Paving the way to an open scientific information space: OpenAIREplus – linking peer-reviewed literature to associated data

OpenAIREplus (2^nd Generation of Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) was launched in Pisa in early December. The 30 month project, funded by the EC 7^th Framework Programme, will work in tandem with OpenAIRE, extending the mission further to facilitate access to the entire Open Access scientific production of the European Research Area, providing cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes.  This large-scale project brings together 41 pan-European partners, including three cross-disciplinary research communities.

The project will capitalise on the successful efforts of the OpenAIRE project which is rapidly moving from implementing the EU Open Access Pilot project into a service phase, enabling researchers to deposit their FP7 and ERA funded research publications into Open Access repositories. The current publication repository networks will be expanded to attract data providers from domain specific scientific areas. “The participatory design of OpenAIREplus will seamlessly guide the researcher to Open Access research data. The experienced consortium will pave the way to support the research work of European scientists and open up the road to multi-disciplinary science” says Dr. Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of OpenAIREplus and Director of Göttingen State and University Library, Germany.

Creating a robust, participatory service for the cross-linking of peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated datasets is the principal goal of OpenAIREplus.  As scholarly communication touches upon many disciplines, the project’s horizontal outreach will facilitate collaboration across data infrastructures, providing information to scientists, non-scientists as well as to providers of value-added services. The project will establish an e-Infrastructure to harvest, enrich and store the metadata of Open Access scientific datasets. Innovative underlying technical structures will be deployed to support the management of and inter-linking between associated scientific data.

Access to and deposit of linked publications via the OpenAIRE portal will be supported by a Help Desk, and OpenAIRE’s collaborative networking structure will be extended to promote the concept of open enhanced publications among user communities. Liaison offices in each of the project’s 31 European countries work to support the needs of researchers in Europe. The project will also actively leverage its international connections to contribute to common standards, data issues and interoperability on a global level.

Website: www.openaire.eu

'Shanghai Ranking' 2010: overview of methodology; Irish universities' scores

Due to the high volume of traffic following the release of the 2010 list, the website of the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2010 (Shanghai Ranking) is difficult to access at times. Data relating to the Irish universities featuring in this ranking and an overview of its methodology is provided here to provide easy access to those interested in these results. A few comments on the methodology and data sources are included...


See also:
Michaela Saisana / European Commission JRC Report (2008): Higher Education Rankings: Robustness Issues and Critical Assessment


Sample news stories:

Shanghai rankings rattle European universities

GLOBAL: US lead slips in world's top 100 universities

Our universities fail to make the world's top 200

IRELAND LAUNCHES NATIONAL PORTAL FOR OPEN ACCESS TO RESEARCH

IRELAND LAUNCHES NATIONAL PORTAL FOR OPEN ACCESS TO RESEARCH

RIAN - OPEN ACCESS TO IRISH PUBLISHED RESEARCH

Date of release 8 June, 2010

We are pleased to announce the launch of RIAN, Ireland’s new national portal for Open Access to Irish published research.

RIAN is the outcome of a project to build online open access to institutional repositories in all seven Irish universities and to harvest their content to the national portal.  RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research.

RIAN will act as a single point of access to national research output, and will initially contain content harvested from individual university institutional repositories and that of the Dublin Institute of Technology. The Portal will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new investment and high quality staff.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The project was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. The project, running from April 2007 to May 2010, was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

Benefits of RIAN to Irish authors:

    * Broadens worldwide access to material

    * Increases citations for research material

    * Makes easier access to material via search engines such as Google,    Google Scholar and Yahoo

    * Raises profile of Irish researchers internationally

Benefits to Irish institutions include:

    * Provides a showcase of the institution’s research output

    * Raises the profile of the institution’s research internationally through broader access and citations

    * Increases potential for collaboration and synthesis between Irish and international researchers

Support from Irish universities:

“The development of an institutional repository to demonstrate our research activity and achievement is a central element of Trinity’s research support infrastructure. TARA  will also play a vital role in communicating the strength of Irish research to a global audience, in attracting the highest quality of research to Ireland and in enabling valuable links with industrial partners.”

