RSP e-theses briefing papers

The RSP have made a number of reports and briefing papers authored by UCL, regarding e-theses concerns available on their website: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/help/publications/#briefing-papers (they can be found near the end of the page). The papers cover:

Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE. Report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access
Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE, Appendix. Full text responses from a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access
Vision, Impact, Success: mandating electronic theses. Case studies of e-theses mandates in practice in the UK Higher Education sector.
Third party copyright
Impact on future publication
Managing embargos
Plagiarism
Policies and guidelines available on the internet
Sensitive content
Workflow analysis

Preservation for Repository Practitioners

Aston Business School Birmingham, Thursday 27th May 2010.

In conjunction with the Repositories Support Project (RSP) and the Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland project (ERIS), we here at WRN are organising a free, one- day workshop at the Aston Business School Conference Centre Birmingham on Thursday 27th May, looking at preservation issues and repositories.

We have created a hands-on, practical programme with preservation tool presentations from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the PLANETS project as well as facilitated discussion sessions looking in to preservation issues and your repository, and how to construct an action plan and preservation policy to use in your institution.

For a draft programme and booking please see the RSP event page.

Official launch of UWIC’s institutional repository

Last month marked the launch of UWIC’s institutional repository. The launch consisted of presentations, live demos of the repository, and opportunities for attending academics’ to deposit their own research. RSP advocacy material was used and disseminated at the launch. Three, separate sessions were held at each of the University’s campuses. Since the launch there has been an increase in user account registrations and an increase in deposit enquiries.

If you would like to find out more about UWIC’s institutional repository please contact Helen Thomas, Repository Administrator at dspace@uwic.ac.uk.

If you would like any help or ideas for what you could do to launch your repository or further raise its profile within your institution please contact the WRN team at wrnstaff@aber.ac.uk.

Preservation event planning

In conjunction with our sister projects RSP and ERIS, the WRN are planning some one-day events looking at digital preservation and repositories. The programme will specifically target repository practitioners and will be aimed at beginners. In order to ensure as many people as possible are able to attend we are tentatively planning to repeat the event in various locations around the UK. Provisional dates are under discussion for Cardiff, Birmingham and Edinburgh in May 2010.

We are very keen that these events are of real practical use to the repository community, so in order to help us plan theses events, we would appreciate it if you could take the time to complete this quick question.

If you would like to register your interest for one of these events, please visit http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/92F89A8D8D2C15BE.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

News Round-up

Two interesting pieces of news from repository land this week ...

Enabling Open Scholarship



EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is a new organisation for universities and research institutions worldwide. It is acting as both an information service and a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities and research institutions, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings. Of particular note is the fact that EOS is primarily aimed at senior institutional managers who have an interest in, and wish to help develop thinking on, strategies for promoting open scholarship to the academy as a whole and to society at large.

Repositories are mentioned widely on the site and we would encourage all our parnters to explore this new resource and promote it within their own institution.


Open Access Week & RSP Deposit Competition



To coincide with Open Access Week (19th-23rd October 2009) the Repositories Support Project (RSP) is launching a competition! The UK institution with the greatest number of fulltext, open access items deposited in its repository during open access week wins an RSP iPod!

With our next WRN statistical census date fast approaching (1st Oct), our attention will be drawn to the progress (or otherwise!) with getting full text content into our own Welsh repositories. Perhaps we should all enter into the competitve spirit and use Open Access Week as an opportunity to encourage academics to deposit more content?

JISC Cross Project Forum: 8th September, 2009

On Tuesday 8th September, Antony and I represented the WRN at a JISC organised Cross Project Forum. Also in attendance were representatives of the RSP, UKCoRR, ERIS (Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland) and UKOLN. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together similarly focussed repository projects and groups to consider and discuss repository development and support across the UK. It was hoped that the forum could be held at regular intervals over the next 18 months and that over this time those within the forum could collaborate with each other in order to meet the individual aims and objectives of each group.

Points of interest from the meeting in regards to the WRN and its partners included:

• Dominic Tate, RSP Project Co-ordinator, relayed to the group that the focus of the new phase RSP was looking to continue its support of Repository Managers within England and Wales; with the continued focus of encouraging more content within HE repositories. The RSP hoped to deliver ‘campaigns’ on certain repository topics, entailing high level events; training; and support materials.
  

• ERIS, represented by Project Manager, James Toon, is looking to work with both Repository Managers and Researchers within Scottish HEIs to create tools and solutions to encourage engagement and content within Scottish IRs. A special focus is on the work of cross-institutional research pools and the curation of any data produced. ERIS will build upon the work of the previous IRIScotland project. This project established two pilot services: a cross repository harvesting service to aggregate research outputs; and a hosting service based at the National Library of Scotland for those without repositories. These services are of particular interest to the WRN in light of our proposed e-theses harvesting work package. The previous project also produced a draft metadata policy between partners which may be useful to inform our Mediated Deposit Bureau.
  

• The possibility of special interest/ software user groups within the bigger UKCoRR structure was suggested by Mary Robinson, UKCoRR Secretary. The IRIScotland and WRN groups already create forums for the included Repository Managers/ Staff and possible ways for those groups as a whole to be represented within UKCoRR were considered such as the creation of group ‘reps.’
  

Other interesting points discussed included:

• The creation of academic profiles to identify the types of ‘academic’ that are out there and their views on OA publishing along with their potential relationship with a repository. Suggestions for advocacy and engagement strategies for each type will also be produced.
  

• The creation of a ‘How to’ advocacy pack including model answers to academics’ repository FAQs.

• The use of Twitter to raise awareness of individual repositories. A suggestion was to have repository staff appear as personal members but to use it as a professional site; making tweets about repository achievements and developments. Rather than having a repository account automatically tweeting when particular items were deposited. A repository RSS/Atom news feed maybe better suited for this purpose.
  

• Development of a technical awareness list for JISC projects so results of past projects within one technical area are grouped together and easily searchable so developed software is not lost.
  

• Forthcoming publication of a JISC study on Repository and OPAC links. James highlighted that work has been carried out at the National Library of Scotland connecting their repository with a Voyager OPAC, an area of interest for many of the Welsh HEIs.
  

See the UKCoRR blog for another post about this meeting and other posts regarding repository issues and UKCoRR.