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A quick comparison of Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin in the 2010 THES rankings

2010-09-16T01:11:00.000+01:00

TCD overall ranking: (2010) 76 (2009) 43 (2008) 49
UCD overall ranking: (2010) 94 (2009) 89 (2008) 108

Breakdown of new rankings methodology

Teaching – The Learning environment (30% of total) TCD 47.7; UCD 42.4
International mix – Staff and students (5% of total) TCD 84.2; UCD 87.0
Industry income – innovation (2.5% of total) TCD 31.6; UCD data not supplied
Research – Volume, income and reputation (30 % of total) TCD 45.3; UCD 36.6
Citations – Research influence (32.5% of total) TCD 84.4; UCD 86.3

Fumble in the greasy till - Ireland's national identity is up for sale yet again

2010-05-17T17:33:00.005+01:00

While the selling of the family silver may be a sad indicator of dynastic decline it amounts to disgrace and scandal when applied to the nation state. Tomorrow the Dublin auction house James Adams and Sons will undertake a sale entitled ‘The Great Famine’. The catalogue includes a number of letters plucked from the archive of a firm of Dublin solicitors called Stewart & Kincaid to be sold ‘singly and in small groups’. The parent collection is described in the catalogue as follows:

‘The letters come from the recently discovered archives of a firm of Dublin solicitors, Stewart & Kincaid [S&K], who acted as landlords’ agents on a large scale, representing the owners of very large tracts of land throughout the midlands, south and west, notably Lord Palmerstown (Sligo), Daniel Ferrall (Roscommon), Col. Wingfield (Sligo), the Marquess of Westmeath (Roscommon), the Stratford estate (Clare & Limerick), the Frankfort estates (Kilkenny & Carlow), and many others. S&K administered a system of sub-landlords and local agents, and most of these letters were sent to the firm or its principals (Henry Stewart and Joseph Kincaid) by agents remitting rent, or explaining why they were unable to do so. There are also some appeals directly from tenants or minor landlords in distress or facing dispossession, and a few from concerned clergymen. The firm’s replies are not usually present, but their content can often be inferred from later correspondence.’

Anyone with even the slightest interest in Irish history could not mistake the importance of such a collection. The fact that a decision has been made to extract a selection of letters and sell them as individual lots is appalling. It undermines the original archive and tramples over any idea of establishing provenance in the future. It is vandalism pure and simple.

So here’s a suggestion to salvage something for scholarship if not for the nation. Enact or amend existing legislation to allow the examination of items that are to be sold at public auction to assess if they are of national significance and if they form part of a body of material whose integrity will suffer if split up or sold piecemeal. Where the state cannot offer a price for the collection, a levy is placed on the final sale price that will allow the material to be digitised and access made available to all.

Assessing research excellence in the Humanities - an Australian approach

2010-04-11T17:37:00.008+01:00

When asked to explain what a librarian does I’ve sometimes come back with the reply that we make lists. Lists that will facilitate ease of access to the collections we curate and preserve. Other colleagues may balk at what might seem a blunt summation of our chief function and point to user education, or collection development and preservation as more illustrative of our mission. Yet behind all these functions lies the goal of access to the stuff we gather and preserve and to do that we make itineraries of what we hold. The methods and standards we deploy to create lists gets defined in the basic job skill of cataloguing regardless of whether it’s metadata creation or scholarly bibliography.

The list also has another function beyond being just a primary facilitator to access. Any exercise in collection development would be lost without it. You need to know what you have before you decide what’s needed. It is therefore no surprise that an exercise like Australian Research Council’s ERA initiative with a list of 20,000 + ranked journals would draw some notice. The initiative seeks to examine where Australian researchers are publishing and give a ranking to the journals they choose to publish in. In effect a variation on the contentious Journal Impact Factor specific to Australian published research with metrics based on citation analysis (via SCOPUS) and post publication peer-review (via a three stage process between Research Evaluation Committee (REC) Members and peer-reviewers). The sustainability of a secondary ERA type peer-review process may be tricky to negotiate; nonetheless it establishes precedent and more efficient models may emerge.

The objectives of the exercise are to:

1. Establish an evaluation framework that gives government, industry, business and the wider community assurance of the excellence of research conducted in Australia’s institutions;

2. Provide a national stocktake of discipline-level areas of research strength and areas where there is opportunity for development in Australia’s higher education institutions;

3. Identify excellence across the full spectrum of research performance;

4. Identify emerging research areas and opportunities for further development; and

5. Allow for comparisons of Australia’s research nationally and internationally for all discipline areas.

The project identifies 8 research clusters with specific disciplines identified by Field of Research Code (FoR) e.g.:

Cluster Two: Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA)

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY 21

ARCHAEOLOGY 2101

CURATORIAL AND RELATED STUDIES 2102

HISTORICAL STUDIES 2103

OTHER HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY 2199

The initiative deserves a commendation for bravery in choosing Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA) along with Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences (PCE) as the trial research clusters. The latter could draw on existing citation analyses not suitable or indeed available to the former. Australian higher-education institutions provided data to ERA via SEER, an interface developed on top of the existing Australian institutional repository infrastructure.