Dr. John Hegarty, Provost, Trinity College Dublin.

“UCD welcomes the development of global access to Irish university research outputs which will contribute to the social, economic and cultural objectives of a knowledge society."

Dr. Hugh Brady, President UCD

"It is in the national interest to extend access to Irish research output at institutional and sectoral level so as to maximise the long-term strategic impact and thereby help develop a knowledge society."

Professor Ferdinand Von Prondzynski, President, DCU

"The National Research Portal will increase the international profile of individual researchers and of Irish Universities and will thereby enhance the national research endeavour".

Professor Don Barry, President, University of Limerick.

“This initiative will provide a world-wide gateway to that research and build on our own institutional repository for publications.”

Professor John Hughes, President, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

“University College Cork’s institutional repository has the potential to transform the dissemination of our scholarly output and will be the point of access for these resources for future generations.”

Dr. Michael Murphy, President, University College Cork.

 “The project provides an international window on Irish Research output and NUI Galway is delighted to be part of this.”

Dr James J. Browne, Uachtarán – President, National University of Ireland, Galway

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. 

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. 

PEER Behavioural Research - Baseline report

The PEER Behavioural Research Team from Loughborough University (Department
of Information Science & LISU) has completed its behavioural baseline report,
which is based on an electronic survey of authors (and authors as users) with
more than 3000 European researchers and a series of focus groups covering the
Medical sciences; Social sciences, humanities & arts; Life sciences; and
Physical sciences & mathematics.
The objectives of the Behavioural Research within PEER are to:

-       Track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour in the
context of so called Green Open Access.
-       Understand the role repositories play for authors in the context of
journal publishing.
-       Understand the role repositories play for users in context of
accessing journal articles.


The baseline report outlines findings from the first phase of the research
and identifies the key themes to emerge. It also identifies priorities for
further analysis and future work. Some interesting points to emerge from the
first phase of research that may be of interest to a number of stakeholders
in the scholarly communication system include:

-       An individual’s attitude towards open access repositories may change
dependant on whether they are an author or a reader; readers being interested
in the quality of the articles but authors also focused on the reputation of
the repository itself
-       Reaching the target audience is the overwhelming motivation for
scholars to disseminate their research results and this strongly influences
their choice of journal and/or repository
-       Researchers in certain disciplines may lack confidence in making
preprints available, and to some extent this is not only a matter of
confidence in the quality of a text but also due to differences in work
organisation across research cultures (e.g. strong internal peer review of
manuscripts versus reliance on journals for peer review). Other factors are
likely to include career stage and centrality of research to the parent
discipline
-       Value-added services, such as download statistics and alert services,
would contribute to the perceived usefulness of repositories and could help
them gain popularity in what is an increasingly competitive information
landscape
-       Readers often need to go through a variety of processes to access all
the articles that they require and widespread open access may reduce the need
for this time consuming practice.

The full report is available from http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/

Science Foundation Ireland's Open Access mandate is now effective!

Science Foundation Ireland's Open Access mandate became effective from February 1st 2009.

The policy is clearly outlined on the SFI website under 'Grant policies'. The full text of the policy is available here.

It covers peer-reviewed papers, conference papers, reports, monographs and datasets and generally follows the EURAB recomendations.

Now all Irish funding councils but one have open access policies: the Higher Education Authority (HEA), the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Health Research Board (HRB)). The HRB has OA recommendations which are expected to become mandatory later this year. All of the others have Open Access mandates in line with the EURAB recommendations. Apparently discussions are underway in IRCHSS which is now the only Irish funding council without an open access policy.

