Busy busy with dissemination preparations

Despite the recent blog silence, in fact there’s quite a lot going on with RePosit at the moment. Next Tuesday is our main project dissemination event for the whole year (although Jodie Double has just agreed to present at the Repositories Fringe in Edinburgh next month too) – at the RSP event in Nottingham. Six members of the project team – Ellie James (Keele), Sarah Molloy (Queen Mary), Nicola Cockarill (Plymouth), Rachel Proudfoot (Leeds), Jodie Double (Leeds) and Lizzie Dipple (Symplectic) – will be there representing RePosit, outlining our project findings so far and sharing our experiences of advocacy planning and in action. Therefore we’re all busily making final changes to presentations, running over organisational details and tying together our sessions. We’ve been using our usual Skype call method of keeping in touch and facilitating necessary discussions. Roll on Tuesday...


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

EPSRC mandate - working closely with Research Office staff

Research Office staff can play an important role in publicising repository deposit. The relationship between repository staff and research support staff is a key one which should be nurtured. It's great that we have direct research support representation on the RePosit team (Ellie from Keele) as this brings an important different perspective to our work - but also provides a good route to information which may naturally come the way of the Research Office but may or may not make it as far as the Library. The recent EPSRC mandate is a good example. The EPSRC open access policy is not new, but it has been revised recently. There is a prominent and imminent date on the policy which has made institutions sit up and take notice (true of EPSRC's open access publication policy and their data management policy). There's some interesting psychology in that. In addition, the EPSRC has written to all University VCs to publicise their policy.

From a deposit/RePosit point of view at the University of Leeds, the Research Office has take the opportunity to publicise the EPSRC policy on the staff intranet and in a direct email to all EPSRC grant holders. We (repository staff) were able to confirm deposit via Symplectic meets the green route requirements and we provided relevant text for the email to grant holders. Because the EPSRC policy is flexible and allows recipients to choose whether to comply via the gold route or green self-archiving route, we can gave a straightforward message to grant hodlers. Yes, deposit into White Rose Research Online meets your funder requirements. There is no cost to you . Here's how you do it. The EPSRC email provided a great way to reach academics directly and show our relevance to them - and to work closely with our Research Office. Whether it will have a significant impact on deposit - we'll see!

RePosit at the RSP Winter School

Three project partners are attending the Research Support Project's 2011 winter school event held at Armathwaite Hall, Bassenthwaite in the Lake District from 9th February to 11th February: Rachel Proudfoot from Leeds, Nicola Cockarill from Plymouth and Sarah Molloy from Queen Mary. Sadly Jill Evans from Exeter is ill and so cannot attend as planned. With backup from Nicola and Sarah, Rachel is presenting one of the four case studies during the workshop part of the event on Thursday afternoon, based on the experience at Leeds University around embedding their institutional repository, also drawing on what we've worked through the RePosit project so far. Another project aim is to use this opportunity of such a gathering of repository managers and interested parties to grow our project user community forum, and gain feedback on the materials we've produced so far.


Posted by: Lizzie Dipple

What can we learn from Prof Weasel and Kooey the Goose: project chat with Gareth Johnson

In our Exeter project meeting, we discussed different ways of promoting a CRIS (or choose your preferred term!) to repository link. Readers may be familiar with the (in)famous library education video series created by Gareth Johnson (University of Leicester aka llordllama). In particular, “The Professional Librarian’s Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright” is well known and has been used in repository training sessions – I’ve used it on occasion (with permission!) as an icebreaker and a painless way of explaining the consequences of academic authors’ tendency to sign away rights to their work. Would this type of video be a useful advocacy or educational tool in the CRIS to Repository context?

Although a lot of our advocacy work will be focussed on our home institutions, communicating RePosit findings to the wider repository and library community is very important – particularly to maximise awareness of the training materials produced during the project. We will want to explore the pros and cons of the emerging deposit method and hope to facilitate a community of practice around the new CRIS/repository model.

I had a very helpful discussion with Gareth around a couple of key issues (i) whether videos in this field were feasible and what form they might take (ii) community building.

(i) of course, whether Gareth produces videos in this area is very much his call. Having produced many videos, he’s learned that it can pay to focus a video on one main issue or message e.g. “what is a CRIS?”. So a possibly approach would be a series of videos from which to pick and mix according to the specific requirements of a training session. This could fit very well with the emerging RePosit approach of a slide bank from which “stories” can be pulled together to appeal to a specific audience. From us (RePosit – or anyone else promoting this type of deposit model), Gareth would like any specific quotations or opinions from researchers, librarians, administrators which could be used to inform any videos he puts together. As Gareth says, it’s useful for the videos to provide food for thought and look at a topic from several angles.

(A useful tip from Gareth: why not email all your keen depositors and ask them to provide an attributable quote for use in promotion – this can yield surprisingly rich results.)

(ii) Perhaps we could offer the emerging “community” multiple options/ discussion venues and see where the traffic goes? So if the RePosit Google Group doesn’t take off, maybe try a Facebook page – this may be more user friendly. Are there any established groups we could piggy back on?

“The Professional Librarian’s Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright”