Monday, March 15, 2010

Trinity College Dublin to act as liaison for Ireland on pan-European Open Access project


TCD is the Irish liaison institution for a three year project to make research outputs generated under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, Open Access via the national institutional repository infrastructure. The project involves 38 partners from 27 European countries including stakeholders from academic publishing, SPARC Europe and LIBER


OpenAIRE will support the Open Access pilot established by the European Commission under FP7 requiring researchers in 7 thematic areas (Health, Energy, Environment, Information & Communication Technology, Research Infrastructures, Socio-economic sciences & Humanities and Science in Society) to deposit their research publications in an institutional or disciplinary Open Access repository. 

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Major upgrade to Trinity's Access to Research Archive

Trinity College Dublin’s institutional repository TARA has undergone a major upgrade to its DSpace platform. The architecture underpinning the digital collections in TARA has been transformed allowing new opportunities to enhance existing service interoperability, collection management and resource dissemination and discovery.

The collections hosted by TARA currently comprise of four strands:

  •  Research Publications
  •   E-Theses
  • Electronic Journals
  • Digital Images
The upgrade incorporated full data migration of over 10,000 items as well as replicating the separate submission workflows and metadata associated with the collection strands.

Unlike most institutional repositories TARA is fully integrated with Trinity’s Current Research Information System (CRIS) known locally as the Research Support System. Research outputs and associated metadata get passed directly into the repository from the RSS which acts as the primary point of ingest into TARA. Any edits to publication data in the RSS have to allow these changes to propagate across to any associated record in TARA. The links to open access copy hosted by TARA pass back to the RSS populating the research web pages of individual researchers and faculties and schools in the University.

The upgrade affords a number of key enhancements to TARA’s service domain which we will roll out over the coming months. These will include:

·         An enhanced statistics package
·         The ability to embargo items to comply with publisher policies regarding when copy can be made open access
·          A copy request button for items where open access dissemination is prohibited
·         A complete redesign of how content is presented in www.tara.tcd.ie

Thanks to Stuart Lewis and the DuraSpace development team; Enovation Solutions and TCD IS Services