A new RepNet project website is to be released mid-July following the collection of up-to-date contents as the projects nears its nominal end date later this month. Together with links and descriptions for the repository services offered under the RepNet umbrella, the new RepNet site –on which you should probably be reading this very text– provides an insight of the intertwined project work strands in repository service provision – namely repository aggregation, benchmarking, registries and continuity of access, plus repository content deposit, discoverability and metadata enhancement.

The new site provides a collection of the different features the RepNet has produced along its extensive outreach and stakeholder engagement activity – including the RepNet survey for IR managers and an analysis of its results, the RepNet maps describing various aspects of the research information management system configuration at UK HEIs and the RepNet factsheets for repository service implementation. A specific chapter in this section is devoted to the STARS joint venture in which the U of ST Andrews, the RepNet and the Scottish Digital Library Consortim (SDLC) have been jointly working in order to test repository service provision for a single institution running a specific CRIS+IR system configuration.

Additional information on the RepNet activities and follow-up will shortly be delivered at the Repository Fringe 2013 to be held in Edinburgh from Jul 31st to Aug 2nd.

As part of the preliminary work for rolling out the Repository Junction Broker service for automated delivery of EuropePMC articles to the UK repository network, the RJB Team at EDINA is now carrying out transfer tests on live EPrints- and DSpace-based institutional repositories (with Fedora-based IRs shortly to follow). This preliminary testing stage has already resulted in a successful 103-strong EuropePMC article delivery into a test instance of the Spiral repository at Imperial College.

Following regular RJB operation, the agreed set of EuropePMC articles have been left at the repository main entrance for the IR manager to decide whether they should be ingested. Once the automated RJB-mediated transfer has proved successful, subsequent testing stages are now dealing with metadata quality fine-tuning and identifying optimal ways to tell what subset of the transferred contents is new and therefore eligible for final ingest into the IR.

The RepNet was recently attending the SyRTUG (for Symplectic) and the Pure UK User Group meetings in Leeds and Dundee – thanks to Nick Sheppard, Leeds Met U, and Yvonne Fox, U of Lancaster, Symplectic and Pure UG coordinators, for kindly inviting us to be there. The RepNet delivered a presentation at both venues emphasizing the presently highly fragmented CRIS/IR landscape – with few research-intensive universities relying anymore on repository-only solutions for managing their research information needs – and the need for RepNet services such as the RJ Broker to serve the rapidly evolving range of system configurations running at institutions. Although the RJ Broker was originally conceived to deal with automated content transfers into IRs, the picture now is such that some mechanism needs to be found for talking to CRISes such as Pure or Symplectic too.

The chance to listen to additional discussions on issues such as REF reporting, Snowball metrics or ORCID implementation was also very useful for figuring out relevant activity timeschedules and opportunities for synergy with the different RepNet worklines for providing repository services.

Monday and Tuesday the RepNet has been attending the Spring 2013 euroCRIS member meeting at the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Bonn, Germany. Together with a reduced British contingent including Anna Clements from U of St Andrews and Rosemary Russell and Brigitte Joerg from UKOLN-University of Bath (plus of course Keith Jeffery), the RepNet has taken the opportunity to catch up with recent progress in CERIF-based CRIS development and implementation.

The release of the DSpace-based SURPlus open source CRIS developed by the Italian CINECA Consortium was one of the event highlights in this regard.

CRIS vendors such as Atira (for PURE) and Avedas (for Converis) are a key stakeholders for a comprehensive implementation of several RepNet components like IRUS-UK or the RJ Broker, which although initially built with institutional repositories in mind, must now often serve mixed CRIS/IR systems at a growing number of UK HEIs.

A short two-paragraph piece on the UK RepositoryNet+ project is featured in the ‘Reports from the Regions’ section of the recently released COAR Newsletter No. 6 (May 2013). The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) is an international association of repository initiatives launched October 2009 and representing 90 institutions worldwide – EDINA National Data Centre amongst them.

This brief post on the RepNet arrives shortly before a project presentation is delivered at the 4th COAR Annual Meeting to be held next week in Istanbul (May 7-8).