Looking at humanities in isolation, if we take the monograph as the ‘gold standard’ of humanities research a search in Australian Research Online (an aggregation of open scholarly research outputs across Australia) returns 421 item types = book in the date range 2008 – 2010. Within these results 7 are listed under the subject heading ‘arts’ (sadly none of the records have a link to an open copy). I’m assuming that these items were submitted to ERA and that a hard copy of the monograph was examined as part of the peer-review analysis. I say brave because I imagine there is as much scepticism among the Humanities and Creative Arts research cluster in Australia as to the true object of the ERA exercise as there would be among its Irish counterpart.

By far the most important outcome of this process is that it has established an independent, national metric to try to uncover quality in research. Based on citation and independent peer-review analysis the trial established a journal assessment metric

A* Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of a very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted. Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions.

A The majority of papers in a Tier A journal will be of very high quality. Publishing in an A journal would enhance the author’s standing, showing they have real engagement with the global research community and that they have something to say about problems of some significance. Typical signs of an A journal are low acceptance rates and an editorial board, which includes a reasonable fraction of well known researchers from top institutions.

B Tier B covers journals with a solid, though not outstanding, reputation. Generally, in a Tier B journal, one would expect only a few papers of very high quality. They are often important outlets for the work of PhD students and early career researchers. Typical examples would be regional journals with high acceptance rates, and editorial boards that have few leading researchers from top international institutions.

C Tier C includes quality, peer reviewed, journals that do not meet the criteria of the higher tiers.

to support a five point ERA Rating Scale

5. The Unit of Evaluation profile is characterised by evidence of outstanding performance well above world standard presented by the suite of indicators used for evaluation.

4. The Unit of Evaluation profile is characterised by evidence of performance above world standard presented by the suite of indicators used for evaluation.

3. The Unit of Evaluation profile is characterised by evidence of average performance at world standard presented by the suite of indicators used for evaluation.

2. The Unit of Evaluation profile is characterised by evidence of performance below world standard presented by the suite of indicators used for evaluation.

1. The Unit of Evaluation profile is characterised by evidence of performance well below world standard presented by the suite of indicators used for evaluation.

NA. Not assessed due to low volume. The number of research outputs does not meet the volume threshold standard for evaluation in ERA.

This is an important and bold initiative in which input from Australian libraries comprises a vital component supporting the institutional stakeholders. It’s not pretty and it’s not without its critics but we have to take notice.

Searchable database of ERA ranked journals [ http://lamp.infosys.deakin.edu.au/era/index.php ]

Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences (PCE) and Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA) Clusters Evaluation Guidelines for the 2009 ERA Trial (PDF) [http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/ERA_Eval_Guide.pdf ]

Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences (PCE) and Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA) Clusters ERA Indicator Benchmark Methodology (PDF) [http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/ERA_Indicator_Bench.pdf ]

Closure of Expertise Ireland portal

2010-02-09T11:52:00.000Z

'The official expertise portal of the third level institutions on the island of Ireland', expertiseireland.com is to be closed effective 29 February 2010

Ned Costello, CEO of the Irish Universities Association has just circulated the following:

Dear Colleagues

As you will be aware, the main funding line for expertiseireland.com â€“ from InterTrade Ireland/Enterprise Ireland expired about two years ago. Since then we have left the site live but with declining functionality for the period while the SIF project on the National Research Platform was underway. At present, there is no identified or committed source for the funding required to build the National Research Platform, and in the circumstances, we feel it is bad practice to continue with the expertiseireland.com portal since it is now effectively moribund. In addition there would be a cost in excess of â‚¬20k per annum in hosting and IT support costs associated with keeping the site live and restoring its full functionality, for which IUA has no source of funding.

We therefore intend to close the site with effect from 26 February, 2010 and we will shortly put a notice on the site to that effect. Of course, should the NRP project come to fruition, the basic data architecture of Expertise Ireland would be an important input to any new portal/platform.

Regards,

Ned

Ned Costello
Chief Executive
Irish Universities Association

Scholarly communication and the practice audience

2009-11-09T12:15:00.001Z

Apologies for a lack of communication over the last few months but the frenzy of the new academic year came a month early and only now seems to be hitting a regular rhythm. After giving a short presentation to the School of Social Work and Social Policy on the Research Support System and the Institutional Repository, I was reminded of the importance of effective communication of research findings to a practice audience outlined by researchers in RIN's 'Communicating Knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings' . The report does note a tension arising from the need to publish in a high-status journal in order to advance your career and the desire to disseminate research effectively. One cancer studies researcher sums it up as follows: “There’s a real dilemma there … You’re trying to reach as many people as you can because they’re the ones that are going to implement your practice" while a nursing and midwifery researcher notes: “The practice audience is hugely important because all the research we do should influence how nursing is practised, but then there’s also the influence on fellow researchers and our peers. So you write for both.”.

While I would make the argument that mandated open access policies fulfil both needs, the report shows that in humanities, social science, business and economics one vehicle designed to facilitate this, the institutional repository, is not seen as important to the effective dissemination of research (Report and analysis of research survey p.48). This would seem to indicate some confusion regarding how the IR mission is understood by a significant part of the community it hopes to serve. If the open access repository argument has been largely won in the physical sciences it has a way to travel elsewhere.

When the pay walls return, 'de-monetize' the archive

2009-08-23T18:54:00.009+01:00

Following the $3.4bn net loss posted by News Corporation in June it would seem that Rupert Murdoch is about to tear up the free on-line content model and introduce pay access. And where the Digger goes others may well follow. Even The Guardian seems to be contemplating toll access to some types of premium content although a blanket pay wall would seem out of the question according to the paper’s Director of Digital Content, Emily Bell. Last Friday, The Los Angeles Times reported that News Corp had been in discussion with publishers ‘…including New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co...’ to set up a consortium to charge for distributed on-line news content. With APN News & Media (part owned by Independent News and Media) also ‘…examining many options, including paid content, transactional and ‘club’ models’, I think it is safe to assume that this debate is ongoing in Irish publishing also.