Higher Education Authority adopts OA mandate

Following a public consultation earlier this year, Ireland's Higher Education Authority has adopted an Open Access mandate effective from June 30th 2008. The HEA is the second major Irish research funder to adopt an OA mandate - the first was IRCSET with an OA mandate effective from May 1st this year. Both mandates are 'in keeping with the recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) Policy in relation to scientific publication' and 'with the combined OECD Ministers’ Declaration entrusting the OECD to work towards commonly agreed Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding'.

Also in common with the IRCSET mandate, the HEA requires deposit in an open access repository (ideally an institutional repository) upon acceptance for publication; repositories should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to the full text paper to be applied as required - but open access to the fulltext paper must be available not later than six months after publication.

Further information will be available shortly from the HEA website. Meanwhile the fulltext of the HEA mandate is available below (with thanks to Dr Gemma Irvine, Manager, Research Programmes, HEA):

HIGHER EDUCATION AUTHORITY POLICY RELATING TO:

THE OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORY OF PUBLISHED RESEARCH

The Higher Education Authority (HEA) has established and will promote the following policy relating to the placement of research publications in Open Access repositories.

Where a research publication arises in whole or in part from HEA funded research (i.e. where one or other of the researchers concerned receives HEA funds in support of their endeavours), the following policy will be adhered to with effect from 30^th June 2008.

APPLICABLE TO HEA FUNDED RESEARCHERS

The HEA policy is adopted on the following key principles:

The intellectual effectiveness and progress of the widespread research community may be continually enhanced where the community has access and recourse to as wide a range of shared knowledge and findings as possible. This is particularly the case in the realm of publicly funded research where there is a need to ensure the advancement of scientific research and innovation in the interests of society and the economy, without unnecessary duplication of research effort.

1. This publication policy confirms the freedom of researchers to publish first wherever they feel is the most appropriate.

2. The effect of the policy is intended to increase the visibility of, and improve access to, the research funded by HEA and the State, where such research is intended to be published by the researcher(s) concerned.

3. The policy is based on recognised best practice. It is in keeping with the recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) Policy in relation to scientific publication. It is also in keeping with the combined OECD Ministers’ Declaration entrusting the OECD to work towards commonly agreed Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding.

Conditions to which HEA funded award recipients should adhere:

1. All researchers must lodge their publications resulting in whole or in part from HEA-funded research in an open access repository as soon as is practical after publication, and to be made openly accessible within 6 calendar months at the latest, subject to copyright agreement.

2. The repository should ideally be a local institutional repository to which the appropriate rights must be granted to replicate to other repositories.

3. Authors should deposit post-prints (or publisher’s version if permitted) plus metadata of articles accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings.

4. Deposit should be made upon acceptance by the journal/conference. Repositories should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to full text article to be applied as required. Open access should be available as soon as is practicable but not later than six months after publication.

5. Suitable repositories should make provision for long-term preservation of, and free public access to, published research findings.

6. Books and book chapters are not covered by such repositories but the following condition applies in such cases. When a book goes out of print or four years following publication, whichever is sooner, and the publisher does not foresee a further print run or availability online for the work within a six-month period, then authors should make the work available online in an open and accessible way.

7. Metadata has already been noted under point 3. Data in general should as far as is feasible be made openly accessible, in keeping with best practice for reproducibility of scientific results.

8. Software, together with methods and algorithms, are not directly covered by Open Access repositories. However in keeping with best practice of scientific reproducibility key scientific results should be made available openly.

9. HEA may augment or amend the above requirements wherever necessary to ensure best practice in Open Access.

How does Open Access work?

An Open Access repository is a storage and retrieval system where published research findings and papers would be stored and made available for full, open and free access by the research community and the general public.

A number of Irish universities currently provide open access repositories of their own and a consortium of the seven Irish universities is engaged in the development of a national open access repository system, i.e., connecting the repositories of each participating institution for fuller public accessibility as funded by SIF.

In an Open Access repository system, the usual copyright and fair practice considerations are not waived and publication on Open Access does not preclude prior publication in a recognised research journal or commercial publication.