“The PI Warrior and the Bag of Gold: Open Access Metadata and University Accounting Practice” is the title of the inaugural post recently released by Peter Burnhill, UK RepositoryNet+ Project Director at EDINA, at the new Gold Open Access Infrastructure blog. The post builds on the previously released RepNet discussion paper “A pedestrian view of the roads to Open Access” in proposing a mechanism to institutionally deal with [Gold] Open Access payments via the systematic use of Purchase Orders and to link the metadata filled into these POs to the institutional research information system (either a CRIS or a repository) from the very moment a research article is accepted (to later becoming completed once the publisher releases the DOI and the citation details for the work).

The Warrior PI post also builds on the earlier SONEX Work Group default use case for research work authorship: the multi-authored, multi-institutional output. This use case poses additional requirements on the information workflow for the accepted article metadata which may now start to be tested as a proof of concept.

Besides the intense and inspiring debate on whether Gold OA may or may not be the most appropriate way for realising Open Access that the default Finch, RCUK and BIS support to Gold Open Access has sparked, it is indisputable that it has also enormously raised the profile of Open Access at institutions (some of whose scholars are now suddenly becoming aware of their institutional repositories) and is enabling a pioneering discussion to take place in the domain of research information workflows and processes.

Muriel Mewissen of EDINA will be presenting the RepNet R-J Broker service enabling automatic deposit of research articles from publisher and subject repositories into relevant institutional repositories. Muriel will be discussing recent tests carried out with Europe PMC where the RJ Broker mediated deposit of over 60,000 articles to IRs worldwide. The webinar will take place at 15.00 GMT on Wednesday 29th May – to register, go to http://rsp.ac.uk/events/the-repository-junction-broker-a-tool-to-automate-delivery-of-research-output-to-institutional-repositories/

Following the start of the joint venture it is carrying out together with the University of St Andrews and the Scottish Digital Library Consortium (SDLC), RepNet has recently been invited to deliver a guest talk at the PURE UK User Group meeting to be held next month at the University of Dundee. This presentation will make emphasis on the fact that additional HEIs might benefit from a similar work programme for enhancing their research information management (RIM) system functionalities, with or without direct RepNet involvement in such activity.

A meeting was held last week at EDINA with the Open Access Working Group coordination within the PURE UK UG in order to set up the guidelines for RepNet’s presentation. A preliminary survey has been set up in the meantime for any PURE UK UG member institution willing to provide their input prior to the UG meeting in terms of interest and/or readiness for RIM system enhancement.

The second meeting for the U of St Andrews/RepNet/SDLC (STARS) inititive was held last week at EDINA. The STARS joint venture aims to enhance the U of St Andrews’s institutional research information management systems (PURE CRIS + Research@StAndrews:Full Text Institutional Repository) following the RepNet worklines for improving IR functionality in order to allow them to play a key role in Open Access tracking and reporting tasks at HEIs. These worklines include IRUS-UK implementation, SWORD endpoint implementation and RJ Broker testing, RIOXX early adoption, OpenAIRE compliance, testing mechanisms for monitoring mandate compliance and eventually ORCID implementation.

The first STARS joint venture meeting was held at the U of St Andrews Library on Feb 14th and the initiative will run until Jul 31st, which is the nominal RepNet end-date in its current project stage.

As part of the joint venture tasks, the Research@StAndrews:Full Text IR has already started collecting its COUNTER-compliant usage stats after becoming IRUS compliant via the Scottish Digital Library Consortium (SDLC).

A UKRepNet Project presentation will be delivered at the 4th Annual Meeting of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). The 2013 COAR Annual Meeting will be held next May 7-8 at the Özyeğin University Library in İstanbul, Turkey with a focus on repository interoperability. The UKRepNet presentation aims to raise the profile of the Green Open Access initiatives being carried out in the UK and to explain the specific actions the project is taking in order to enhance the UK IR network.

Aware that institutional repositories are gradually becoming embedded in larger institutional RIM systems, the UKRepNet presentation will reflect on the way these new services should jointly be delivered by IRs and CRIS systems. The work RepNet is carrying out in cooperation with partner institutional stakeholders in this regard will also be presented, together with its goal for delivering best practices on how to serve different institutional system configurations.