Clearly the notion that the public will pay for online news ring fenced behind aggressive copyright control is now on the boardroom table. This change of direction must also be raising some wry smiles at the BBC. The Newstracker aggregation service was recently overhauled helping to counter claims of ‘unfair advantage’ by big media. If the links will now resolve at the pay wall, why should the BBC bother at all?

It’s been over a year since The Irish Times removed toll access to online news. The paper’s digital archive ‘from 1859 to the present’ is available yearly for €395 and via Proquest for institutional subscriptions. This model of monetizing the archive is fairly common among newspapers with both The Times (€89.95 per annum) and The Guardian and Observer (£49.95 per month) recouping on investments made in digitisation programmes. It’s a pretty crude business model that turns on using the archive (much of which is public domain) as a cash cow. Pay walling this content stifles the possibilities that a more open dissemination model would allow. Never mind the semantic web, this arrangement does not even make the Web 2.0 paddling pool. These archives also appear as stand-alone entities and not truly interoperable with the newspaper’s main online services.

If we have to pay for online news content can the argument not be made that the archive should be free to access? If the archive is more fully integrated into the primary service, then a rolling wall of say 1 day to 1 week that moves content from toll to free could be achieved and some best practice regarding Web 3.0 development retained.

The embedded research librarian

2009-08-17T16:14:00.014+01:00

Much of the concern raised last week by the open science community following the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook, underlined the fragility of developing a research web space on a service still trying to find a working business model to sustain it. I found it ironic that while the move was touted as a 'talent grab' the inherent value of the service, its communities, were ignored. One such community,The Life Scientists, have been very proactive in using FriendFeed as a forum for sharing and debate with librarians who have an interest in supporting open science methodologies. Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh among others raised a number of important points regarding the difficulties of reconstituting such a community should the service fold. As of today there seems to be a moratorium on its future but nothing is for certain.

Being allowed to participate and observe the open science community in such a forum has proved invaluable to me. Most notably when it came to understanding how a particular group of scientists use a variety of social networking tools to assist in what can be referred to broadly as 'scholarly communication'. I use this phrase cautiously because I think there are some misconceptions as to what this actually means in a networked research environment. From a librarian's perspective, seeing the published peer-reviewed paper as the only output worth considering when deciding on policies regarding collation and preservation is missing the point. When discussing the technical merits of FriendFeed over Facebook, for the open scientist the former's ability to unlock the sociology of scientific investigation has been mentioned. The fact that a group of scientists share data, prototypes, presentations and opinions gives an invaluable insight into the mechanics of a research community. It also indicates the need to think beyond linear text.

This adoption of Web 2.0 tools is surely behind the Elsevier and Cell Press decision to launch their ‘Article of the Future’ project. It’s a very clever move by Elsevier because it allows them to expand their traditional publishing model beyond the journal and into the realm of the lab and notebook. Interestingly, this has been met with criticism by Ad Lagendijk, a former editor of Physics Letters. Prof. Lagendijk sees the move as an abandonment of the separation between the context of discovery and the context of justification that, in his opinion, linear text (the peer-reviewed journal paper) provides. I think that the use of Web 2.0 tools in the context of scientific discovery is not just purely of interest to the future sociologist or historian. It will have a bearing in the immediate future on how the review process in scientific scholarly communication is undertaken. Open Notebook Science undertakes the practice of ‘making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded’. Scientists such as Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon present their notebooks as wikis allowing open interaction with their work to anyone who cares to contribute. This approach does not detract from the traditional publishing model but accommodates a type of robust on-going review process that can lead to a stronger context of justification.

This evolving landscape is presenting a whole raft of challenges for the librarian. Working from the premise that the collation, preservation and dissemination of linear text is meeting the needs of the communities we support does not bear close examination. Research support librarians need to get in among research units and identify those outputs produced as part of the investigation. I think the best way to achieve this would be to ‘embed’ the research support librarian in the research unit making them part of the team and keeping them within the communications loop. There is not a one size fits all solution here but any inside track specific to a research project would be invaluable in terms of service planning.

Some addenda to the DHO's Digital Research and Projects database (DRAPIer) [ http://dho.ie/drapier/ ]

2009-07-20T16:22:00.004+01:00

Dear All,

Here are a list of resources and on-going digital projects located in Trinity College Dublin and hosted on Trinity's Access to Research Archive:

Library Special E-Collections includes:
EPB: Aibidil Gaoidheilge & caiticiosma (Digital Image Collection)
EPB: An Hibernian atlas, or, General description of the kingdom of Ireland (Digital Image Collection)
EPB: Taylor and Skinner's maps of the roads of Ireland (Digital Image Collection)
Nicholas K. Robinson Collection of Caricature
Ordnance Survey Irish Historical Maps
TCD MS 00942: Original drawings and paintings of Ireland and Scotland, Vol. 1 (Digital Image Collection)
TCD MS 02208: A true collection of severall letters on various subjects (Digital Image Collection)
TCD MS 03328: Further experiences of an Irish RM (Digital Image Collection)
TCD MS 11103: Course of practical artillery (Digital Image Collection)