Making scholarly publications available on Open Access allows them to be freely accessed by anyone worldwide using an internet connection. The potential readership of Open Access material is far greater than that for publications where the full text is restricted to subscribers only. Open Access repositories are also designed to expose the details of their contents to web search engines.

Ends

Council of European Union Adopts Conclusions on Access, Dissemination & Preservation

Today the Council of the European Union adopted "Council Conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation" during the 2832nd Competitiveness Council meeting held in Brussels on 22-23 November 2007.

The Council has issued clear invitations to member states and to the Commission to develop policies and actions on the dissemination of scientific and research information (including datasets) and on digital preservation. No sign of a mandate though...

The press version of the Conclusions can be accessed here

Irish Research Council Proposes OA Mandate in line with EURAB Recommendations

The first Irish research funding council to propose an Open Access mandate is the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET). Today IRCSET has invited submissions from the research community, and other interested parties, regarding a proposed IRCSET policy on Open Access to Publications, stating:

"IRCSET intends to put in place a policy whereby researchers will be required to make their publications available on an open access basis - where these result in whole or in part from IRCSET funded research - as soon as possible after publication. The requirement will be that these should be made openly accessible within a period of 6 months at the latest following initial publication."

The proposed policy is in line with the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) Policy in relation to scientific publication. Further details on the EURAB Policy are available here.

IRCSET invites all interested parties (including organisations and individuals) to make their views known.
The closing date for opinions or submissions is Friday 28th September, 2007. Further information is available at this link.

In proposing this mandate, IRCSET joins with other important funders of research internationally (Wellcome Trust, UK Research Councils, etc.) in seeking to maximise the impact of the research it funds through the widest possible dissemination of its research outputs. A list of international research finders who have adopted Open Access mandates is available here.

The IRCSET webpage provides information on the supporting infrastructure for Open Access currently being developed in Irish universities: "A consortium of Irish universities is now engaged in the development of the Irish Universities Association Libraries National Research Portal – an open access repository system connecting the repositories of each participating institution for fuller public accessibility..." and goes on to state: "the IUA Librarians are committed to supporting Irish researchers to make their research papers available on open access and each institution will provide, to the best of its ability, assistance in copyright clearance, deposit of papers and other matters of possible concern."

European Commission Communication on Access to Scientific Information

The European Commission has adopted a Communication on access to scientific information in the digital age. The Communication announces a series of measures on how the Commission will deal with open access in FP7 funded projects - and how it will use its funding programmes to improve the access to and the preservation of scientific information. The following measures will be adopted:

A. ACCESS TO COMMUNITY FUNDED RESEARCH RESULTS
– Costs for publishing, including open access publishing, defined as eligible costs in
Community funded research projects.
– Specific guidelines to be issued, within specific programmes, on the publication of articles
in open repositories.

B. CO-FUNDING THROUGH COMMUNITY PROGRAMMES
– Approximately €50 million for work on infrastructures, in particular digital repositories, in
2007-2008.
– Approximately €25 million for digital preservation and collaborative tools in 2007-2008.
– Approximately €10 million on access to and use of scientific information through
eContentplus programme.

C. INPUT FOR THE FUTURE POLICY DEBATE
– Study on the economic aspects of digital preservation.
– Funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication
system.

D. POLICY CO-ORDINATION AND DEBATE WITH STAKEHOLDERS
– Deliberations in the European Parliament and Council; further discussions with
stakeholders.
– Exchange of good practices for new models of access to, dissemination of, and
preservation of scientific information.

Related documents are available here - the Staff Working Paper is useful and comprehensive.

TARA-Derived Teaching/Learning Resources - Test

TARA meets Flickr!
Repository interoperability is a hot issue internationally and a number of important projects are currently underway in this area. Meanwhile we have an immediate practical need to learn about the potential for linkages between the primary research resources deposited in TARA and the university's teaching needs 'on the ground'. A seamless interface between Dspace-based TARA, the College VLE (WebCT or equivalent) and the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) would be great, but before thinking about building system solutions we need to understand more about the needs and behaviours of potential users.

