JISC

Advocacy and Ingest

Frances Shipsey spoke about the VERSIONS project.  The VERSIONS project was noted as developing standards for version identification. The project looked at authors' attitudes and working habits in relation to the process of research article creation.  A survey, drawing 464 responses, found that over 59% have more than four types of output from a single research project; and typically create between 50 to 60 versions of a paper before the final version is produced.  This shows some of the difficulties that face repositories and authors when dealing with object types and identifying significant "milestones" in the evolution of a research paper. 

Interestingly, 81% said that they would "provide an author final version if invited to do so" for repository use.  This is approximately the same percentage of authors stating support for open access archiving that was found in other studies by Key Perspectives Ltd. 

Bill Hubbard gave a presentation on the RoMEO and JULIET services provided by the SHERPA team.  This covered their history, purpose and use of RoMEO by individuals wishing to archive material and by service providers through the provision of APIs. The presentation looked at the way that the colour coding originated by the JISC-funded RoMEO project has been developed to summarise the increasingly complex copyright transfer agreements being produced by publishers.

RoMEO has had a recent development which gives summary information on publishers' compliance with the archiving requirements that have been defined by some funding agencies.  This links in with the JULIET service which provides summaries of these research funders' policies.

Peter Burnhill gave a preview of "the Depot" just prior to its formal launch in the following session at the conference. The presentation discussed some of the background to the creation of the Depot, including issues of security, take-down, preservation, notification to institutions of their authors use of the depot, the search and browse facility within the Depot, and finally the exit strategy for the Depot.  The presentation went on to look at the intended development of version 2 of the Depot with further support and guidance for mediated deposit by third parties and the possible incorporation of the Scholarly Works Application Profile.

Discussion: Questions were asked about the way in which funders' mandates might work in practice, including the question of how much authors already know about their funders' mandate requirements; how they will get to know; what mechanisms for compliance will be used; and whether the funding councils will be prepared to both police compliance and to take action where non-compliance is identified.