Are your repository policies worth the HTML they are written in?

In Neil Stewart's recent guest post on this blog he lamented the The Unfulfilled Promise of Aggregating Institutional Repository Content;  in the context of his work with the CORE projects at the Open University Owen Stephens (@ostephens) commented on that post about  "technological and policy barriers to a 3rd party aggregating content from UK HE IRs" and has subsequently posted in more detail over on the CORE blog.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I think Owen has identified issues that are fundamental to the potential value of our repository infrastructure in UK HE, at least in terms of responsible 3rd parties building services on top of that infrastructure - though Owen also asks in the title of his post "What does Google do?" for which the short answer is that it indexes (harvests) metadata and full text for (arguably) commercial re-use unless asked not to by robot.txt. This is not necessarily to suggest that Google is irresponsible, it may well be but that is a rather bigger discussion!

For CORE, by comparison, it has understandably been important to establish individual repository policy on re-use of metadata and full text content; where such policies exist at all they are invariably designed to be human readable rather than machine readable which is obviously is not conducive to automated harvest, in spite of guidance being available on how to handle both record, set and repository level rights statements in OAI-PMH from http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-rights.htm.

To quote Owen in his review of policies listed in OpenDOAR he found that "Looking at the 'metadata' policy summaries that OpenDOAR has recorded for these 125 repositories the majority (57) say "Metadata re-use policy explicitly undefined" which seems to sometimes mean OpenDOAR doesn't have a record of a metadata re-use policy, and sometimes seems to mean that OpenDOAR knows that there is no explicit metadata re-use policy defined by the repository. Of the remaining repositories, for a large proportion (47) OpenDOAR records "Metadata re-use permitted for not-for-profit purposes", and for a further 18 "Commercial metadata re-use permitted"."

It might be suggested that machine-readability is actually secondary to what is potentially misconceived policy in the first place - or which hasn't perhaps been fully thought through and at the very least is fatally fragmented across the sector - and that arguably is the result of lip-service rather than based on what actually happens in the real (virtual) world.

For my own part, in my institutional role, I was very, er, green (no pun intended) when I defined our repository policies back in 2008 using the OpenDOAR policy creation toolkit - http://www.opendoar.org/tools/en/policies.php - and to be frank I haven't really revisited them since. I suspect I'm not terribly unusual. To quote Owen once more, "the situation is even less clear for fulltext content than it is for metadata. OpenDOAR lists 54 repositories with the policy summary "Full data item policies explicitly undefined", but after that the next most common (29 repositories) policy summary (as recorded by OpenDOAR) is "Rights vary for the re-use of full data items" - more on this in a moment. OpenDOAR records "Re-use of full data items permitted for not-for-profit purposes" for a further 20 repositories, and then (of particularly interest for CORE) 16 repositories as "Harvesting full data items by robots prohibited".

The (reasonably unrestrictive) metadata and full-text policies I chose at Leeds Metropolitan University state that "the metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for not-for-profit purposes and re-sold commercially provided the OAI Identifier or a link to the original metadata record are given" and "copies of full items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge". Even this, with the word "generally" implicitly recognises the fact that there may be different restrictions that apply to different items which to some extent reflects the complexity of negotiating copyright for green OA, not to mention the other types of records that repositories may hold (e.g. our repository also comprises a collection of Open Educational Resources [OER] which are in fact licensed at the record level with a Creative Commons URI in dc:rights as in this example - http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary-OAI?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:com.intralibrary.leedsmet:2711&metadataPrefix=oai_dc)

Nor are my policies available in a machine readable form (which as we've established is typical across the sector) and I'm not actually sure how this could even be achieved without applying a standard license like Creative Commons?

Owen goes on to consider "What does Google do?", if you haven't already it's certainly worth reading the post in full but he concludes that "Google, Google Scholar, and other web search engines do not rely on the repository specific mechanisms to index their content, and do not take any notice of repository policies". Indeed, I think in common with many repository managers, I devote a lot of time and effort on SEO to ensure my repository is effectively indexed by Google et al and that full-text content can be discovered by these global search engines...which seems somewhat perverse when our own parochial mechanisms and fragmented institutional policies make it so difficult to build effective services of our own.

Jorum Steering Group

On 17th October I attended the first meeting of the Jorum Steering Group at Mimas (excuse the delay in posting). The group has been convened to provide strategic input to Jorum during what is a transitional year for the service, with members asked to act as advocates and critical friends especially in regard to grassroots perspectives, market intelligence and user feedback.

