DCAT Meeting January 2018

• How are you using DSpace? What are you using it for? What is the role of your IR? What is the role of DSpace?
• How are you using DSpace alongside, or with, other tools, digital asset management systems, research information management systems, etc.?

• How is DSpace used as part of a broader set of offerings (e.g. Open Journal Systems for publishing, Spotlight for exhibits, Fedora/Samvera for digital collections, etc.)
• How do your different platforms interoperate?

Preparing for the call

Meeting notes

Topic:  How do IR’s fit in with the scholarly communication ecosphere?

Q. Are there items in one platform owned by an institution that are also in another platform in an institution?

A.  Most institutions don’t duplicate internally; might duplicate in external systems like Hathi trust. 

Discussions in some institutions re: whether IRs should duplicate content from commercial publishers, or other repositories.  “Why should we spend resources to add it when it’s already available?”    

• In order to for this model to work, universities need guarantees from content owners that content will be made available in the long term.  
  • What does the university do to guarantee access if the resource is purchased by a commercial entity?  (SSRN, for example) 
  • Some contracts with aggregators give the university the content that they are licensing, but the university then has to provide a platform to make the content available if the original access is cut off. 

At Georgetown, many faculty are in the humanities and don’t publish articles; instead, they publish books and book chapters that might not be allowed to be shared in the IR.  Instead, Georgetown has had success in adding university publications--grey literature, departmental publications, etc.--to their IR. 

The original ideal of IRs was that they would contain all of the publications of the university community, especially articles.

• In practice, most IRs don’t fully reflect the publications of the university community because of the reality of getting materials from faculty, and providing resources (programming, staffing, etc.) to make it as easy as possible to add items to the IR. 
• Some universities are pursuing metadata in order to reflect the full publication output of the university, with full text added whenever possible.
• Some institutions are having good luck adding work from Institutes, etc. 

At one institution, Elements has tie-in with SHERPA/RoMEO to indicate publisher policy.  – The faculty member can then upload the item through Elements for the repository; ETDs are half of the collection at that university.

Journals – Some universities publishing journals through OJS, some DSpace, and others use both.  Some universities have had journal content shift from one platform to another (i.e. DSpace to OJS), with the result that journal content is found in both platforms (not usually overlapping). 

Q.  Are there connectors between OJS and DSpace content? 
A.  No one on the call is using these.  

Currently, DSpace lacks some functionality to really excel in the Scholarly Communication sphere:  Author profiles, splashy statistics, and integration with some other systems is limited unless custom programming is done. 

Q. Is there a pressure from faculty to make IR like ResearchGate—easy to use, lovely graphics?

A.  Yes, faculty would like easier deposits, author profiles, statistics, etc.    

• To compensate, some institutions provide services to deposit on the faculty member’s behalf.  
• Some institutions use DSpace content to populate faculty profiles hosted elsewhere on the university’s web space.   
• Sometimes faculty want very specific customizations to DSpace that can’t be done because of resources.  They are usually understanding when they are told the reasons for not customizing (resources to do custom programming, difficulty when moving to a new version of the software, etc.)
• Stress that IRs can offer preservation, visibility, and access to readers that might not have bandwidth or latest technology.  

University of Toronto using APIs for UnPaywall and Open Access Button that allow them to write scripts to locate more accepted manuscripts.

Q.  Does anyone have DSpace journals in DOAJ?

A.  Yes, two institutions on the call have this.   The complication is how to export and upload article-level metadata.  It can be entered manually, one article at a time, but that may not be practical for all journals.

Q. How do people work with indexers such as Crossref, DOAJ, etc.?

A. OAI-PMH

• One institution has written customizations for DPLA, Catholic Finding Aid consortium, WorldCat, etc.

In the future, one institution is starting to develop ways that Elements can use the repository as a data source

At the University of Kansas, as part of the annual evaluation cycle, faculty enter citations and other professional information into Digital Measures (referred to locally as the PRO (Professional Record Online) system.)  Each year, IR managers receive a spreadsheet from PRO containing all of the journal citations so that they can be analyzed for possible inclusion in our DSpace repository.  Process includes scripts to eliminate duplicates (faculty will often publish with each other, and each adds the citation to their PRO record, to retrieve metadata for those articles with DOIs from CrossRef, to add SHERPA/RoMEO information, and to check articles with DOIs to see if they are already present in the IR.  Once this process is complete, articles for which the published version is allowed to be shared are deposited manually in the IR. 

Q. Are institutions going to move to not depositing articles in the future because they may be available elsewhere?

A. This is being discussed in many institutions, but no institutions on the call have stopped depositing articles as a result of these discussions. 

Q.  What percentage of items in the repository are published elsewhere?  Published versions of articles may be a relatively small part of the total.  So much of content is archival, departmental publications, journals, and accepted manuscripts (so it’s a different thing from the published version already).

Q.  Is anyone having discussions about retention schedules—removing old materials from the IR?

A.  Most institutions don’t have a collection development policy for IR—“once it’s in there, it’s in there” 

• Older materials that are not often used may become valuable resources if they can answer a new research question in the future.  
• Can be more resource intensive to weed than to continue to manage older materials already in the repository.\

Wrap up:  Do you have ideas about where we might want to take this?   Information for a future call? 

• The call participants were interested in follow-up re: the University of Toronto’s scripts used with UnPaywall and Open Access Button to find OA versions of articles.

Call Attendees

• Maureen Walsh (Ohio State University)
• David Corbly (University of Oklahoma)
• Marianne Reed (University of Kansas)
• Claudio Cortese (4Science)
• Mariya Maistrovskaya (University of Toronto)
• Suzanne Chase (Georgetown University)
• Anne Lawrence (Virginia Tech)
• Felicity Dykas (University of Missouri)
• Gail McMillan (Virginia Tech)
• Terrence W Brady (Georgetown University)