Digital Image Project
As a collaborative effort between academics in the Departments of Classics, History and History of Art & Architecture in the School of Histories and Humanities, the Digital Image Project (DIP) is at the forefront of the development and implementation of digital archiving systems and standards of practice in Trinity College Dublin. Supported by the Research Committee and a relationship with the Trinity College Library, DIP will provide a publicly accessible, visual research and teaching resource covering over 4000 years of visual and material culture relating to Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world. Includes:
History of Art & Architecture - The Stalley Collection (Digital Image Collection)
Medieval History Research Centre - The Barry Archaeological Archive (Digital Image Collection)
TRIARC - Crookshank-Glin Collection (Digital Image Collection)
TRIARC - Edwin Rae Collection (Digital Image Collection)
TRIARC - Modern and Contemporary Irish Art Collection (Digital Image Collection)

History of Art includes:
IRCHSS: Reconstructions of the Gothic Past. This collection consists of approx. 500 moulding profiles collected from medieval buildings c.1200-c.1600 across the island of Ireland. The material was collected by Dr Danielle O'Donovan between 2000 and 2008. The work was funded by Enterprise Ireland, the Office of Public Works, IRCHSS and the Heritage Council.

Kind Regards,

Garret McMahon
Institutional Repository Content Manager [ www.tara.tcd.ie ]
Trinity College Dublin

Irish research funding and Open Access in the 'age of austerity'

2009-07-18T16:17:00.006+01:00

Everyone knew this was coming but it was still a shock to see the swingeing recommendations in print. It would be futile to speculate on what the organisational topography of Irish third-level education will look like this time next year but I think it's safe to assume that streamlining and rationalisation are going to profoundly effect how research is funded by the State. Relying on bibliometric analysis as a primary yardstick of research quality meets with cold dismissal:

'The largest verifiable output to date appears to be the publication of articles as opposed to more concrete
measures of economic returns.'

I'm not sure what these concrete measures are but the emphasis in the report seems to be toward applied rather than blue skies research. This is a dangerous supposition infringing on the concept of academic freedom and dismissing the nursery of real innovation. One big gun is already absorbing the extent of this challenge so I won't dwell on this here.

It does seem safe to assume that the agencies delivering funding to research under The Strategy for science, Technology and Innovation 2007 - 2013 will be reconstituted in some way. Against this background of fundamental change, I hope that the enlightened policies toward Open Access to research outputs don't wither on the vine. Science Foundation Ireland, IRCSET and

the Health Research Board, all have been recommended for amalgamation into whatever single funding agency emerges. The proposed dissolution of the Higher Education Authority and the acquisition of that body's functions into the Department of Education and Science could just be an exercise in ball-hopping, nonetheless this too may come to pass. Clearly, whatever agency emerges will need to be re-engaged regarding the concept of Open Access to Irish research. Hopefully familiar faces and old allies will re-emerge in the new body making advocacy a less daunting task than starting from scratch.

All this flux and fear bookends a fairly successful repository summer. I was glad to have my instincts confirmed that funder policies over institutional mandates can be more effective in leveraging Open Access by Stuart Shieber. Using the stated policies of the agencies described above I was able to convince a number of high profile researchers to avail of the benefits of the repository and allow deposit of their current published research.

The Open Access service that will aggregate Irish university research outputs (publications, theses etc) is also under development and looking at an end of year delivery date. This should be a core component of an all-Ireland research support infrastructure. This project is currently funded by the Irish Universities Association and the Strategic Innovation Fund which has established Institutional Repositories in all Irish universities and gone some way to keeping a roof over my head since 2005. The McCarthy Report has recommended that the fund be abolished citing the slow drawdown of available funds as the primary reason. I found this particularly irritating because, if true, it does represent a failure to capitalise on available funding when times were good. Using this fund to build the type of infrastructure needed to support teaching and research in Irish third-level would have been an excerise in the type of rationalisation strongly recommended in the report. The vision, planning and stewardship needed to deliver doesn't seem to have been all it might have been.

Presentation at MILE 2009

2009-04-12T10:15:00.002+01:00

Increasing points of access - a guide to metadata harvesting

Presentation at IUISC 2009

2009-04-12T09:17:00.001+01:00

The Institutional Repository and the return of the university press?

Presentation at UKSG annual conference 2009

2009-04-12T08:48:00.005+01:00

The evolving role of the institutional repository in promoting library research support

UKSG postscript: non-STMs just runnin' scared

2009-04-02T14:00:00.007+01:00

This annual academic publishing conference was a first for me. Although the focus is a commercial one I found the plenary and breakout sessions worthwhile. I don't often get a chance to hear at first hand what publishers think of IRs and Open Access and I wasn't surprised that the dis/misinformation remains fairly pervasive. Les Carr's tweet to look upon the publisher contingent as service providers was a mantra I repeated over the next three days. Hearing from one major non-STM publisher that IR content is secondary to published content did rile me a little. The long-tail of humanities and social science research is being ring-fenced by a major player in non-STM publishing and this is doing a disservice to the community it purports to serve. Non-STM scholarly communication is changing the publishing model from within. Publishers, librarians and the institutional repository are bystanders in this process. Look at the economists. RePEc currently has 615,000 online items the vast majority of which are journal papers. The real revolution however is how working papers in economics are becoming the preferred method of scholarly communication. Papers can be disseminated quickly and freely across the Internet and subject to a type of open peer-review. Whether or not the paper subsequently appears in some form in a 'quality' scholarly journal is secondary to the communication of the idea.

