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.

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.

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).

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

ArXiv Plugin

We have developed an Eprints ArXiv import plugin based on the PubMedID and PubMedXML plugins. This plugin imports the following metadata from ArXiv: item type, article title, abstract, authors’ names, journal title, volume, issue, page number(s), date and DOI. Furthermore it also extracts links to the full text PDF and the ArXiv abstract page (entered in the Official links field). The data is pulled from ArXiv using the ArXiv API.

How does it work?
Initially the author/article needs to be identified uniquely using the arXiv ID. The arXiv API (http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?id_list=arxiv_id) is used to retrieve an XML file containing all the metadata associated with that ID number. This is done with ArXivID.pm and the retrieved XML file is parsed with ArXivXML.pm. The most difficult aspect of the writing this plugin was parsing the “journal_ref” field from the arXiv xml file. This is because it is a free text field containing the journal reference information which is not in a consistent format. To overcome this we installed Biblio::Citation::Parser::Jiao, which extracts the journal title, volume number, issue number, date and the ISSN from a given journal reference. Biblio::Citation::Parser::Jiao can also be installed from CPAN.


PubMed Bug Fix
The PubMedID import plugin was designed for importing multiple IDs however this did not appear to be working and only one item could be imported at a time. This was due to a bug in the code which did not remove the html encoded end of line characters. After removing the end of line characters, the PubMed import plugin works well and can import multiple IDs either from a file or from the text box.

WRRO Upgrade Complete

White Rose Research Online and its sister repository White Rose Etheses Online are now running on EPrints 3.1.1. This upgrade offers some useful new "back end" functions which will improve management of material being deposited and material already in the repositories. We hope to complement the upgrade with the introduction of improved statistical tools. Watch this space.

New IncReASe website launched today

We've just launched the redesigned IncReASe website at: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/increase/

The aim of the redesign was to improve the navigation so that it's easier to find your way through the outputs from the project. Hopefully it also looks nicer too! There's some new information available about the different strands of the project. More will be added in the next few weeks, so please do check back if you're interested. There will also be more outputs added, including interview summaries and the questionnaire report.