SHERPA-LEAP

Just to say again what a pleasure it was to see so many of you yesterday. Thanks for all your input and suggestions, and a special thank you to the speakers for the afternoon – four very interesting presentations and a lot to think about. Thanks again to Beth at SOAS for providing the venue and the biscuits!

The themes for the day seemed to work well, and it looks like there are some great opportunities for collaboration. Dominic Tate’s presentation on the future plans of the RSP was great, and I for one am particularly interested in the possibility of RSP funding for LEAP advocacy events – if we can time them to coincide with RSP campaigns, so much the better. The idea of building our next wave of advocacy around funder mandates seemed popular, and would enable us to really publicise the work being done by the mandate working group as well.

Adrian Clark’s contribution to the meeting sparked quite a few ideas, and I think the various strands of research we’re undertaking, and Peter’s suggestions for looking at graduate students’ attitudes to theses mandates could lead to some useful work. I’m going to send some requests for information on proposed mandates to the UKCoRR list and continue to examine institutional and funder mandates – please add to the Mandates thread in the forum if you have any news or information to share.

Steve Grace’s presentation on R4R showed a potentially really interesting way of linking publications metadata to other kinds of research information using CERIF. I think the adaptation of CERIF for the REF could prove informative in all sorts of ways – and provides us all with a pathway to better integration with other campus information systems. The more systems we work with, the more visible we are, and if we can use the REF to push our repositories up the institutional agenda, well, it can’t be bad can it? If you’re using the IR for the REF, keep us posted on what you’re doing, how it’s going, what challenges you face and how you overcome them.

Richard Davis gave some great examples of ways we can customise our interfaces to make them more meaningful to users. The more we can incorporate the kind of interactions users want in our pages, the more attractive we can make our repositories. I also particularly like the idea of using folksonomies – on one level, and this is the librarian in me coming out, I hate the concept, but pragmatically speaking, more and more people use them as discovery tools, and we’d be mad to miss the boat. We have two sets of users, researchers and researchers. It’s all too easy to focus on researchers who have research to add to our repositories and forget about the ones who want to get research out of them again. Anything we can do to make it easier and friendlier for them to do it has to be a good thing.

It was great to see some agreement around the working groups – I’ll be adding to the forum threads later, and planning initial meetings in the coming weeks and we should have some progress to report by the next LEAP meet. I think the online library of policy documents about what to accept, copyright, anything you’re willing to share basically, will be a real help to members who may have to revisit their policies or may be starting from scratch. Please upload them to the forum, and if you encounter a tricky question, let us know!

Finally, if you have any particular success or good ideas for advocacy, share them! This is an ongoing concern for us all, and it would be great to get as many ideas as possible for us to take forward.

I’m looking forward to the next meeting in January!