UKSG the roaring naughties in academic publishing

2009-03-30T09:42:00.003+01:00

Sitting in the auditorium of this annual bash, you might be mistaken for thinking that happy days are here again. The schmaltz of the lounge music as the technical crew tinker with their wires and bits gives this the air of a tech convention circa 1996. If you're one of the suits on a stand with the firm posting profits of between 6% to 8%, while your university friends are facing city redundancies, you'd be forgiven for feeling a little smug. Things it would seem have never been as good in academic publishing.

I've been asked to sketch out the research support infrastructure in TCD and have a tailored, 20 minute standard presentation to deliver. The role of the repository will be set in the context of an integrated institutional support infrastructure. What this sales focused crowd will make of it remains to be seen.

Institutional Repositories and Big Publishing - it's good to talk

2009-01-14T12:20:00.001Z

Peter Suber recently alerted us to the STM publisher briefing on Institutional Repository deposit mandates which is restricted to members only. Stevan Harnad was allowed access to the briefing and asked the STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to use quotes from the briefing to answer some of the points raised. This is both commendable and absolutely necessary if we hope to succeed in mainstreaming OA services that draw on IR deposit. It was refreshing to see STM's points of view plainly stated and have those points refuted in a manner that can only lead to further dialogue. I have no illusions that STM will lobby hard to protect their members and there can be little doubt that they currently see OA IRs as a threat to their bottom line. Yet if we don't engage in discussion we may be accused of being sanctimonious to the detriment of our core objectives. I was surprised at how blinkered the response was from some quarters when I posted notice of the PEER project of which STM is a major partner. Some jeremiahs reckoned that because of the participation of STM the outcome would be a snowjob endorsing the position of big publishing. Why so? To believe that the other project partners - the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society, INRIA and DRIVER will all endorse the STM position from the outset is a nonsense. I for one welcome this initiative and congratulate Stevan on informing the debate

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Working around publisher embargos

2009-01-07T11:44:00.005Z

When it comes to generating IR content, taking the message of the OA advantage to arts and social science is not exactly gathering the low lying fruit. I was very encouraged by the reaction I got in late Autumn from the Department of Sociology ( many thanks to the subject librarian and faculty members for assisting me to give a presentation during the weekly departmental meeting). Even a cursory analysis of the Scopus and ISI citation indices showed a long tail of 10 years and above for the most highly cited papers. However, as the deposits began to hit the IR task pool I became slightly deflated. Many of the papers had been published in Taylor and Francis titles which according to SHERPA/RoMEO deploy an embargo of 12 months for STM and 18 month for non-STM. Relating this back to faculty I got a surprising reaction. They picked up the phone and called the publishers. The result was that self-deposit of some accepted manuscripts were given the all-clear by the journal editors. This indicates a couple of things. Firstly, the relationship between author and editor is close and very often interchangeable. Secondly, the embargo restrictions that T&F currently insist upon probably reflect a buffer behind which a more flexible approach to OA is being formulated. If anyone can shed light on this please let me know.

So what can we do to assist? Recently, IR vet and blogger par exemplar Dorothea Salo gave notice that her most recent publication was given the green light for IR submission by publishers T&F. Dorothea submitted her paper along with the SPARC Author Addendum. This addendum could act as a template for author consent where an institutional or funder mandate is in operation. Given that T&F produce the lion's share of titles that humanities and social science researchers wish to publish in, this is encouraging. Thanks to Dorothea for flagging her paper's route to immediate deposit and BTW, the paper's worth a read.

The mind of God as a corporate advertising giant

2009-01-06T15:29:00.008Z

Reading Chris Castle's recent piece on the Google book deal I was struck by a number of observations not least of which is that the proposed registry is not opt-in but opt-out for authors. Put simply, unless the copyright holder explicitly tells Google that they do not wish their works to be associated with the service they will be anyway. This is a rights grab if ever their was one and it's worth reminding ourselves what Google really is - a corporate advertiser keen to improve on it's 5% ($15 billion) share of the total ad spend in the US alone. Their strategies have been devilishly clever. By developing a series of interoperable tools that have a considerable wow factor as service management indicators and that are simple to implement we have all skipped gaily into their parlour. We use Google Analytics on our library web services and Google metasearch widgets on our catalogues. When pointing out the benefits of Open Access to faculty I incorporate the Google Analytics pie chart of site referral to show that 70+% of visits to the IR are via Google. 'How beautiful is this gift from the Greeks. Open the gates so that all of Troy may behold its splendour'.

I'm presuming that the approach to gathering quality metadata to associate with resources held in the Google Books registry was the reason that our GeoWeb catalogue was reduced to what a senior colleague has called a 'quivering wreck' recently by a google bot trawl. The OPAC concept is, by its nature Open but this information is now a commodity. I think we should try to be a little more robust in saying how we would like it used. And by whom.

