Literature Review: IncReASe project

The project aimed to increase content in White Rose Research Online by improving deposit options and embedding the repository within researcher workflows. It looked at researcher self-archiving behaviour and awareness of open access (web site analysis/questionnaire/interview), identified issues around bulk import of metadata (import from various sources) and looked at interoperability between the EPrints repository and other internal and external IT systems. The appearance of Symplectic shortly after the project started required us to rethink the project, the ongoing role of the repository and the sort of services we’d assumed the repository might offer (e.g. feeding data to web pages).

Key findings which may be relevant to RePosit

• Authors: low awareness of repository and OA in general, including funder OA requirements. Deposit barrier: deposit not seen as relevant to their academic discipline. Copyright checking the most valued aspect of the repository service. Usage statistics most desired add on service. Fewer academics spontaneously archive on their own web pages than we thought (16%); much of this material is grey literature. Maths and Computing had strongest self-archiving profile. A large cultural and behavioural shift will be required for widespread self-archiving; targeting early career researchers and PhD students may help cultural change. (Questionnaire summary document).

• Versioning / file capture: project concluded version confusion was a barrier to deposit and this was best addressed by routinely asking for the “accepted version” of the work at the point of acceptance for publication. Possible model to investigate (i) initial capture of file and skeleton metadata (ii) subsequent post-publication metadata completion.

• “Proxy” depositors: local administrators are well placed to “champion” and support the repository in ways that more “remote” central repository staff are not; this advantage needs to be balanced against the need to provide training and support for departmentally based staff.

• Manual metadata: varied hugely in quality and improvement was resource hungry. Services need to weigh benefits of improvement against cost. Dealing with legacy data is challenging! There is scope for further automation of quality control processes e.g. reporting tool run against agreed metadata quality criteria.

• Sharing data: we need to work out the relationship between institutional repositories and subject / funder repositories (arXiv, RePEC, PMC, ESRC) to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort - and for more powerful advocacy.

• Funders: linking research grant details to output is necessary to (i) show compliance with funder open access requirements and (ii) flag the requirement for onward deposit to (or harvesting from) a subject repository. ESRC collaborated on the IncReASe project; in principle, ESRC were open to the idea of accepting deposits directly from SWORD compliant repositories. There is further scope to explore this function. Would be a strong selling point for both depositors and research administrators.

Project web site: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/increase/
Advocacy tools - poster and leaflet: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/increase/publicity.html