UKCoRR has been identified as a potential partner organisation to Jorum during this time and although the expertise within our organisation is primarily Open Access to research, which arguably has occupied a different space to Open Educational Resources (OER), both in terms of technical infrastructure and also, I think, national and institutional stakeholders there is nevertheless a degree of cross-over; Jorum runs on a modified DSpace repository and a minority of UKCoRR member institutions do manage OER in their repository alongside their research. Perhaps more importantly, however, I would argue that recent political and economic developments in UK HE, combined with a zeitgeist that had already moved a long way towards “open” dissemination of scholarly output (even before the Browne review* was published) has brought OA and OER closer together, possibly a conflation in some respects (in the public mind) but also a real phenomenon as illustrated in this post in the Guardian and subsequent discussion during Open Access week:

“arguably no other aspect of digital holds the promise of the open access (OA) philosophy and open educational resources (OER)”

* The Browne review, of course, may make it less attractive for institutions (though perhaps not individuals?) to openly share teaching & learning resources if they perceive it as giving away a competitive asset which is, perhaps, in contrast to renewed drivers towards Open Access to (publicly funded) research exemplified most recently by the government white paper Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth.

Against this background, it is extremely important that Jorum is both responsive to its existing users’ needs and is able to attract new users; in the changing landscape of HE what are likely to be the mainstream requirements; what do (potential) users need and want and how can this be evidenced? What is the evolving relationship between HE and FE and how can Jorum / ukoer support it?

User requirements have been discussed throughout phases 1 and 2 of the ukoer programme particularly on John, Lorna and Phil’s CETIS blogs and on my own institutional blog and the Jorum team are now blogging regularly at http://www.jorum.ac.uk/blog/.

Early priorities include work on the existing user interface to make it easier to download  resources, particularly when they comprise just a single file and improved metrics, with a “dashboard” for users to visualise, for example, how often their resources have been downloaded. Longer term, the plan is to redesign the user experience in a more fundamental way, in response to collated user feedback - so please, if you use or manage OER yourself, or are interested in ukoer in your institution and the wider sector, do get in touch.

The full membership of the steering group is as follows: Margaret Coutts (Chair) (University of Leeds), Jackie Carter (Mimas), Laura Shaw (Mimas), Lorna Campbell (CETIS), Phil Barker (CETIS), Joe Wilson (Scottish Qualifications Agency), Rachel Bruce (JISC), Amber Thomas (JISC), Hetesh Morar (JISC), Luis Carrasqueiro (British Universities Film & Video Council), Brian Kelly (UKOLN), Antonio Martinez-Arboleda (University of Leeds), Simon Bains (University of Manchester), Doug Belshaw (Northumbria University), Jean Downey (The Higher Education Academy), Bob Strunz (University of Limerick), Nick Sheppard (Leeds Metropolitan University & UKCoRR).

Follow the Jorum Team on Twitter

SWORDv2

SWORD version 2 is a new JISC funded project to update the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) standard in order to cope not only with the traditional 'fire and forget' deposit scenario, but also to facilitate new functions - update, retrieve and delete extensions - needed to support the whole deposit lifecycle of scholarly works while also supporting the broadening range of technical systems to enable better integration across the scholarly infrastructure. In addition, a new community development model is planned to ensure that it is developed, implemented and adopted by communities engaged in research management across HE.

Though the emphasis of SWORDv2, like it's predecessor, is on research outputs, it will surely also impact on teaching and learning materials - including OER - and the respective systems used to manage them whether dedicated repositories like Jorum or VLEs and other LMSs; as noted by CETIS' John Robertson in a recent post the "development [is] focused on scholarly works but extending the profile to support CRUD functionality and ongoing interaction around content and use of content between users and repository is an important step towards richer tools and services"

Development will first document the use cases that SWORDv2 needs to fulfil before developing the new standard and implementing it across the main repository platforms. Naturally the project would value input from UKCoRR and we have been invited, as a community, to review and comment on the requirements and specification as they evolve. Keep an eye on the blog at http://swordapp.org/ and for the more technically minded there is a mailing list that you can subscribe to at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sword-app-techadvisorypanel (where you can also browse the archive.)

In addition, UKCoRR is very pleased to welcome Richard Jones, the Technical Lead for the SWORDv2 project, to our membership meeting on Friday 25th February at the University of Salford (register here). Richard is a core developer of the DSpace platform and also Head of Repository systems at Symplectic Ltd currently working on the RePOSIT project which aims to “increase uptake of a web-based repository deposit tool embedded in a researcher-facing publications management system.”

We are especially keen for colleagues to bring their deposit wish-lists and use-cases to the February meeting

N.B. RePOSIT is one of three projects funded under the Deposit strand of JISC's current Information Environment Programme 2009-11 which also includes DepositMO: Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits which is "creating a repository deposit workflow connecting the user’s computer desktop, especially popular apps such as MS Office, with digital repositories based on EPrints and DSpace" and will liaise closely with Microsoft and DURA – Direct User Repository Access "a collaboration between Mendeley, Symplectic and CARET and the Library at the University of Cambridge"