Institutional Repositories and The Library - a dysfunctional relationship

2008-11-20T11:48:00.003Z

What are you to do when your analogy goes stellar? Referring to the hard-pressed and mostly thankless toil of the repository manager, librarian and repository manager Dorothea Salo, coined the term 'Repository Rat' in her essential blog Caveat Lector. Prof. Les Carr in his blog RepositoryMan picks up on this and feeling that the term is too restrictive, has developed a veritable organisational menagerie. In the corporate domain animal motifs abound providing an irresistible satirical target for comedians. I chuckled to myself this morning after reading Les Carr's post but then a familiar feeling of unease set in. The Institutional Repository is in the front-line of a fundamental shift away from the traditional suite of services that the library has provided for the institution. IR managers are in fact organisational change agents and subject to the same challenges that all managers face when embarking on a process of transition. In an institutional library, they will fail if the commitment to implementation is not underwritten unequivocally by senior management. I don't believe that type of commitment is the norm and believe I understand why. Senior library management spend much of their time fighting the library's corner to justify the considerable draw on institutional coffers that providing 'core' services implies. Everyone who works in a library will be aware of this and nearly all are supportive. As units in a unique organisational culture, libraries are very good at this but it does have a downside. The library is reactive to change and very good at being so. It is not so good at instigation and innovation. Resources are deployed delivering the traditional core services and there has been a lack of preparation to develop the type of skills at all levels necessary to manage and deliver 21st century library services.

So where to the Institutional Repository? Increasingly it seems to me that the IR is just part of a set of research support services. We may feel as librarians that the natural home for this piece in the research support jigsaw is within the library, but are were being a little starry eyed? As RepositoryMan and Caveat Lector must concur, the repository experience is often an under resourced and isolated one for those of us tasked with developing these services. Perhaps we would have a better chance of success if we were removed from the managerial domain of the library and operated as part of the institutional research office. Many Repository Rats are not funded out of their library's budgets at all. The money is hustled from VPs or Deans of Research. You're lucky if you get a three year run but more often then not it's a year by year cliff hanger. A lack of commitment eventually destroys all relationships. Are you prepared to let this happen to your career?

What Open Access means to me

2008-10-14T12:17:00.003+01:00

It's been a grey and wet start to October 14 here in Dublin. The weather capturing the mood of the nation perfectly as we brace ourselves for the toughest budget in decades. For those of us on short-term contracts in third-level education, fear for the future is palpable. Makes me wish sometimes that I'd found myself a little gig in cataloguing and kept the head down. But only sometimes. What if you could make a small contribution to helping close the gap between the information rich and the information poor by developing new services based on a flexible, global networked infrastructure? Imagine a paediatrician in Lilongwe or a social worker in São Paulo accessing Irish research without the impediment of tolled access. What if the institutional library was central to delivering these services...

Well I'm still in employment and still contributing. The mainstay of my Open Access pitch to faculty and library has more to do with citation impact and the serials crisis than the dissemination of knowledge for the greater good of humanity. I know that scholarly communication's means of production, distribution and exchange is shapeshifiting into something that will facilitate mass collaboration and sharing. I see an enormous opportunity for the library to redefine itself as central to this process. I'm ready to assist. I'm having fun. We are, all of us, doing good work.

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Disappearing digital resources

2008-10-01T14:06:00.008+01:00

If you are looking for a short sharp demonstration of the need to adopt an institutional / corporate web preservation policy have a play with this little tool from Google. Confining searches to the number of pages Google had indexed in January 2001 ( 1,326,920,00) it shows unequivocally the transience of many web links and resources from that period.

How Ireland will provide OA to its publicly-funded research - some addenda

2008-09-09T14:03:00.001+01:00

Apologies for the lag on this.

Further to the recent Research Information Systems Conference in Trinity College Dublin and Peter Suber's comments in Open Access News, I thought it might be helpful to tease out a number of points raised in the following press release and try to put these in the context of current Open Access developments in Ireland. I will then give a brief description and commentary on the presentations.

The goal of IUA's National Research Platform Project is to provide a web based platform where all publicly funded research projects and information can be found at one location and will be ordered in a user-friendly way. This means that users don't have to browse individual websites to find out what R&D is being undertaken in Ireland.The platform can be used to highlight the extent and quality of the Irish research effort to National and International audiences.

Essentially this service will be built utilizing existing services such as expertiseireland.com and the network of Irish Institutional Repositories. Currently researchers in Trinity College Dublin have a web-based research profile allowing them to build up a comprehensive CV with a full bibliography of research outputs. When updating their profiles they have the option to make available their research outputs in Trinity's Access to Research Archive, an Open Access Institutional Repository. The metadata generated in the research profile is also harvested by the expertiseireland.com portal along with any links to those research outputs that are available via Open Access. Each of the Irish universities has a Current Research Information System being developed in tandem with IRs.

Data from expertiseireland.com will provide the cornerstone for the new National Research Platform. Under the banner of the expertiseireland.com website considerable progress has been made in mining the research information systems of the higher education institutions and creating, in a single web-based location, more than 5700 profiles of knowledge experts and access to the opportunities available for licensing from this sector.

The IR development model of deposit institutionally and harvest centrally with the Institutional Repository network essentially acting as a service layer along with expertiseireland.com will feed into the National Research Platform service.

The value of expertiseireland.com has been affirmed by an international peer review process which resulted in the IUA securing funding from SIF for a project to provide open access to research papers of university researchers which would use expertiseireland.com as a national access point. For the first time, Irish research will be freely available worldwide. This access will ensure Irish research has a greater impact by significantly increasing the visibility of Irish research and the concomitant increased citations and awareness. It will also ensure that universities can preserve research in digital format to international standards. In addition the SIF Cycle II funded National Research Data project will provide information on citations and international peer review ranking of the R&D Investment to date.

