John MacColl (SELLIC project, University of Edinburgh) has kindly given his permission for this edited version of his report on the OAi day to be circulated to the DNER list. The event will also be covered in the September edition of Ariadne (issue 29).
'Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives' Report of Meeting, Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London. 11 July 2001. The meeting was chaired by Sheila Corrall. The first presentation was given by Catherine Grout, Assistant Director (Collections) of the DNER, and essentially outlined the JISC/DNER perspective on the OA initiative, which is that open archiving provides a technology for cementing the DNER architecture. The DNER investment over the next few years will be primarily in middleware, fusion and infrastructure services. Her assumption seemed to be that content and presentation are already largely catered for (a view which was challenged later during the moderated discussion at the end of the day). JISC services supplying or facilitating access to content are the RDN and MIMAS, which are seeking to make their metadata OAi-compliant. JISC has also funded the eprints distribution work at Southampton, and is supporting the Open Citations project. Tools, guidelines, best practice case studies and pilot projects are all likely to be the sort of initiatives which JISC will wish to fund. JISC will be interested also in projects involving communities other than libraries. Michael Nelson, (NASA) gave an entertaining historical overview of the OAI in 'OAi past, present and future'. Distributed searching, the computing science 'hammer' to the 'interoperability nail' is hard to do. There were many attempts in the mid-90s, which failed. the OAI alternative, metadata harvesting, proposed instead by Van de Sompel (now the e-Director of the BL), Nelson, Lagoze and others, was also hard to do. Every archive had its own different format. The repositories which were included at the beginning included arXiv (physics), Cogprints (cognitive science), NDLTD (theses) and RePEc (economics). The OAi idea separates out data providers from service providers. Data providers must provide methods for metadata harvesting. The OAI is only about metadata not full-text. It is also neutral with respect to the source of the metadata. The protocol, launched in January/February of this year, has been frozen for 12-15 months to allow services to be built on a stable platform. Nelson also explained the difference between OAi and OAIS (Open Archival Information System), which is a developing standard for digital preservation. This has confused a lot of people. The protocol uses XML, which has lots of advantages (e.g. schemas to determine compliance). But it is unforgiving and a strong disciplinarian, in that it forces clean metadata. The OAi protocol is always a front-end for another dataset: it has no interface for record input or deletion. Eprints, for example, is an archiving system with the OAi protocol built in. The protocol also supports sets to partition archives, e.g. by discipline. Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, then gave a paper on 'The potential of institutional eprint archives'. OAi has widened from its original focus on eprints, and Harnad wanted to narrow the focus back to the original publication type (i.e. peer reviewed papers). He now calls this the 'Self-Archiving Initiative'. He was very much in favour of archiving at the institutional level rather than by discipline - he argued that the motivation to do this is institutional, since institutions lose when their own researchers work cannot be read by other researchers, because they are debarred from access due to high subscription costs. Harnad advocates that all research universities mandate a CV with all published papers linked to an institutional archive. There is therefore an explicit link there to RAE methodology, which could make the RAE redundant (the impact would be measured by continuous assessment.) Harnad has been trying to persuade a group of Provosts of elite US universities to do this. In the UK, the people we need to persuade are the Funding Councils, in order to change the methodology for research assessment. After lunch, Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at UCL, spoke on 'Why research libraries need open archives'. The cumulative increase in the RPI since 1986 is c. 50%; that in periodical prices is nearly 300% - while at the same time library funding in real terms has dropped by about 1% over the same period. The NESLI deals which have been brokered have proved difficult for CURL, since they have been based on traditional spend on print journals. This is effectively a tax on research. CURL wants to lobby for a general review of STM publishing by the Director of Fair Trading. CURL will produce advocacy packs for its member institutions for next academic session, to alert Principals and Vice-Chancellors of the problems. As Chair of the relevant CURL Task Force, Paul advocated the establishment of OAi servers in institutions though consortial or regional models may also be appropriate. Libraries should lead this. He asked about the costs of OAi, in terms of staffing, metadata