Are Institutional Repositories Doing Their Job?

Posted on September 11, 2012 by

Scholarly communication librarians (and our colleagues) often tout institutional repositories as the best place for authors to keep their work safe and accessible. Yet, more than 4 years after the publication of Dorothea Salo’s infamous article, “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel,” another former librarian is pointing out that while work uploaded to IRs is secure, it is oftentimes undiscoverable by the public.

Before I go any further, I should clarify that the IUScholarWorks team has identified and addressed our own discoverability problems long ago. Our metadata is regularly indexed and is fully findable by Google Scholar. We also have staff hard at work on some of the usability and product awareness issues raised below. This post is merely intended to serve as a conversation starter among librarians.

Over on the MmITS blog, Louise Morrison has written a provocative post highlighting several problems that often plague users who try to find content in IRs:

  • Lack of discoverability via Google and Google Scholar
  • Poorly conceived IR search tools
  • Users are oblivious to the existence of IRs (and hence they cannot find content therein)
  • Subject repositories don’t exist for every subject

While I can’t speak to all the points raised by Louise, I find the metadata interoperability issue intriguing. Is Dublin Core a poor choice for an IR metadata standard, given that Google Scholar uses a different approved metadata scheme? Should we change our standards to fit with common practice, or hold tight to best practice?

Jenn Riley (Head, Carolina Digital Library and Archives*), in her keynote speech at the 2011 Australian Committee on Cataloging Seminar, suggested that as far as metadata goes, libraries should become integrated, rather than carving out a niche (Maclean, 2011)—and I would agree.

What do you think? Common practice or best practice? And how would you suggest we tackle building more user-friendly search tools for the major IR platforms?

 

* Full disclosure: Riley was my former supervisor at IU’s Digital Library Program in 2007.

Archiving Conference Works in IUScholarWorks Repository

Posted on August 31, 2012 by

The IUScholarWorks Open Access Research Repository can be an excellent archive for IU conference and workshop presentations in whatever form they take.  Often times these types of materials are difficult,  perhaps impossible, to locate after the event.  If there is value in preserving these materials and making them available at a permanent Internet location, please contact us.

To participate in the Repository, the rightsholder (in all likelihood, the presenter) needs to be able to accept the Repository’s non-exclusive license.  While it is best to have the license accepted before the event, it is possible to track down presenters from past events in order for their materials to be archived.

It is not necessary to have every presentation from a conference or workshop archived in the Repository.  It is possible to deposit the event program so that users may understand the full scope of the event when all presentations are not available.  It is also possible for rightsholders to opt for a Creative Commons license to their work when they elect to archive them in the Repository.

If this service could extend the value of a conference or workshop, please contact IUScholarWorks staff.   We will help devise a workflow for the responsible group that will result in a collection similar to the Latin American Music Center’s 50th Anniversary Cultural Counterpoints conference.

Welcome to a new year! IUScholarWorks Services

Posted on August 22, 2012 by

Welcome back for the 2012-2013 school year!  We’d like to remind our faculty and students of the services provided by IUScholarWorks, the open access publishing program of the IU Libraries:

  • New this year: Data Services: Indiana University Bloomington’s Data Management Service provides consultations on funding agency mandated data management plans, and data storage, access, and preservation options offered free-of-charge to campus researchers. Visit the IU Bloomington Data Management Service webpage for more information.
  • Journal Publishing:  We support IU faculty and graduate students who run electronic journals with their editorial needs such as author submissions, peer review, and journal website.  Please visit the IUScholarWorks Journals website or our recent blog post that showcases our publishing services.
  • Scholarly Research Archive:  Faculty can use our free, secure storage as a place for their Open Access research materials. The archive supports working papers, technical reports, media files, published articles, book chapters, and data: large and small.  Visit the archive, check it out, and contact us to learn more.
  • Graduate student theses and dissertations:  We actively collect PhD and EdD theses in the scholarly research archive.  A variety of departments also use the archive to showcase their masters theses.
  • Teaching: The Libraries Scholarly Communication department staff is available to lead workshops and guest lectures regarding our services, scholarly communication issues relative to the disciplines, and topics related to intellectual property and author rights.  Checkout our workshops pages (here and here) to see the latest offerings.

Visit the IUScholarWorks website to learn more about our services or to contact our staff

(#16) Beyond the PDF

Posted on April 16, 2012 by

As the Digital Publishing Librarian I am frequently asked what format a researcher should use to publish their materials in our open access institutional repository or in our open access journals.  Leaving the other mediums aside for now, I will focus only on text files for this post.

