Institutional Repositories Infrastructure for Scotland
This project has successfully brought together Universities across Scotland with other principal players in Scotland to explore the cultural and technical issues surrounding the development of an institutional repository infrastructure for Scotland to support the Scottish research agenda.
Executive Summary
IRIScotland was a 2-year project funded by JISC, under its Digital Repositories Programme (IRIScotland-I) with a 6-month extension (IRIScotland-II).
The project had 3 principal aims to:
- explore ways of bringing about cultural and organisational change by developing institutional research publication policies, procedures and mechanisms, as well as workflows to assist individual researchers, conducive to the promotion of self-archiving in institutional open access repositories
- develop a broad framework for a distributed institutional repository infrastructure for Scottish research and experiment with both a collective hosting repository, in particularly for smaller institutions that may not wish to set up their own institutional repositories, and a cross-repository search facility capable of dealing with a wide range of research and research-related digital objects
- identify what can be more effectively done centrally—and whether this should be done at a national Scottish level or a national UK-wide level—or locally at institutional level, taking account of relevant international developments to ensure that the Scottish infrastructure is globally interoperable
The project had very large ambitions and worked within an arena which is the subject of a large international debate, and which required major changes in user behaviour. But the project had a small budget and resources to work on both cultural and technical issues. The project has had some marked successes in some areas but in some other areas there has not been the progress hoped for.
The project had 5 Work Packages: Project Management (led by UoE), Introducing Cultural and Organisational Change (led by UoE), Developing Workflows to Support Cultural and Organisational Changes (led by UoG), Repository Hosting for Scotland (led by NLS) and Cross-Repository and Browse Service for Scotland (led by CDLR). There have been some changes to the project management during the project—these are detailed in the full report on IRIScotland I.
The extension also had 5 workpackages, building on areas which had outstanding issues from IRIScotland-I: Project Management (led by (UoE), Development of Hosting Repository Browsing Interface (led by NLS), Metadata Guidelines (led by CDLR), Advocacy (led by UoG), and Network Infrastructure Issues (led by UoE).
The Scottish academic community was conscious of developments in the Open Archives world early on, and was keen to explore the use of repositories in the Scottish HE environment. IRIScotland was proposed by SCURL, on the basis of discussions within OATS (the Open Access Team in Scotland group), which had developed the Scottish Declaration on Open Access It was hoped that the Project would build on these early discussions.
There have been many developments during the time of the project —in effect there has been a moving target against which the project has worked, and into which it has had to fit. These include:
- changes in government in Scotland
- changes in the funding regime for IT and libraries in the UK as the separate UK Funding Councils have responded to devolution
- the development of research pooling in Scotland
- development by the National Library of Scotland of a Trusted Digital Repository
- less change than might have been hoped for in scholarly communications practices globally
- the work of the e-prints Applications profile for metadata
- the advent of commercial and non-for-profit hosting repositories
- the development of web 2.0
- an all-consuming focus by the research community on the Research Assessment Exercise. The RAE has both refocused attention on institutional publications repositories and, arguably, has made it more difficult to pursue the Open Access agenda. The future Research Excellence Framework (REF) model, based on metrics, will boost the importance of the Institutional Repository to manage research and to promote its visibility
- During the period of the project, repositories have developed a broader applicability in universities (e.g. for learning materials or research data or the corporate record)
Successes of the Project
In overarching strategic terms, the successes of the project have been:
The prototype services (a pilot hosting repository and an OAU PMH harvester/search service) will be developed into services by the NLS in consultation with the community, with a view to launching the service in early 2009.
The work of the Project Board will continue through a Council. The Council will be established by its sponsoring organisations, SCURL, SLIC and NLS. The functions of the Council will be to:
- Lead on behalf of the sponsoring organisations on strategic issues in relationship to research dissemination and curation
- Pursue the Open Access agenda in Scotland through advocacy at all levels and through all methods, including the population of institutional repositories, advocacy tools and the adoption of metadata standards
- Promoted related research and development work
The sponsoring organisations for the Council will be SCURL, SLIC and the NLS and the Council will have representation from organisations involved with research dissemination in Scotland.
The project extension created “branded access points” for the pilot hosting repository; produced a report on metadata good practice for application profiles; updated the metadata agreement for Scottish Institutional Repositories; worked to understand the network infrastructure for repository aggregation and search up to European level; tested advocacy work on academic and research attitudes to deposit in institutional repositories.
More Scottish institutions have Institutional Repositories than is the norm throughout the UK- that is Scotland is more “IR-ready”.
All Scottish HE institutions have signed up to the Scottish Declaration on Open Access
There has been a significant acceleration in deposit in those institutions which have set up repositories (possibly more than in the UK,), which means that the research in Scotland has been more exposed as a result of this project.