Selected images from the Nicholas K. Robinson Collection of Caricature have been uploaded from TARA directly to Flickr (via Flock). This is a test demo examining a Web 2.0 method - quick, simple, user-generated and free! - of repurposing TARA repository-based resources for use in teaching. This method allows direct upload of the web images as they are being viewed in TARA, and image cropping, rotation, addition of description and tagging at the point of upload using the Flock browser's special features. The usual Flickr facilities may be used as required: addition of notes to image, creation of 'sets', creation of slideshows, facility for comments by viewers/students, restrictions on access. There's an even faster way to do this: downloading Bill Conan's handy Firefox extension allows you to right-click an image in TARA (or any website), and send it straight to your Flickr account.

The advantage is simple and pretty basic: a learning resource is built 'on-the-fly' as a lecturer browses images in TARA. The Flickr slideshow link may be subsequently added to WebCT & Moodle courses and deposited in the NDLR as a reusable learning object. Of course, there are more high-tech/better ways to achieve this kind of thing - this is just a zero-cost start for us to explore the spaces within and between these systems. (The demo is for the TCD School of Histories and Humanities Digital Image Project).

View: TARA-Derived Slideshow

technorati tags:Dspace, Flickr, Horses, Political Cartoons

Blogged with Flock

Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age

On 15 and 16 February 2007 the European Commission will host a conference in Brussels on scientific publication issues.The goal of the conference is to bring together stakeholders concerned with access, dissemination and preservation issues in connection with scientific publication and data in an effort to provide policy options for scientific publishing under FP7 and in the European Research Area. Both the Commissioner for Science and Research, Mr. Potočnik and the Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Ms. Reding will be speaking at the event.

Research - Science and Society

technorati tags:Open, Access, Scholarly, Scientific, Publishing

Blogged with Flock

GSU Research Skills Day 7 February 2007, 10am-4pm GMB

The Graduate Students' Union Research Day will be held on the seventh of February, next Wednesday. There will be various interactive workshops held in the GMB during the day. Open Access and TARA are amongst the topics to be covered in 'The Research Support System and Publishing' at 2.00pm. Further information

Developing a Research Culture and Research Capacity - School of Nursing and Midwifery Research Seminar Meeting

Round table Discussion: Maximizing your research impact for staff and research students.
Speakers: Niamh Brennan and Andy Watson
6th February 07 13.00-14.00
For further information please contact: School of Nursing and Midwifery, e-mail: nursing@tcd.ie or by phone: 01 896 2692

EURAB proposes making open access obligatory for FP7 research

The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB)
has published its Report and Recommendations on "Scientific Publication: policy on open access" (December 2006). Here's the press release. Professor Jane Grimson (School of Computer Science and Statistics and former Vice-Provost, Trinity College Dublin) chaired the EURAB Working Group responsible for the report.

Comments on EURAB's recommendations and proposed mandate by advocates of Open Access Peter Suber and Steve Harnad have been very positive.

Read the EURAB recommendations in full here.

European petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results

A group of European organisations has launched a petition to the European Commission calling on it to support public access to research outputs shortly after their publication, guaranteeing open access to publicly funded research.

Organised by SPARC Europe, JISC, SURF, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF), the petition urges the Commission to follow the lead of other research funding agencies in mandating the publication of articles arising from EC-related funding after a given time period in open access archives. It also calls on the Commission to explore a European-wide approach to policies and practices surrounding the development of digital repositories as a means of making more visible the fruits of European research and maximising the return on public investment in research.

For further information on the petition, and to sign it, please go to: EC petition

Trinity's Access to Research Archive (TARA)

Trinity's Access to Research Archive (TARA) is an open access repository containing scholarly publications, electronic theses, images, 'grey literature' and e-publishing outputs of Trinity College Dublin.