: Advocacy Benchmarking Book Club |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem