Post pdfs of publications

back up to User Stories: Defining features and functionality VIVO needs - September 2011

User types involved

• Faculty user type
• Researcher user type

Narrative User Story (for sharing/review/voting)

to be written

Background

There are a number of reasons to post PDFs or links to PDFs of publications, reasons which apply to a range of end users types:

1. Access for all – As we all know from the open access movement, only a portion of would be readers of scholarly papers has access to such papers.
2. More seamless access for others (and the researcher!) – Other groups of people have access but decide for whatever reason (e.g., lack of computer savviness, time pressure) not to track down a paper. Researchers often have trouble finding their own papers.
3. Promotion of researchers' work – The more easily accessible a full text article is the more that work will be cited in the literature and the popular press.

One of the opportunities for education/marketing is that, with the exception of certain fields such as physics, there is limited knowledge or interest in publishing preprints.

Wish list for improvement

• Authenticated users can log in to their profile and then:
  • associate a given publication object (e.g., presentation, journal article, etc.) with a given submission to an institutional repository, or other third-party site (e.g. Nature Precedings, Faculty of 1000, etc.)
  • before submission is accepted, user is prompted to verify (and maybe re-authenticate) that submitted and posting the document publicly is not a violation of copyright law, which states X.
  • submit PDFs to an institutional repository and have it linked to from their VIVO profile; an alternative would be for VIVO to host these documents
  • the relevant icon (e.g. PDF, PowerPoint, etc.) will be displayed next to the publication object
• Administrators can activate a feature which populates journal articles with a link to an openURL resolver

Technical considerations

Options:

1. Hosted solution - users upload PDFs to their respective VIVO instance.
2. Point to a defined third-party hosted solutions such as e-Commons. In this case, it might be worthwhile to allow users to upload pre-prints of their publications or presentations into e-Commons (or other DSpace, Fedora Commons, etc. instance) from VIVO.
3. OpenURL resolver - an outgoing link is created from the metadata

Priority or staging considerations

There is a longstanding issue (NIHVIVO-1227) to extend file management/upload capability to support CV and other document upload.

Given that most universities now have institutional repositories, it's not clear why publications would need to be stored in VIVO itself; an improved linking capability as described above probably makes more sense.

It would also be useful to discuss whether it's more useful for researchers to be able to store a pre-formatted CV on VIVO or to generate that CV from VIVO – so far sentiment seems to be for the latter.