On Apr 1st the RCUK Open Access policy comes into effect. This policy, which does express a preference for Gold without ruling out Green Open Access, should have a large impact in widening the Open Access availability of peer-reviewed research papers. In order to verify this, an evidence-based policy effectiveness assessment will be held in 2014. In the meantime, HEIs are figuring out the most appropriate advocacy and monitoring strategies for ensuring RCUK policy cross-disciplinary implementation.

The RCUK Open Access policy document states that “The RCUK OA Block Grant is principally to support the payment of APCs. However, Research Organisations have the flexibility to use the block grant in the manner they consider will best deliver the RCUK Policy on Open Access, as long as the primary purpose to support the payment of APCs is fulfilled”.

Once preliminary assessment was carried out by specific HEI on their yearly publication tion figures and the amount of funding required for making them available via Gold Open Access, results showed a need to reinforce Green Open Access and institutional repositories in order to provide mechanisms for policy compliance to all researchers and research departments. HEIs are subsequently investing part of the Block Grant funding in delivering enhancements to their repository infrastructure as well as in research information workflow implementation that will enable the required reporting requirements to be met.

The RepNet Project will provide its full support to institutional repository enhancement by gradually rolling out new functionality -such as IRUS-UK, the RJ Broker and beyond- that may contribute to a more effective RCUK Open Access policy implementation and monitoring at HEIs.

The Repository Junction Broker is a middleware tool to automate delivery of research output from different data suppliers – mainly publishers and subject repositories – to multiple repositories. The RJ Broker is currently undergoing extensive testing with the main repository platforms before becoming a service.

Among the first set of RJ Broker tests, 60,000 Europe PubMed Central articles were successfully trasferred last week into a test EPrints platform at EDINA during a 3-day process. This amounts to nearly a month’s feed into Europe PMC by publishers and researchers.

The target EPrints test repository was configured to show the input distribution by repository into which the content would be distributed were this a live service. See below the number of articles that would be transferred into different repositories – covering exemplars across the whole world.

Save for quite specific deposit processes such as the DepositMO Project or BioMed Central automatic article deposit, so far there were no general-purpose tools for automated ‘random’ content delivery into IRs. Subsequently the urge to identify publications in order to avoid the ingest of duplicated publications was not felt in Repositoryland. The Repository Junction Broker (RJB) will eventually change this by delivering content from various sources (such as publishers or subject repositories) into IRs. And de-dup at entry level will quickly become an issue.

The RJB as a tool for automated SWORD-mediated item ingest into IRs has only undergone preliminary testing so far with internal test DSpace, EPrints and Fedora repositories at EDINA. However, plans for testing actual content transfers to IRs at partner institutions are already being rolled out – with the de-dup issue rapidly becoming a critical challenge. There are basically two ways of dealing with it: the first one is having the RJB leave the content at the IR’s front door for the IR manager to check whether the item was already filed into the IR (this is default procedure for RJB). The other one would be to use some kind of article identifier to detect potential duplicates. But this is a hard one, of course: most content sources tend to use their own internal identifiers and although there are wide-scope identifiers such as the Scopus# or the WoK#, these are not used widely enough to be any real help. At best you can get PubMed IDs (which is not bad if only IR managers usually collected these as part of the relevant metadata, regrettably not the case for most) or DOIs. But even then we’re only talking partial IR content coverage.

In the same way as ORCID is a potential solution for author ID purposes we do probably need a similar progress in terms of document identification, de-dup strategies and metadata enhancement at IRs.

‘Engage with SWORD to allow deposit transactions’ RSP webinar was delivered last Friday by Stuart Lewis, Head of the University of Edinburgh Digital Library, and Richard Jones, Cottage Labs Senior Partner. The presentations included an introduction to the SWORD AtomPub-based protocol and its applications to content deposit into repository-like platforms. The protocol evolution till current version 2.0 was also explained.