The truth is, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to best direct researchers with this question and no great answer seems readily available.  My default response is, if you want to use PDF, please use archival PDF/A-1.  In my position I recognize how important it is to authors and editors that a document look its best, but I also need to think about how to best preserve it, digitally, for a long time.  I’m not a preservationist by a long shot, but these matters still keep me up some nights.

We have experimented with a few projects that stray from the PDF.  For example, The Medieval Review uses XML to generate their articles which they supply to our repository and in turn we then transform into HTML.  We hold on to the XML files primarily because we think they could be useful to our preservation strategy.

We’ve also worked with Museum Anthropology Review (see volume 5, issues 1-2) as time and staff help permits to create HTML versions of their PDF articles using a template a crafty student created.  While these files in particular are great HTML files, they take quite a bit of time to create as I learned one Friday afternoon last month when the editor and I sat down to try to create them ourselves!

Yes, time is a large part of the crux of the problem.  Staff expertise as well.  I have inquired of these editorial practices and support for the creation of well-formed preservable articles with other library staff doing similar work and our general response boils down to this:  we’re a shoe-string shop, trying to get by and do good work without spending a lot of time and money on the format of the output and so we resort to what seems good enough and people like:  the PDF.

In our spare time, folks like me keep abreast of the the NISO Journal Article Tag Suite – Standardized Markup for Journal Articles.  We play around with Annotum, an open-source, open-process, open-access scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress which allows for the easy creation of XML-based articles.  We try to create XML templates in Microsoft Word.  If you read into these projects you may notice many of them focus on scientific publications and I thank these developers for venturing into these arenas.  Most of the publications I support to date are humanities-based and am hopeful as humanists continue to explore viable options – ones that are easy for authors, editors, and peer reviewers to use and of course, that readers like to read.  I look forward to the possibility of discussing these questions at venues such as ThatCamp Publishing 2012.

This post is just as much a call for response as it may help point others wondering about these matters to useful resources.  I thank people like Michael Fenner at PLoS and Matthew Gold at CUNY for delving into these matters as well.

(#11) FAR and IUScholarWorks

Posted on December 16, 2011 by

Have you noticed in the Faculty Annual Report (FAR), there is a check-box labeled ScholarWorks?  This check-box appears when you record your publications, creative activities, conference presentations, and even service activities.  By checking the
ScholarWorks button, you are indicating that you are interested in placing the
corresponding publication, presentation, etc. into IUScholarWorks, the digital
repository hosted by the IU Libraries (see https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/).  By placing your work in the repository, you will gain increased visibility to your research and the work will be assigned a permanent, stable URL for easy linking and dissemination.  In order for a paper, powerpoint presentation, poster, or other material to be deposited into the repository, you must own the copyright to the material or have permission to make it
available.  Note for journal publications, this often means that that the publisher’s PDF copy of the article is generally not allowed, although a pre-print version may be.  If you are interested in increasing access to your work, while having the libraries be responsible for the long-term maintenance to it, then check the ScholarWorks button when you fill out this year’s FAR.  A librarian will contact you to discuss your work and to get copies
of the work for deposit.  If you have any questions regarding this process
or about IUScholarWorks, please feel free to contact us at IUSW@indiana.edu.

 

(#7) A View From the GA, Part 1

Posted on October 19, 2011 by

IUScholarWorks has a Graduate Assistant, Carol Lubkowski, to help us with many aspects of our work.  Carol’s job description is basically “other duties as assigned.”  We thought it would be interesting and useful to see things from Carol’s point of view occasionally, so this is the first of her posts.  Welcome Carol!

Before coming to IU and joining IU ScholarWorks as a Graduate Assistant, my previous experience with the concept of a digital repository was in a corporate context, at a Boston-based biotech company. I was working in records management there and the term and concept of a digital repository were just getting introduced. However, it was not aligned with the company’s existing corporate library. Thus, when I started as the Graduate Assistant for IU ScholarWorks, I understood the basic concept of a digital repository, but had a lot to discover. Within the academic world, an institutional repository addresses a wide variety of concerns and needs for scholarly communication, reflecting the increasing importance of digital formats and sources both inside and outside of the library. I am particularly excited by the ways in which institutional repositories can help disseminate dissertations and theses, and by the services they provide to researchers and authors.
IU ScholarWorks is working on getting the dissertations of IU doctoral students into our repository, which has exciting potential for both disseminating research and for bringing new researchers into IU. It is often very difficult for researchers to access dissertations – very few of them are available in print format on library shelves. Some are available on microfilm, and many must be requested either through interlibrary loan or directly from the author. Expanded, easier access to dissertations will make the most recent research available to the wider scholarly community. Not only will this help researchers, it also has the potential to attract new researchers to IU through our graduate programs. By having access to recent graduate work, prospective students can get a clearer picture of what IU’s programs can offer them and whether a department’s focus and strengths match their own research interests.
As someone who has several friends in academia, I am also excited by the services an institutional repository can provide to authors and researchers. The repository provides a permanent digital home for their work, accessible via the internet with a stable and permanent URL. This also gives the authors the advantage of using a system and location backed up by established and robust IT services and infrastructure. The repository can thus provide a convenient and reliable way for authors to make their work widely and freely available without forgoing the aegis of official institutional support and authority.

