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University of Tasmania

 

The University of Tasmania school of computing concluded that it needed to adopt an Open Access approach to publishing its research results. JISC recently endorsed the open access approach. The primary motivation is that the citation rate for papers published in open access journals is 2–5 times that for papers published in traditional journals. Similarly, printed PhD theses are accessed rarely, if ever, after they are catalogued. This led the school to establish a prototype Eprints repository in 2004, which currently contains about 1,400 papers. The school also saw an opportunity to improve the software (GNU ePrints) with add-on modules, giving it a profile in the open access world. Online access to research outputs will:

• raise the profile of the University
• make DEST reporting easier
• enhance the impact of the University’s research

After a demonstration of the prototype repository to the academic senate, the University decided to establish a university-wide prototype. The goal is to have the prototype in place by September 2005. At the moment, about 75% of the content is from the school of computing. The key problem is participation — perhaps 20% of academics will deposit voluntarily; 90% will comply if the university makes it mandatory. Alma Swan discusses this issue. There are 600 academic staff in 30 schools. At the most, there will be 4,000 new documents per year, including say 200 PhD theses. The key is to make submitting electronic copies of research outputs a routine part of research operation:

• build it into the thesis submission form
• link it to the recording of publications in the WARP system for DEST reporting
• build an Eprints search link into personal web pages, so the list of publications is always current
• target one school at a time, covering both early adopters and less computer-literate areas to build content by subject
• encourage schools to take responsibility for their own quality assurance (in at least one US repository, each paper carries the school logo)
• encourage staff to self-digitise significant older papers
• export to the State Library of Tasmania for long term storage, preservation and content migration

The University concluded that theses and papers should all be in a single repository. To allow the ADT program to harvest thesis records from the University’s repository, add-on software was written that generates a simple HTML file for each research thesis. This is required because the current ADT software uses web robots to harvest HTML metadata, rather than OAI-PMH; the ePrints software is OAI-PMH compliant. The add-on software is also used by the University of Melbourne.

The eprints software is trivial to install and fairly straightforward to customise. The main enhancement was to create a module that gives usage information to authors, with the aim of encouraging participation:

• downloads by time period
• analysis by document — abstract views, downloads, by country, by time period
• no list of ranked authors

The usage logs show that 4–5 times as many visitors find papers via a full-text search service (such as Google) as use the Eprints, ARROW or ADT gateways. Most searchers go straight to the document, bypassing the metadata page. For this reason, the prototype uses out-of-the-box LC default subject headings, rather than adding the ASRC scheme.

In looking at software options before deciding on eprints for its institutional repository, the University concluded:

• DSpace and ePrints are the only real contenders
• Fedora is high risk as it is not widely used
• for a straightforward repository of papers and theses, use eprints
• if you need other services to the community, use DSpace
• eprints is low cost and simple to run — this was particularly important as resources are scarce

The priorities for the next 2 years include:

1. engage with 10 representative schools
2. create access to topic-based special research collections
3. enable new publishing services — such as virtual monographs which use the Web to extend and enhance the printed monograph
4. use the research repository to create learning objects for the wider education community, such as schools
5. potentially accept research outputs from other, smaller Tasmanian institutions

Achieving this means continuing to deal with questions. Not everyone understands the implications of the shifts in scholarly communication towards open access. Quality assurance is critical: the repository must enhance the University’s scholarly image. Is investing in a repository the best use of the University’s scarce funds? Alma Swan’s summary of the issues is that:

• authors are beginning to understand the relationship between OA and impact and are already trying to provide OA to their work by putting articles on their own websites
• self-archiving in an IR is a much more systematic way of doing this and this method has shown the greatest growth in activity over the last year (presumably as the number of available IRs has increased as well as author awareness of this possibility increasing)
• authors have no objection to being required to deposit their work in IRs

The University of Tasmania has made a proposal to assist with establishing New Zealand repositories. It has proposed a co-ordinated push over all New Zealand universities by offering a start-up service to enable each university in New Zealand to have an OAI presence in under 6 months. This has the initial aim of putting all New Zealand research on the global map, and the long term aim of increasing the global impact of New Zealand research. New Zealand institutions may also wish to follow the Guidelines on Implementing the Berlin OA Declaration.

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