As a first step towards providing a comprehensive picture of the available Reseach Information Management (RIM) infrastructure at UK HEIs, the RepNet has produced a map of the UK IR network. This first map shows the distribution of the most frequent repository platforms across the UK IR network. Besides providing the basis for displaying various IR-related information on top of it -such as SWORD endpoint availability, repository size or full-text rate- the IR map is just a first step towards delivering a picture of the whole RIM infrastructure at HEIs, covering the increasingly frequent IR-as-CRIS and CRIS-as-IR situations as well as CRIS/IR coexistence.

Besides filling in the RepNet survey at UKCoRR website, cooperation from the IR manager community by reporting potential mistakes or missing entries in the map at support@repositorynet.ac.uk is much appreciated.

“Open Access: What Future for Scientific Publishing? Strategies from Institutions, States and the European Union” is the title of the 5th Open Access Meeting to be held in Paris next Jan 24-25th by the French Couperin Consortium. Aiming to examine strategies for achieving a 100% deposit rate of research outputs into Open Access repositories, the event programme will feature presentations by Stevan Harnad, Michael Jubb, Alma Swan, Bernard Rentier and Jean-Claude Guédon among other high-profile Open Access advocates.

The RepNet will contribute a poster to the event describing its strategy for enhancing the Institutional Repository network in the UK as a means to promote a deeper Open Access adoption at HEIs.

An overview of the RepNet RJ Broker Delivery Service is provided by Muriel Mewissen, RJ Broker Project Manager at EDINA, addressing issues like required metadata for deposit, dealing with embargoes or deposit tracking. Building on the RJB brainstorming session held last Jul at the OR2012 Conference in Edinburgh, the post describes the RJ Broker features and its evolution from its conception in Aug 2009 to the current trial stage.

Prospects are to deliver a first operative RJ Broker version in Spring 2013.

Registration is already open for the 2-day OpenAIRE workshop on interoperability between research infrastructures to be held in Portugal next Feb 7-8. The workshop will be hosted by the University of Minho as part of an umbrella Open Access Seminar with the MedOAnet conference. This will also serve to promote synergies between the projects.

The workshop goals are two-fold:

– Dissemination and awareness of OpenAIRE repository manager guidelines and upcoming OpenAIREplus data sources guidelines.

– A technical discussion about the challenges and approaches to interoperability faced by OpenAIRE. Selected data sources will be present and the focus on discussions will be on how to create links, the challenges involved and how to prioritize. Other topics of discussion will include metadata formats, usage statistics, unique IDs, input/output formats, interpretation of enhanced publications.

Having extensively contributed last year to the ‘Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability’ report released by COAR, the UK RepNet will take the chance to discuss its approach to repository interoperability with representatives from other projects and initiatives.

On the way to its imminent release as a demonstrator, the RepNet Repository Junction Broker is already undergoing some preliminary testing of its functionality for automated SWORD-mediated item transfer into Institutional Repositories. Ongoing tests result in RJ Broker fine-tuning and getting closer to live operation onto real repositories.

A recent post has recently been released by the RJ Broker Team at EDINA on the way the Broker deals with embargoes. This handshake feature will be critical at content transfer negotiation time with live IRs.

A guest blogpost on the evolution from ‘Gold vs Green’ to ‘Gold & Green’ has been published at the UKCoRR blog by the RepNet. From the presentations delivered by three IR managers at the RSP webinar held last Dec 4th on ‘The role of IRs after the Finch Report’, the post tries to tell whether considerations on the costs attached to the transition to a Gold OA publishing models may result in HEIs actually turning their eyes to Institutional Repositories when discussing compliance with funder Open Access policies.

A RepNet/RSP event on enriching Institutional Repositories and their metadata sets will be held in London next Jan 21st 2013. The workshop aims to gather the wide repository manager community in order to provide an introduction of the RepNet approach to adding value to IRs, to promote discussion on the best way to jointly implement new IR features and to collect feedback on this issue from IR managers.

Special emphasis will be made along the workshop on the RIOXX metadata enhancement initiative. RIOXX, whose application profile is currently being put together, aims to provide the repository network a standard for implementing enhanced metadata sets in a harmonised way. RepNet plans for providing automated metadata enhancement features will also be discussed in the session, which will include a presentation on CrossRef services for the purpose such as DOI lookup or FundRef.

A report on payment of Open Access (article) processing charges (APCs) was recently released by the Research Information Network (RIN) on behalf of the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG). The report explores the potential role of intermediaries for the implementation of more efficient open access payment processes among publishers and institutions in the post-Finch Open Access landscape.

The RepNet project, which released its “A Pedestrian View of the Roads to Open Access” discussion paper earlier this year, provided its own contribution to this APC report as part of its remit to envision potential future roles for Institutional Repositories in the management of research information.

The OpenAIRE End-of-Project Conference is held in Göttingen on Nov 20-22, 2012. The RepNet Project, which liaised with OpenAIRE earlier this year at the OR12 event in Edinburgh, will attend this Conference, where the transition to OpenAIRE+ will be staged.

The RepNet is contributing a 3-slide presentation on the current state of Open Access in the UK on behalf of the OpenAIRE UK National Open Access Desk (NOAD) at CRC-Nottingham.

Two RepNet presentations were delivered at the UKCoRR Membership Meeting held last Friday Nov 9th at Teesside University. This first one, delivered by Andrew Dorward, provided an overview of the RepNet project history and current state, while a second one on the RepNet use cases for delivering new repository services was provided by Pablo de Castro. The event offered the RepNet a very value opportunity to directly engage with the IR manager community and collect their feedback on the project and its suggested future worklines.

Videos of both presentations are available here.

An additional IRUS-UK presentation, “Making scholarly statistics count in UK repositories”, was delivered by Ross McIntyre (MIMAS) as part of the RepNet-related updates.