A specific mention was made during the session to the Repository Junction Broker as one of the most prominent examples for SWORD-based content transfer into repositories. The RJ Broker is currently under test at EDINA before its release to the RepNet at the end of the month. Present RJB tests involve delivery of NPG and Europe PMC research articles into a set of selected target institutional repositories.

On Mar 1st Donna Cruickshank joined the RepNet Team as new Project/Service Manager. Donna is a senior Project Manager in IT application environments at the University of Edinburgh, and will contribute her expertise to ensure the RepNet completes the testing and delivery of the planned services in the remaining months until the project reaches its end-date next July.

Donna will also work on the analysis of requirements for RepNet’s future transition into a service ensuring all project components are appropriately made available in a sustainable way.

A first meeting was held last week as part of the RepNet’s stakeholder engagement strand for testing the institutional repository enhancements discussed last January 21st at the joint RepNet/RSP workshop in London. The meeting took place at the University of St Andrews Library and gathered U of St Andrews CRIS/IR staff, an SDLC representative and the RepNet. Discussions were held on a previously drafted checklist of technical enhancements and how these could be implemented on the specific system configuration run at U of St Andrews.

The RepNet is at the same time working on the collection of CRIS/IR use cases at UK HEIs. This joint work for a specific CRIS+IR use case at U of St Andrews will provide useful input on how required platform enhancements such as RIOXX implementation, IRUS-UK adoption or SWORD endpoint customisation can be dealt with for different system configurations.

A post was recently released at the Repositories Support Project (RSP) blog summarizing the joint RepNet/RSP “Supporting and enhancing your repository” workshop held in London last Mon Jan 16th. The post described the findings collected from the four breakout sessions held during the event – covering the four main areas (Reporting and benchmarking, Deposit, Metadata Enhancement and Repository platforms) that were identified as critical for IR network enhancement purposes.

The release of the draft RIOXX metadata application profile was announced during this event at the BSC, together with the available and upcoming CrossRef tools for automatically implementing such enhanced metadata standard into IRs.

A wealth of repository-related projects will be represented at the Open Access Seminar to be held next week at Universidade do Minho in Braga, Portugal, with an emphasis on interoperability and connecting institutional repositories to research data management. An OpenAIRE wokshop on interoperability where the CRIS/IR integration will have a central role, plus the release of the ‘OpenAIRE Guidelines for Data Archive Managers’ and presentations by projects such as Jisc-funded PRIME or PREPARDE plus MedOANet and OpenAIREplus will add to a speech on Open Science by University of Edinburgh VP Geoffrey Boulton to make this a very useful event to see the different work strands gradually coming together.

Prior to this Seminar, a CERIF Task Group meeting will take place at the same venue earlier next week where relevant issues for the RepNet Project will also be discussed.

Two events will be held next week, weather permitting, where the audience will be offered the opportunity to learn more about the RepNet Project: The joint RepNet/RSP ‘Supporting and Enhancing your Repository’ Workshop in London on Mon Jan 21st and the 5th Couperin Open Access Conference in Paris on Jan 24-25th. Besides the project presentations to be delivered in London by Andrew Dorward, RepNet Business Manager, and Pablo de Castro, RepNet Consultant, a brand new project poster will be displayed at both events (thanks to Jackie Clark, EDINA Graphic Designer).

Event twitter coverage will also be provided by the RepNet from London and Paris – stay tuned to @UKRepNet.

The first RepNet User Group meeting will be held tomorrow Jan 16th at EDINA in Edinburgh. This User Group is composed of IR managers from different institutions who engaged with the RepNet for providing their direct feedback on new repository features and tools designed by the project. HEIs represented in the RepNet User Group include University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow, UCL, Cranfield University, Leeds Metropolitan University, University of Cambridge and University of Warwick.

The all-morning meeting will provide an overview of the current project state and worklines, plus an insight on new repository features and services under consideration. The meeting will also host a first presentation of the LOCKSS disaster recovery service the RepNet is examining as a potential candidate for its service catalogue.