and infrastructure. There is also the need to clarify the ownership of IPR. In the action plan he suggested, Glasgow, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Southampton and Strathclyde are all setting up archives: could JISC fund an evaluation of these? Can JISC funding also be provided to support the establishment of archives in all institutions? Charles Oppenheim mentioned in the Q&A that JISC is setting up an IPR committee under Brian Fender, and including Charles. This will address many of the issues which Paul had raised. The next paper was given by Chris Rusbridge and William Nixon of the University of Glasgow: 'Setting up an institutional eprints archive': what is involved? The Glasgow model is inclusive of all types of scholarly publication, including reports, conference papers, monographs and book chapters. They had hoped to invoke their archive in the current RAE, but could not get things established in time. They were explicit about long-term digital preservation not being part of the aim. The Glasgow server has only 15 papers at present. Some of the formats supported by the eprints software were questioned by Chris (Word and HTML, for example). Glasgow has added PDF and planning for XML. Being able to link in to the authentication structures of the institution (as in single sign-on) would be a good thing. Links to Reference Manager should be supported, and a better audit trail is required, as in submission date. He also asked whether any quality checking should happen. Chris Rusbridge spoke of his wish to set up an e-theses service at Glasgow, possibly using NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations). City University is so far the only UK university in membership of NDLTD. He said that NDLTD is likely to increase use of these by 400%, according to Virginia Tech figures. The final paper was by Rachel Heery: 'European support for Open Archive activity'. She introduced a new European project, the Open Archives Forum, an Accompanying Measure funded by the EC IST programme whose partners include Humboldt University and IEI-CNR in Pisa. Part of the EC motivation in funding this is to release the value of the invisible web (materials at a deep level not often picked up by search engines); and to act as a focus for dissemination, the collaborative development of software, and to help build a community of interest. This work is also exploring some of the relevant business models. It will also evaluate the OAi protocol technologies, comparing the protocol with HARVEST and Z39.50, for example, and asking the question whether DC is sufficiently rich as a metadata format. The day then concluded with an open discussion session, moderated by Jan Wilkinson, University Librarian at the University of Leeds. Gordon Dunsire made a plea for the initiative to cover all scholarly material. That point, however, had already been granted. There was a suggestion that an XML cleanser be provided to the community (to clean up bad xml in metadata records). Ronald Milne presented the case for disciplinary rather than institutional archives, echoing a point made earlier by Peter Brophy. This did not receive too much support, though the point was made that most papers these days are written by authors from several institutions. The JISC view on the day seemed to be that there wasn't a contradiction between the two approaches (the metadata could be produced on an institutional level, and another party might produce a discipline based view). Charles Oppenheim made the point that institutional frameworks can help junior researchers. John MacColl suggested that JISC should fund a pilot study in a small group of institutions to assess research impact, by requiring that researcher CVs are deposited online with links to papers in a local open archive, as Stevan Harnad had suggested in the morning session. This should also assist in the filling of archives. There was some support for this notion of a pilot initiative funded by JISC, from Paul Ayris. This connected with Catherine Grout's reminder that there is a research contract obliging this in the case of some research councils. Fred Friend also supported the notion of tackling the Funding Councils on this. Chris Rusbridge suggested that JISC may make such deposit a condition of any grant it awards. Thomas Krichel suggested the creation of a disciplinary archive in library and information science. Sheila Corrall concluded the meeting with a summing-up: funding from JISC to allow us to build on existing projects and to experiment; a side by side institutional/disciplinary approach, since the two are not mutually incompatible. She also suggested that JISC invite bids for imaginative suggestions for populating archives, of either type. They should put the funding up and invite us to bid imaginatively for it. ******************************************************* Philip Hunter, Information Officer at UKOLN, and Editor of Ariadne Magazine, UKOLN, c/o Library, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Tel: +44 (0) 1225 826 354 Fax: +44 (0) 1225 826838 email: [email protected] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/ *******************************************************