Two points here worth noting. The correlation between making Irish research outputs Open Access and by doing so increasing citations and awareness is made without reservation. This has been a central argument during the advocacy process leading to the IRCSET (Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology) mandate and the HEA (Higher Education Authority) mandate. The preservation remit should be interpreted as being the adoption of best practice when it comes to digital preservation, persistent identification and format. I think this is important to reiterate as confusion over what should be the preservation priorities regarding IR content can lead to unnecessary delays and confusion.

The Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Dr Jimmy Devins gave the keynote address.

This was followed by Dr Conor O'Carroll, head of the Research Office at the Irish Universities Association giving an overview of the IUA's research strategy. Conor placed a strong emphasis on developing the Irish third-level sector as an attractive place for overseas PhD candidates aiming for a target of 30% of the Irish total. This strategy is being replicated in the UK and recently Kevin O'Leary, Project Manager on EThOS (Electronic Thesis Online System) has stated that making theses digital and OA is having a positive effect in attracting overseas PhD candidates. Conor went on to the underline the continuing commitment to the Bike Report 2004 (Building Ireland’s Knowledge Economy); that the Institutes of Technology should be included in any development strategies of the IREL-Open Project and that PhD candidate profiles would have an expertiseireland presence linked to their OA dissertations.

Chris Baars of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences presented an overview of the NARCIS service. This amalgamation of resources and metadata from 21 Open Access repositories and 14 institutional CRIS is essentially DAREnet and information from the Dutch Research Database (NOD) integrated into one portal. This is an impressive service built on the best practices of a succession of SURF projects and programmes.

Grete Christina Lingjoerde and Andora Sjorgren of the University of Oslo presented a paper on Quality Assurance practices in FRIDA. What is most impressive about FRIDA is the scope of its interoperability. It pulls data from institutional HR systems; uses social security numbers as unique IDs and is interoperable with DiVA, BORA and MUNIN. A final report is due to be published later this month.

Dr. Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka briefed delegates on the European Science Foundation's efforts to co-ordinate the development of research information systems on a European level. He cited the involvement of EUROHORCs (European Heads of Research Councils) in the development of a common minimum classification system for projects, institutions and researchers based on the Frascati Manual.

Dr Celia Gallagher presented an introduction to the National Research Platform feasibility study. The position of the institutional repositories in the service architecture was reiterated.

Dr Geert Van Grootel introduced FRIS (Flanders Research Information Space). Geert made some very important points about rolling out these types of systems and services. The central principal was to 'generate the required information directly from the data within processes at and between the stakeholders' and that implementing these services are a change process.

Finally, Dr Franci Demsar director of the Slovenian Research Agency showed how a small European country like Slovenia successfully competes for research funding by being as transparent as possible about research fund allocation and output assessment.

All presentations made at the conference are available here

Trust me I'm a peer-reviewed doctor

2008-09-02T16:40:00.007+01:00

In a recent post on the scholarly kitchen the Wikipedia entry on Sarah Palin was presented as an example of how editorial anonymity mitigates against factual accuracy:
'Scholarly publishers know the power of accurate author attribution. It keeps people honest. It lets the community exercise standards of behavior. And it allows liars and cheats to be banished.' This seemed a little overblown to me and put me in mind of a recent threat to public health that accurate author attribution failed to prevent.

The whole sorry saga of the MMR hoax was revisited last week following the publication in The Guardian of an extract from Ben Goldacre's new book Bad Science. It reminded me that despite the claims that peer-review provides an iron-clad method of scientific validation, the facts are often never allowed to get in the way of a good story. In February 1998 The Lancet published a paper by the surgeon Andrew Wakefield on 12 autism spectrum children . Co-authored with twelve others, the paper did not claim a causal link between autism and the combination measles, mumps and rubella vaccine although it did suggest a possible new syndrome linking it to bowel disease and autism. In the wake of the report's publication however, Wakefield called a press conference following the distribution of a twenty minute video in which he claimed the link as proven. What followed was a barrage of celebrity endorsements of Wakefield buoyed up by the likes of The Daily Mail and The Sunday Telegraph resulting in a public health scare that ultimately put the health of young children seriously at risk. It subsequently transpired that Wakefield and a number of the children's parents had serious 'conflicts of intersest' not least of which were patent applications for new 'improved' vaccines and planned law suits against the MMR manufacturers.

All of which has left serious questions over The Lancet's peer review process. I'm not for one moment suggesting that editorial procedures at The Lancet resemble those on Wikipedia but I am questioning the dogmatic assumption that the scholarly review process is a guarantee of quality control. If anything, surely a more open approach to reviewing research would enhance the peer-review process. While the banishment of liars and cheats might be a little too much to hope for, scholarly investigation could only benefit.

A fly in the Open Access ointment

2008-09-01T15:53:00.005+01:00

The recent paper by Davis et al. questioning the citation advantage of OA continues to generate discussion and debate. Recent postings on Stevan Harnad's blog questioned the paper's metrics in terms of its narrow date range (between 1 and 1.5 years) and research focus (9 out of the 11 journals examined covered the biomedical sciences). It is no bad thing that the Open Access advantage is held up for scrutiny and that this continues to be so. David Flaxbert commenting on the paper makes a very good point that publishers hawking the little used author pays route to OA will claim that the OA advantage is a red herring because of the lack of take up.

