Presentation to the ARROW repositories day, Brisbane, 2008, on suggestions for improving the rate of capture of documents in institutional repositories

1. a centre of expertise in data curation and preservation
Moving the Repository upstream
Chris Rusbridge
ARROW Repositories day
14 October 2008
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2. a centre of expertise in data curation and preservation
Contents
• The resistant scholar
• Researcher work flow
• On negative clicks…
• Can the repository help rather than hinder?
• Towards a Research Repository System?
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The resistant scholar
• Edinburgh Research Archive has 1100+
(publicly accessible) items
• Edinburgh scholarly output?
• Wet finger in the air: annual output ~ number of
academics? (RAE every 4 years wants 4 papers)
• Ie ~2500 papers per year!
• So after 4 years we have <10% of output
• A common story everywhere!
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Why is this so?
• Uncertainty, risk?
• About copyright
• About Ingelfinger rule
• Change
• Too busy
• Doesn’t fit in the way they do things now
• Not well motivated by advantages to others
• Little in it for them!
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Researcher work flow?
• Many projects/tasks in parallel
• All different stages
• Teaching (several), research (several), writing
up research, writing grant proposals,
reviewing papers, administrative tasks,
University governance, etc
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Researcher work flow?
• Think up research idea
• Write grant proposal with colleagues
• Submit, wait, refine/revise, resubmit
• Hire/assign staff, plan project
• Gather data, analyse data, refine hypothesis
• Refine methods, more data etc
• Write draft paper with colleagues
• Refine, revise submit paper, repeat until successful
• New directions, more data, new paper
• Conference presentations, discussion, new research
ideas…
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Who are you working with?
• Your group
• Your department
• Other departments in your university
• Colleagues elsewhere worldwide
• Often more of the latter than the former!
• Wide variety of IT environments
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Write paper work flow?
• PI and co-PIs outline structure
• PI assign sections to colleagues
• Gather sections, edit, circulate
• Identify weaknesses, gather more data
• Select & organise citations, images, tables, graphs,
supplementary data
• Comment, revise, circulate, repeat until deadline
• Submit, wait
• Revise following review, circulate, resubmit
• By now working on other research!
• It’s published! Add to bibliography…
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When do you submit to
repository?
• There’s no obvious point
• It’s always extra work
• Any doubt, uncertainty, distraction enough to
put it off
• “The library” wants you to do it? Sure, RSN
• The repository doesn’t help, it hinders
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On negative clicks
• Research in Glasgow for Effective Records
Management project (JISC-funded)
• Currall, Johnson, Johnston, Moss, Richmond
• “How many extra clicks are you willing to
make to ensure preservation of the records
you are creating?”
• Answer: zero
• Design goal follows: reduce work for clerks
(fewer clicks) AND ensure preservation
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How could a repository help?
• Support the research
• Support the researchers
• Support the writing
• Support the publishing
• Be a natural part of the work flow…
• How could we do that?
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Negative click repository?
• Could a repository reduce the workload of
researchers?
• Perhaps not on its own…
• What would be needed to make things
easier?
• Maybe a system and services with the repository
embedded?
• Research Repository System
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13. a centre of expertise in data curation and preservation
Some known research issues
• Extended teams across institutions, even legal
jurisdictions
• Varying technology: Windows/Mac/Linux versions, MS Office,
OpenOffice, LaTeX, EndNote, BibTeX, etc
• Localised, segregated identity management
• Informal extranets
• Distrust of anyone who (ever!) adds complexity or
difficulty, even apparent
• University, IT dept, Library, School…
• Individualist local IT management
• Backup, version control, security, patching
• Data quantity, quality, provenance, metadata, version, sharing
• Analytic software version
• Lab notebooks…
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14. a centre of expertise in data curation and preservation
How could “we” help?
• Who are “we”?
• Repository managers
• In/with the Library
• And IT Services
• Backed by the administration
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15. a centre of expertise in data curation and preservation
Maybe we could…
• Help with publisher liaison
• Support multiple authoring across several institutions
• More permissive identity management/extranet
• Support multiple versions
• Fine-grained access control
• Checkpointing
• Support supplementary data
• Provide basic data management capability
• Provide simple, cross-platform, persistent storage
• Provide some longevity
• Provide additional benefits
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Exposure
• Digital Curation Blog posts
• Comments and feedback
• JISC Repository Ideascale discussions
• Comments, feedback, voting
• Blue Ribbon Task Force Ideascale
discussions
• voting
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Some comments…
• Need to be careful of doing this as if it complicates the workflow, it just
won't happen
• I think the RRS you envisage sounds fantastic and would be a 'good
thing', what worries me is the 'function creep' taking us a few miles on
from some of the more basic, simpler 'few keystrokes' approach…
• The RRS sounds to have many features of a Virtual Research
Environment, albeit perhaps a less data centric VRE
• The availability of research via Open Access would increase if the same
systems that provide Open Access also provided, or were integrated
with, tools which support the authoring process
• My experience is, that feature requests of this sort [authoring support]
are exactly the ones which end up in the "users didn't know what they
wanted bin" (I'm a developer).
• A system to help streamline the editorial/publication process is fine (if
we can persuade academics to use it)
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20. a centre of expertise in data curation and preservation
CRIS
• Several spotted that Current Research
Information Systems can provide “fill the
blanks” metadata
• Reduces workload
• Provides context
• Supports research disclosure
• Needs administration support
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Is there something useful here?
• DISCUSS!
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Thank you
c.rusbridge@ed.ac.uk
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