The project has produced a good practice toolkit for use by researchers and institutions.
The integration of the project development with the NLS work on the Trusted Digital Repository has meant that the work on the pilot hosting repository which could be achieved is far in excess of what might have been expected from a project of this size.
In turn, the work of IRIScotland has benefited the work of the NLS Trusted Digital Repository.
The project has demonstrated that distributed institutional repository infrastructure works. Several of the institutions generating significant research have preferred to pursue setting up their own repositories which has proved the value of the distributed environment, which can have elements of repositories managed in-house, repositories hosted by other organisations, and repositories hosted by the pilot hosting repository.
The project has brought together for the first time a group of Scottish players whose joint remit and joint expertise can be considered comprehensive in the area of research information. This has therefore been a very important breakthrough project.
The project has had a significant role in passing on its experience, particularly with metadata, to the international community.
Less Successful Areas
In overarching strategic terms, the less successful areas have been:
The Open Access agenda has not moved on very far yet, and Scotland has not obtained a “mandate” for Open Access publishing, as some other countries have
At the end of IRIScotland-I, there has been less cultural change amongst researchers than we might have hoped for. The project has had less influence on cultural change than might have been the case. However, it now seems that behaviour is changing, with several IRIScotland project partners having mandates for their researchers to deposit.
The project addressed both cultural and technical issues—at times the focus has been more on the technical issues because these may be “easier” than dealing with the complex cultural issues. However, both the technical and cultural outcomes were not delivered until towards the end of the project and this has impacted particularly on the ability to deal with the cultural issues because it was not possible to engage with the community through presentation of the pilot repository and the toolkit.
The project has come up with a view on, but not an answer to, the question about what should be done at the institutional, Scottish and UK levels.
The project has grappled with the issues of getting good metadata and the difficulties of achieving good metadata agreements across institutions. The primacy of institutions in developing their own metadata schema has not been challenged.
The project has not been as active outside the HE area as originally hoped. The project has also not engaged with the e-learning agenda, but has concentrated (as expected) on the research agenda.
A summative evaluation of IRIScotland-I was carried out by Key Perspectives. The Project Board addressed the recommendations in this report, accepting some of these and rejecting others The report in particular rasied the issue of the marketplace for IR solutions.
In response to the first aim of the project, a good practice toolkit for institutional use by researchers, administrators, policy-makers, and repository implementers has been produced. This grew out of not only the experience of the project, but also out of the extensive background in repositories of the project partners from Edinburgh, Strathclyde, and Glasgow. With regard to researcher behaviour, the survey carried out by the project showed that researchers might like to deposit in repositories, but that the process has to be very simple. The processes in place are not yet simple enough to allow for widespread change in researcher behaviour, except in subjects (eg physics) where this behaviour is already ingrained because of subject repositories. The extension project tested out these concepts with researchers in Glasgow University.
In response to the second aim, the project has created a sophisticated pilot hosting repository application, (hosted by the National Library of Scotland), capable of providing branded virtual repository space, manageable by individual participating institutions and individuals. At the time of writing, deposits are now being made by two participating institutions, with four others due to deposit shortly. The project has also demonstrated that the distributed institutional repository infrastructure works. The project has also developed a pilot search service, so that it is now possible to represent the whole Open Access output of Scottish researchers through a single access point, the IRIScotland portal (presently maintained by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde). The NLS had made a commitment to taking forward the prototype services as service in early 2009.
In response to the third project aim, we now have greater understanding of the issues, but the issues remain complex and difficult. There are now a number of commercial, semi-commercial and not-for-profit institutional repository providers, based either in Scotland or the UK which provide a marketplace within with IRIScotland works. Within institutions, the purposes of setting up an institutional repository have also been elaborated during the time of the project, with more focus on research and corporate management alongside the original focus on Open Access publishing.
What is clear is that there are activities which should be carried out at each level: institution, national, UK/global. A survey is being carried out on this, and the report will be added on completion to the IRIScotland website
Only the institution can gather the repository content. We would be ill-advised to ignore global standards. And there may be an intermediate level which ensures national/regional standards in name authority services or metadata. De-duplication of records can only happen at this intermediate level. The responses to the survey will reflect the range of views in the community about what is appropriate for each level.
The business models for these issues remain to be clarified, and may be resolved by further projects based on the IRIScotland work.
Dissemination for the project has been widespread. The dissemination programme is funded by SLIC and will include an event for senior HEI staff, research managers and researchers in planned in spring 2009; and a planned launch for the IRIScotland services also in spring 2009
The recommendations for the future are covered by the paper, Future directions for IRIScotland which has been accepted by SCURL and the IRIScotland Project Board.
Download the full report