1. Institutional Repositories: City Research
Online & open access
Neil Stewart, Digital Repository Manager
Laura Radford, Digital Repository Administrator
CRO Information Session, Wed 30 January 2012

2. Today’s session
•Open access: what is it?
•Policy & infrastructure
•OA at City
•What we learnt
•The future
•Feel free to interrupt, ask questions!

3. Why open access? Research wants to be free!
• Growing recognition in last 10+ years that the internet & web
services can cause this to happen.
Benefits Currently
• Move away from research hidden
• focussed on peer-
behind subscription pay-walls.
• Widest possible audience for
reviewed journals.
research.
• Open access citation advantage. In the Future
• Social justice- lowering the “digital • Open data.
divide”.
• Open monographs.
• Open access = better science,
developed more quickly

4. Green vs. Gold Open Access
Green open access Gold open access
• Author self-archives “author final” • “Author pays” model- though rarely
version in an institutional repository out of academics’ own pockets!
(IR) or subject repository.
• Articles from a fully Gold or “hybrid”
• An embargo period is often applied. journal are made open.
• Copyright, versioning of papers both • Problem of funding for Gold,
issues for academics. publishers “double dipping”, creation of
a market for Gold journals.
• Getting academics to do it- to
mandate?

5. The policy & infrastructure landscape
• 208 UK IRs developed in past
10 years! Hot Topics
• Significant growth in subject • Elsevier boycott
repositories (ArXiv, PubMed,
SSRN, RePEc)
• Finch Report on opening
• Both the Finch Report & the access to UK research
RCUK policy favour Gold, to outputs
the detriment of Green: Green • Research Councils UK
repositories to be used for revised open access policy
“grey literature, theses and
datasets”.
• Aaron Swartz & JSTOR
• Likely to be a “mixed economy”
for a long while yet (?)

6. City Research Online (CRO): the basics
Our set-up
• Symplectic Elements Current Research Information System
(CRIS), contains c. 25,000 publication records.
• Eprints open access full text repository, contains c. 1,400
papers.
Developments to date
• Establishing a presence on City’s main website.
• Using data held in the open access repository to feed web
services.
• Developing use of the CRIS to support REF 2014.
• Storing and serving City’s electronic PhD theses.
• Social media usage.
• Pushing papers to RePEc automatically.

7. CRO at City
Who we work with (other than library colleagues!)
• Academic colleagues
• CRO Steering Group (representatives from across the
university)
• Senate Research Committee
• Pro VC for Research & Enterprise, Research Office (Research
Excellence Framework (REF), RCUK open access policy)
• Information Services (staff profiles)
• Admins in the Schools (advocacy, administration, theses)
We have a policy!
• Adopted as of January 2013- now compulsory to add papers to
CRO.

8. Lessons learnt (1): general lessons
Automating metadata harvest and transfer is good. It saves
on cataloguing time, and means you can concentrate on doing
more interesting things.
Using hosted services is also good, since they tend to be
secure and stable, and allow for nimble development.
Branding is important. We quickly learnt that our users get
confused when we used brand names- using the service’s name
in a thoroughgoing way is very important. Only refer to software
names in the context of technical explanations!

9. Lessons learnt (2): managing systems
Having two systems doing similar things can be difficult:
• Managing systems integration.
• Managing a tripartite relationship.
• Explaining the way in which systems interact to users.
But it also has its advantages:
• Allows for the automated metadata transfer.
• Different systems can be used for different purposes-
differentiation!
• As a result of this differentiation, separate development of the
two systems can be engaged upon.
• Though Eprints now has CRIS-like functionality, Symplectic
Elements has been designed from the ground up as a CRIS.

10. CRO’s future
We try and provide a broadening range of useful services for our
“customers”.
CRO has four major work packages:
• Research data management
• Open access journal publishing
• Archiving and serving working paper series
• Author profiling services
Other stuff: discovery, Altmetrics, linking with ArXiv, new starters.
Killer application will be to do more with the data we hold, not
least Staff Profiling services for City.

11. What we do day to day
• General service management
• Answering enquiries (academic & library colleagues,
others)
• Technical & administrative troubleshooting
• Thinking strategically- service development
• Advocacy: training, awareness raising, publicity
• Current awareness: keeping up to date with open access
& repository developments
• Conferences, external meetings, other events
• Other things you expect to do at work: email, meetings etc.

12. Thanks! Questions?
City Research Online:
http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/
http://cityopenaccess.wordpress.com/
publications@city.ac.uk
@City_Research