(#6) Searching WorldCat for Open Access Publications

Posted on October 6, 2011 by

If you’re interested in using one source to find Open Access publications in repositories around the world, I invite you to check out WorldCat.

WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. Perform your searches for books, articles, photographic images, audio, video, etc. in WorldCat and discover materials in libraries worldwide.  You can also discover freely available digital materials found in repositories worldwide.  Repositories such as the HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and institutional repositories like IUScholarWorks.

How?
Once you’ve performed your search, use the refinement tools on the left navigation side bar to narrow your results to ‘Internet Resources.’  From here, you will notice that many of the records come from a database called ‘OAIster‘ (OA meaning Open Access) and have an orange ‘View Now’ link associated.  Certainly take a look at the full record by clicking on the item’s title, but the view now link takes you to a repository that is storing the material openly for the world to access.

Check it out and please ask us or your library’s reference staff for help if you have questions.  WorldCat is a remarkable search engine.  Be sure to take advantage of creating an account and managing your resources within WorldCat.

(#4) Student Statement on The Right to Research

Posted on September 6, 2011 by

The Student Statement on the Right to Research is a worthwhile read, whether you’re a student or not.  It is a statement from the Right to Research Coalition and it outlines the essential problem that those who need access to information – students, researchers, doctors, patients, entrepreneurs, the public, people in developing countries, and publishers – are often denied access because information lives behind closed doors and requires an outlay of money for the privilege to read, study and use information.

What?  This is crazy!  But it’s true and real opportunities to further ones studies and make valuable contributions to society are stifled.

Read about the problem and solutions at the Right to Research Coalition website. Engage in conversations with your peers, your professors and your librarians. Join the conversation.  We welcome your attention.

IUScholarWorks is a program that endeavors to alleviate these problems by offering alternative publishing solutions to IU Researchers.  Check out our Repository and the Journals we host.

(#2) What is an institutional repository?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by

I’d like to introduce you to IUScholarWorks Repository and explain what it can do for you, the IU researcher.

A definition of institutional repository (IR) by Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information :

“a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.” (2003; ARL)

IUScholarWorks Repository is an open access institutional repository and serves as a place to permanently archive research materials in any format such as:

  • Previously published materials (articles, book chapters, etc.)
  • Conference works and unpublished scholarly works
  • Lectures
  • Data files and databases

Understanding open access. Peter Suber, an  independent policy strategist for open access to research, provides a useful definition:

“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” (2004, revised 2010; http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm)

How does a researcher get started with the IUScholarWorks Repository?
IU Researchers should contact the IUScholarWorks administrator (me, Jennifer Laherty) via email at iusw@indiana.edu or jlaherty@indiana.edu if you are interested in depositing your research materials.  Together and often with assistance from Sherri Michaels, the Intellectual Property Librarian at IU Bloomington, we will determine if you have the rights to deposit your research materials, or if we need to seek permission from the rightsholder in order to make the deposit.  For each item submitted to the repository, the rightsholder must agree to the non-exclusive IUScholarWorks Repository license.

Although it should seem that the author is the rightsholder to the material, this is not often the case for materials already published, such as articles and book chapters.  In most cases, an author transfers a cadre of copyrights to their publisher in a copyright transfer agreement.  It is important to understand which rights were transferred in order to determine if the author has the right to post their work to an open access institutional repository.  We can help navigate to answer this question.  For students desiring to deposit their research, it may be done with permission of their academic department.

Once the copyright situation is figured out, research may be deposited.  Here’s a very short list of some interesting materials in IUScholarWorks:

Some words about access and preservation
IUScholarWorks Repository makes your research freely and broadly available to a worldwide audience (open access); it uses technology (DSpace) and metadata standards (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, OAI-PMH) to ensure your works are more findable on the Internet; and the Libraries take care to archive and preserve your works for future generations.  IUScholarWorks is privileged to have support from the IU Digital Library Program, a a collaborative effort of the IU Libraries and University Information Technology Services in its efforts to achieve its mission.