FAIR Synthesis: Exploring User Needs

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Many FAIR projects have undertaken user studies. Some have done user studies at the start of the project to understand practice within the academic community or to profile user needs. Some will do evaluation studies at the end of the project to assess user satisfaction with the repositories and services they have developed.  This section highlights some of the interesting studies done at the start of the FAIR programme. As projects complete and report on their work, evaluation studies will become available.

 

Trends in self-archiving

Though institutional repositories are relatively new, academic authors have been archiving their research output on departmental and personal web sites for some time.  The University of Edinburgh (as part of the Theses Alive! and SHERPA projects) undertook some interesting research to find out the extent to which academic authors at Edinburgh were self-archiving and see if there were trends by subject.  Though individual subjects varied considerably, they found a direct correlation between a willingness to self-archive and the existence of subject-based repositories.  Most of the academic units that had a high percentage of self-archiving scholars already had well-established subject repositories set up in that area. However, the correlation did not hold for physics, where ArXiv is well established. They argue that this is because the ArXiv has become so successful in capturing and making persistently available a very high proportion of the output in the domains of high-energy physics and related fields, that academics trust it as their 'natural' repository for self-archived material. The main benefit of the baseline study for the Theses Alive project was the identification of willing academic departments willing to take part in pilot electronic theses projects.

TARDis aims to build a sustainable multidisciplinary institutional archive of e-prints to leverage the research created within Southampton University.  To ensure that the solutions they developed would be meaningful across the wide range of disciplines, they studied the publishing practices of academics at Southampton as reflected in departmental web sites, including links to abstracts and full text articles.  Academics need to provide information about their publications for many purposes, and this can be a burden; inputting data once and using it for multiple outputs would be a great benefit. The studies have been useful in understanding how academics manage their publications and how an e-print archive could deliver practical benefits within the university.

 

Protecting the rights of academic authors

The RoMEO project has provided valuable insights into the IPR issues of sharing resources in an open access environment.  At the start of the project, RoMEO assessed the needs of relevant stakeholders (academic authors, journal publishers, and OAI data and service providers), so these could be reflected in rights solutions developed later in the project.  The academic author survey set about to determine exactly how academics wanted to protect their own freely available research papers and use others’ freely available papers. 

The academic author survey met with an excellent response, with 542 authors completing the online questionnaire.  Respondents were from 57 countries with the largest group (one-third) based in the UK.  The data allowed for comparisons between self-archiving and non-archiving respondents (an almost equal number of each completed the survey), and between the protection required of academics-as-authors and academics-as-users of open-access research papers. These analyses are written up in RoMEO Studies 2 and 3.  In summary, over 60% of academics were happy for their works to be displayed, given away, printed out, excerpted from, and saved freely.  The majority wanted sales to be prohibited.  The only restrictions required were that all copies should be exact replicas of the original work, and 50-60% wanted them to be used for non-commercial purposes only.  The only condition demanded was that the author(s) should always be attributed as such.  See the RoMEO studies. All have subsequently been disseminated as published papers as well - see the  RoMEO synthesis page for details.

  • RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on academic self-archiving
  • RoMEO Studies 2: How academics wish to protect their open-access research paper
  • RoMEO Studies 3: How academics expect to use open-access research papers
  • RoMEO Studies 4: An analysis of Journal publishers’ Copyright Agreements
  • RoMEO Studies 5: IPR issues for OAI Data and Service Providers
  • RoMEO Studies 6: Rights metadata for open-archiving

Portal users

The PORTAL project explored issues around the development and use of portals in the education community. In the context of the JISC Information Environment, “an institutional portal provides a personalised, single point of access to the online resources that support members of an institution in all aspects of their learning, teaching, research and other activities.” The resources may be internal or external and include content, services, and collaborative tools.  Understanding user needs is key to ensuring a portal’s success – understanding who the users (stakeholders) will be, what they want to know/do, and how the portal should be ‘personalised’ to deliver it effectively. 

The PORTAL project undertook a wide range of studies to understand user needs. They are particularly significant as they surveyed requirements across UK educational institutions, building a national picture, and will therefore be valuable for any institution building a portal.  The studies involved consultation with over 600 stakeholders using a questionnaire, focus groups, and interviews. They confirmed that potential system users are keen to access the internal and external information resources and services described in the JISC definition. Though there are a number of similarities between the needs of staff and students - most notably perhaps the desire to access search facilities, alerting services and library administrative information, overall their needs are quite different.  The need for personalisation, perhaps initially based on user role, is clear. The studies and publications based on them are listed below.

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