SHERPA-LEAP

OAI6 was held at the University of Geneva from the 17th to the 19th of June 2009.

The SHERPA-LEAP consortium was one of the sponsors of this event, and the three days of plenary sessions, tutorials and breakout groups were well attended, with 227 delegates from 3 continents.

Sessions were grouped by themes, with three or four speakers for each. They were Compound Objects, Mandates and Preservation, Use and Re-use, Embedding, Community Building and Quality Assurance. I’ve summarised all the presentations here, but follow the links for more detail…

Compound objects:

1) Herbert Van De Sompel presented an overview of the OAI-ORE interoperability framework, arguing that the evolution of a machine-readable substrate for scholarly publications is both necessary (there’s just too much for humans to find their way around unaided) and revolutionary (it could change the way we look at and use publications).
2) Robert Sanderson gave us a peek at an intriguing way of visualising the information topology of JSTOR for new methods of navigation and discovery, using machine readable relationships (co-authors, common citations and so on) between publications to enable searchers to follow the lines of their interest.
3) Maarten Hoogerwerf outlined a model of enhanced publication in which a document, all its metadata and the information about how it has been used can be combined with images, videos and/or data tables (as applicable) into one aggregated object by giving each component object its own persistent identifier.
4) Tim Dilauro’s presentation showed how ORE technologies could link the data that journals often won’t take to the publications they relate to by linking repositories where the data can be preserved to the publishers’ systems using resource maps that link all the relevant objects together into one complete object for researchers.

Mandates and preservation :

1) John Houghton gave a summary of his report into the economic implications of alternative publishing models, emphasising the benefits of self-archiving in repositories.
2) Tom Cochrane, of Queensland University of Technology, outlined the rationale behind and perceived results of their OA mandate which are increased citation rates and improved research funding. He emphasised that while they mandate an OA copy of the postprint, they also have a policy of linking to the publisher’s pages.
3) Wouter Spek of the Alliance for Permanent Access argued that since the volume of data is growing all the time, and knowledge and know-how are dependent on the ability to access and re-use that data, we need to permanently preserve it and for that we need a new (and expensive!) e-infrastructure to keep it safe. He cited many of the projects that are working in this field, including CESSDA, CLARIN, PLANETS and PARSE.insight.
4) Andreas Rauber outlined some of the problems and challenges of digital preservation and gave a demonstration of PLATO, a preservation planning tool which guides you through each stage of the planning process in order to optimise the long-term benefits of preservation actions.

Use and re-use:

1) Morag Greig reviewed the impact of publisher’s agreements and copyright policies on the work of repository mangers over the last six years, and discussed the ways in which publisher’s and author’s concerns have shifted over time.
2) David Hoole from the Nature Publishing Group outlined the way in which NPG has embraced OA, citing its involvement in developing hybrid journals, creative commons licensing and the PEER project as evidence. He justified their embargo policy as essential in a world with Google Scholar and mass self-archiving in order to protect revenue, and announced new terms and conditions of use for NPG material which will allow re-use for text-mining and ORE.
3) Sophia Ananiadou gave an overview of activities at the national centre for text mining (NaCTeM), including work with repositories on annotation, curation assistance and name authority. She demonstrated tools for extracting named entities, events and relationships from documents which offers enhanced search possibilities and automatic metadata generation.
4) Alexander Lerchl laid out his detective work investigating fabricated data from a research group. He argued that the only way to verify the scientific authenticity of work is to ensure the deposition of original data for review and examination in an open repository.

Embedding:

1) Martin Van Luijt gave a detailed description of the way in which the Universiteitsbibliotheek at Utrecht have embedded their IR into the management information system and virtual knowledge centre. It’s all integrated with the OPAC, is searched alongside the subscription databases and has secure areas for manuscripts and co-working.
2) Peter Burnhill outlined the way in which Jorum is changing with the introduction of JorumOpen as a repository of open educational resources that will extend Jorum’s already substantial level of ‘embeddedness’ in VLEs in the UK.
3) Travis Brookes described the evolution of SPIRES and arXiv serving the high-energy physics community. He described the way that metadata now flows both ways between journals and SPIRES, and the way in which the new SPIRES platform, INSPIRE, will be able to feed IRs with enhanced publications and metadata.

Community Building:

1) Christian Zimmermann explained the reasons for RePEc’s success as a community-based resource: Economics as a discipline has a long publication delay, which encourages a pre-print culture, authors force their publishers to index their work on RePEc in order that they don’t miss out and RePEc is introducing many new services and tools for authors to stay abreast of developments and raise their profile.
2) James Pringle from Thomson Reuters talked about the ResearcherID project for author disambiguation and how it is being used by researchers to create ‘federated identities’ as ResearcherID, LinkedIn and other profiles are built into individual’s webpages.
3) Jim Pitman described the Bibliographic Knowledge Network scheme to create a federated author ID programme, based on a machine readable network of bibliographic information in which authority would be disambiguated locally, rather than depending on a centralised system.

Quality Assurance:

1) Johan Bollen gave us a demonstration of the MESUR project’s attempt to create an alternative to print-paradigm derived, slow, citation metrics. He argued that usage data picks up activities quicker and across a broader range of materials and when combined with network metrics revealed relationships between activities. He showed a remarkable map, showing usage links across disciplines and emphasised the potential for mapping over time to tell us what gets attention, when and for how long.
2) Ulrich Poeschl presented the case for open peer review, on the grounds that it wil be quicker, collaborations will make it easier to detect fraud and remove inaccuracy, thereby preventing the dilution of knowledge. He argued that access to comments could be as useful as the paper in some cases, and that the need for rapid publication has led to a neglect of thorough discussion in some cases.

Overall, the workshop was a fascinating insight into a mixture of technical, practical, policy and theoretical aspects of OA and a valuable chance to get a view of the ‘bigger picture’ in OA.