Thursday 3 December 2009

Inaugural White Rose Research Support Forum!

Library staff from Leeds, Sheffield and York met in Leeds on the 27th Nov to discuss how we provide research support for researchers at out institutions. Attendees indicated they were particularly keen to learn more about bibliometrics - and a presentation on this topic plus a hands-on exercise provided a key part of the day. We considered the implications of the Research Excellence Framework and other recent developments and drivers such as the Research Councils' Outputs and Outcomes Collection (the OOCS project). Deposit of research papers into our consortial open access repository, White Rose Research Online, was discussed. We also looked at the emerging digital curation landscape which will be needed to manage a whole range of research outputs including datasets and audio-visual materials.

The presentations from this varied and interesting day are available online from the White Rose Research Support Forum site. We hope this will not be a one-off event; the White Rose Advocacy Group and Steering Group are considering when and where to organise a follow up. This forum is valuable for sharing ideas and good practice across the three library services but also for meeting other university colleagues directly involved in research or research support.

Monday 2 November 2009

RSP Competition for Open Access week


Open access week has become an annual, international event - http://www.openaccessweek.org/. The event - or rather, a series of events, announcements, competitions etc. - aims to highlight the importance of open access to research outputs and increase awareness and understanding of the value of open access to the academic community and beyond.

The Repositores Support Project invited all UK repositories to tally how many full text, open access papers were added during open access week. White Rose Research Online - specifically, the Sheffield section of White Rose Research Online - were the winning service. We uploaded a variety of full text journal papers and a series of Working Papers from the Department of Economics.



Access statistics from Google Analytics for the five days of open access week (Oct 19th - Oct 23rd) show 3,492 visitors from 103 countries and territories. Top keyword search for the week was "climate change".

Don't miss out! Ensure your research is uploaded to your prize-winning local repository.

Monday 5 October 2009

Improvements to import using DOI

Eprints has an import via DOI plugin. This import can be used to create single records - or multiple DOIs can be included and imported. The data is imported into the repository from the CrossRef service.

Once logged in to WRRO, go to the Manage Deposits screen, and click on the Import Items button. Then enter your DOIs as below, ensuring you have selected DOI (via Cross Ref) as your import format.



Until recently, for multi-author works, only the name of the first author was imported into the repository. However, functionality has recently improved and all authors are now being imported - which makes using DOI a much more attractive import option. It's still not perfect because the formatting of the author names is quite varied (some are all upper case, others not, some have expanded forenames, others have initials). This simply reflects the variation in data supplied by the journal publishers. The main bit of information still missing from the import is full pagination: generally you get the article start page but not the end page. Can save quite a bit of time - particularly if importing several records.

Tuesday 18 August 2009

Symplectic - Eprints link testing underway

The University of Leeds purchased the Symplectic Publiction Management System last year; it has been live at the University since Oct 2008. The University Library is currently working with developers at Symplectic to put in place an effective link between the University of Leeds' Symplectic installation (sometimes known as TULIP but most people at Leeds simply refer to 'Symplectic' or 'the publications database') and White Rose Research Online. Once the link is in place, it is envisaged that the main - probably exclusive - route for Leeds' White Rose content will be Symplectic. Symplectic regularly searches for new publications by Leeds authors and sends an email alert to them when something new has been harvested. It is straightforward for the author (or someone designated to work on their behalf) to click on a button to accept or reject the publication. Once the EPrints Symplectic link is in place, it will also be straightforward to upload the full text of the work at the same time. It is also possible to add new publications to the Symplectic system manually - clearly, not all publications are indexed in the searched sources (currently Web of Science and PubMed). Again, depositors will be able to upload the full text of their work at the same time as the entry is created in Symplectic.

Once the work is deposited, it will automatically enter the White Rose Research Online workflow, where the attached file's copyright status will be checked. White Rose will supply a White Rose Research Online URL for the work which will be included in the Symplectic record. Some departments use the Symplectic data to produce publication lists for their web pages; once the EPrints Symplectic link is established, these pages will include a link to the open access text within White Rose Research Online.
Publish Post

If testing goes to plan, we hope that the link will be implemented in late September 2009. One step further to creating and depositing items once for multiple purposes!

I'm very interested to discuss developments with anyone interested in repository/research systems links - especially if you use EPrints and/or Symplectic (Rachel Proudfoot eprints@whiterose.ac.uk).

Thursday 30 July 2009

York RAE data import well underway

We have imported all publication data submitted for York's RAE 2008 entry into WRRO. The emphasis for WRRO continues to be full text works rather than bibliographic data. However, it seemed a shame not to reutilise a ready source of bibliographic data. We have enhanced the entries with full author data and added abstracts where possible. It's hoped this content will encourage authors to populate bibliographic only entries with full-text, where possible. It's also hoped that the data will be used within York central research management systems. York's publications are online here: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/view/iau/York.html