Yet the paper was not just an empirical critique of the Open Access citation advantage deploying hard fact to back up its central thesis. Claims such as: 'Our finding that open access does not result in more article citations challenges established dogma.' and 'Subscription barriers are, in reality, porous.' make me slightly suspicious. I'm not alone. Dorothea Salo sees this as part of a campaign by publishers nervous about the implications of gold-OA. I can't say for sure but I think she's got a fair claim to call Philip M. Davis (PhD Student and recovering Science Librarian – his words not mine) a 'notable OA skeptic '.

Have you signed a chit for that?

2008-09-01T11:54:00.002+01:00

A bit of a milestone reached - I just got my first pair of glasses. Perfect distance vision apparently which hopefully means I'm still a decent shot.

City of Metaphor

2008-07-21T09:55:00.013+01:00

Last night I attended a performance by the writer Iain Sinclair as part of the Analog festival held in Dublin's docklands. I've long admired his constructions of an urban pathology that allow the psychic resonances of a city to emerge and wondered what this approach would reveal about Dublin. The performance was developed during a two week stay in the city with the writer undertaking a series of long Dublin walks. I had not been aware that he had been a student in Trinity College Dublin during the early sixties allowing him to refer to memory mappings from that period. His references to sixties Dublin revealed a city punctuated by cinemas where dreamtime vistas stretched like the panoramas of John Ford. Each observation was accompanied by soundscapes created by the musician, Susan Stenger. He uncovers the dark mysteries of the city not through rational or didactic investigations but through the unreliability of memory, the physical decay nestling among the new. It is a realm illuminated by art or faith not by the building blocks of discourse and investigation. Yet underpinning this endeavour is a medium allowing communication and transmission and I was saddened to find that a link posted on the festival website led me to the defunct journal Collective hosted by the BBC. The journal's editorial team signed off thus:

'We would like to thank everyone who has supported the site since it launched. From 2002 - 2008, Collective brought coverage of the most exciting new music, art, film, books and games to people in search of fresh culture in Britain. We aimed to celebrate genuine creativity and bring underground talent to the BBC's audience. We've been privileged to host intelligent comment about popular arts, culture and society in general for almost six years, and occasionally been able to help our community of users in creative collaborative projects. At its height Collective had around 250,000 dedicated users.'

Of cultural significance then and deserving of preservation. The journal was hosted as part of the h2g2 project to create an online open encyclopedia. A dot-com rebranding in 2001 of The Digital Village (TDV) production company, it was the brainchild of the author Douglas Adams and landed in the lap of the Beeb following the company's collapse during those torrid times. The service is interesting on a number of fronts not least being a two-tier approach to contributions one of which uses a form of peer-review. I am presuming that this service's content is covered by the BBC's policy regarding the preservation of digital resources but I don't know for sure. I will investigate and report.

To every cow her calf; to every book its copy

2008-07-08T12:05:00.018+01:00

The often contradictory declarations that publishers make regarding self-archiving have led me in the past to err on the side of approving a deposit when confronted with conditions that state on the one hand: 'On author's or employer's web site only' while on the other 'post-prints can only be deposited in public repositories with explicit permission of the publisher'.

Other hindrances are not so easy to vault over. I'm currently helping to clear an IR submissions backlog and sure as eggs is eggs continually getting halted at the 'publisher copy cannot be used' barrier. When I come across a submission that 'looks' like the publisher copy I check to see if the paper on the publisher's website is physically the same as the one the author has submitted to the IR. Straightforward enough you say but take just one journal's author guidelines as an example. Here the author is asked to submit the paper using a template that complies with the journal's standards regarding layout, fonts, etc. A strawpole of researchers reveals that the publisher template is often incorporated into the manuscript prior to the research paper being submitted for publication. So we have a situation where often the only copy of the research paper that the author possesses is that which is already formatted according to the publisher's specifications. This formatted manuscript draft is therefore the copy that gets passed between the editor and referees as part of peer review and any subsequent drafts arising out of the review recommendations will retain the publisher's format. So which is the author copy and which is the publisher copy? It appears to me to carry little legal weight that once an author drafts a paper according to the typographical guidelines of a specific journal, transmission of that information is now governed by copyright associated with the particular publication. Only after the paper has been published does his occur. So back to our problem of establishing the author copy for the purpose of self-archiving. The manuscript submitted for publication may be in the publisher's format and may incorporate any editorial recommendations but this does not constitute that it is camera ready. In this particular circumstance, a copy that is not camera ready seems the copy that best fulfills the conditions for deposit but identifying it from the prohibited publisher version can be tricky.

The Instituional Repository manager - change agent or a lark's tongue in aspic?

2008-07-06T19:42:00.007+01:00

Recently heard on the grapevine was that the good people at SHERPA are thinking of an IR roadshow presumably as part of the Repository Support Project.

Great idea! Anything that comes to the aid of the isolated repository manager has got to be a good thing. The role itself often seems to turn into a one (wo)man band operation waiting for incorporation into mainstream services or worse still, confined to the ghetto of the special project. I have visions of the hard-pressed IR manager focusing on those key areas of project development and service advocacy that need re-animation and forwarding the wish-list on to Nottingham. The team then arrive like the combined Avengers and sort the whole thing out. Senior management get galvanised, repository platforms get stabilised and library staff get rallied to the cause. Although sadly less dramatic if the idea is a runner I think the reality could be just as effective.