JISC

Fred Friend, as chair of the panel session, started the discussion by asking each of the panellists for two things which they felt would be most significant in advancing repository population or use.

Bill Hubbard said that he felt that it would be good if institutions could move beyond general policy statements in support of open access or repository use and move to some sort of affirmative action. This need not be a mandate, but could take other forms as well: for example, repository use being taken into account in promotion or reward schemes, or senior management asking for regular statistical reports on levels of departmental ingest into the repository and using these as some measure of departmental "health". 

Bill's second point would be to encourage academics to keep their own copy of the final authored version of any article in which they are involved.  It is recognized that this is more than simply hitting "save" at the right time, but is likely to require a change in working habits, in keeping a more formal track of the versions of articles as they are being produced.

Les Carr felt that some tool for integrating the institutional repository into the research process would be invaluable.  With such a tool, the repository would not be something which was used at the end of the research process, once the article has been written, finalised, and submitted. Rather, it would play an integrated part through the research process and the writing of the article. In this way, it could better serve the researcher, and the repository stand a better chance of obtaining their material.

Les went on to give an intriguing metaphor for open access advocacy of blowing up a Li-Lo.  One has to huff and puff for ages, and still see no visible result -- the Li-Lo still flops about like an empty sack. And then, quite suddenly, with just three more breaths, the whole thing suddenly pops into shape and is firm and usable.  It is an amusing and memorable metaphor and has the ring of truth.  Les' message was "keep going".

Frances Shipsey raised the issue of copyright licensing and not copyright transfer as a necessary move for the growth of institutional repositories.  The question was how to get this as a regular and accepted part of the publication process, given the current situation where policy content can be entirely driven by publishers who have no commercial interest in changing their conditions.

Francis also felt that the use of national targets would be a helpful development, comparing the situation in the UK to that in the Netherlands under the DARE project.

Peter Murray-Rust outlined his wish to have some communal authoring tool for articles that better supports the reality of article creation in his discipline, where the process is shared between multiple academics.  Such a tool should then support the deposition of the paper, and more importantly the research data on which the paper is based, into a suitable repository.

Peter's overall message was that the academic community must reclaim their data from whatever ownership claims it as a result of current practices.  Research data, not simply research papers, will be the key to the development of new ways of sharing and communicating scientific research.

Group discussion talked through the process of depositing material into repositories and author's different expectations of the acceptable complexity of the process.  There was general agreement that a "type once" approach would be best, possibly integrating pre-existing data from bibliographic or institutional RAE databases.  Current discussions between research funders and publishers were reported looking at possibly using publisher-supplied metadata, though here the danger was raised of metadata becoming commoditised through its supply by publishers.

One common opinion amongst all four panellists and other contributors to the discussion was that there would be clear benefits to the development of some authoring tool which would support academics throughout the authoring process and support the deposition of their material into repositories -- in keeping track of versions; allowing communal authoring; guiding the author on copyright; supporting academic working habits and supporting the use of repositories.

 

Summary:

A picture emerged of the need for repositories to be integrated into academics' normal working processes.  In some cases, these working processes will need to be mildly amended in order to accommodate repository use.  When this happens, clear advantages must be given to the academic to facilitate the change and other affirmative actions, for example, mandates or reward structures, should be implemented at an institutional level.

Wherever possible technology should be used to ensure that any additional workload is reduced to a minimum; for example, through the creation of tools to support both the process of writing an article and decisions which have to be made through this process; for example the identification of significant milestones in the development of an article, or in dealing with copyright.

Some level of national coordination is seen to be essential for the efficient development and use of shared resources and to be able to to create communities of best practice and represent these communities to other large-scale stakeholders.  Such national coordination must take its place in a scale of collaboration which ranges from departmental level support, through institutional policies, regional or national initiatives, through to the international level.