Environmental Scan and Review of Literature

This environmental scan and review of literature focusses on developments from 2007 onwards.

1.  Current work and future developments

The most current literature focuses mainly on consortia and national repository efforts. These efforts are largely in response to and supported by government initiatives at national and international levels to harness the outputs of research communities. Against this background, the literature also highlights the issues surrounding repositories at the contributing institutional level that have not been adequately addressed, including problems with recruitment of content, interoperability, quality of metadata, funding, user interfaces, ease of deposit, and lack of strategic planning. The Primary Research Group (2007) study provides considerable detail about the variation between fifty three repositories run by educational and research organisations in a number of countries (including two from New Zealand).

There is very little literature addressing the current state of play or future direction of repositories in New Zealand, even with the recent introduction of the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS). Overwhelmingly, the literature highlights the Australian experience, with repositories being a key focus of the VALA conference held in Melbourne in February of 2008.

2.  The future of scholarly communication

The literature on repositories over the last year largely explores the changing nature of research activities and scholarly communication, and the technology that supports this change. Burton et al. (2008) believe that it is applications like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook that are setting the benchmarks for the future of scholarly communications. They envisage a world where “the barriers to sharing and exchanging digital scholarship and information are radically lowered. The world we are undoubtedly moving toward is one of web-based ‘mash-ups’; that is, networked software applications that can combine data in real-time from multiple service providers in ways that are user-friendly, yet powerful”.

Burton (2007) and Henty (2007), both from Australia, discuss the significance of ‘e-research’ to the national agenda, and the development of technology that will support this paradigm. The Research Information Network (2007) in the United Kingdom has published a statement of principles “Research and the scholarly communications process: Towards strategic goals for public policy” to enable Government to develop policy to support effective scholarly communications, including the development of repositories.

In the report ‘The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarhip’ Arms and Larsen (2007) state that “During the past 20 years, scientific and scholarly information has moved from physical media to digital forms. The first generation of digital libraries and online datasets used the new technology to mimic previous practices. We are now seeing the next phase: the emergence of new forms of scientific discovery and scholarly research that were previously impossible”. These new approaches might be called ‘cyberscholarship’.

These passages illustrate the predicted future direction of the research environment and underpin the literature promoting national and international collaboration through consortia of institutional and subject repositories. The various projects identified in the literature are outlined below, followed by specific issues regarding institutional repositories.

In New Zealand, the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS) website was released in 2008. It is promoted as a gateway to the open-access research documents produced at universities, polytechnics, and other research institutions throughout New Zealand. The Kiwi Research Information Service and the nzresearch.org.nz website grew out of a project at The National Library of New Zealand called the National Research Discovery System Project. Coda, Ira and OARiNZ represent 20 different universities and polytechnics, who were the National Library’s initial collaborators in the project. The Ira Project (implemented 3 IRs at Auckland, Canterbury and Victoria) was completed in August 2007. For more information, please refer to the section on New Zealand repositories.

3.  International perspectives

Australia

The Research Quality Framework (RQF) is an Australian Federal Government Initiative designed to measure the quality and impact of Australian research, as part of a larger research management effort administered by the Australian National Data Service ANDSTechnical Working Group (2007). The RQF relied on local institutional repositories for the provision of access to research outputs. To support the establishment of repositories the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) funded proposals that would “help promote Australian research output and build the Australian research information infrastructure through the development of distributed digital repositories and the common technical services supporting access and authorisation to them” Groenewegen and Treloar (2007). The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project thus came into existence.

The ARROW Project worked with VTLS to develop a supported repository software that has, so far, been licensed by fifteen of the thirty-nine universities in Australia. The ARROW community was also established to provide support and share information between institutions using the software. A further project, the Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotations e-Research Technologies (DART) project, investigated the most appropriate response to the challenges inherent in new forms and producers of raw data, new forms of collaborative research activity, new forms of publication, and new forms of research validation Treloar (2007). A successor project, the Australian ResearCH Enabling EnviRonment (ARCHER) is building on the DART deliverables and developing data acquisition and management tools Groenewegen and Treloar (2007). Further work was undertaken by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) in 2007 on the Repository Interoperability Framework (RIFF). The framework basically defined scholarly workflows and developed software services to fit with these workflows.

Many of the projects discussed are not currently active. The ARROW project was funded until the end of 2007, and the RQF has recently been abandoned. The RQF had been the motivation for many universities to develop their repositories. The newly elected Federal government has not specified a new scheme for accessing research, so it is uncertain whether repositories will continue to be the main forum Kingsley (2008).

U.S. and U.K.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States and the British Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) held a workshop in April 2007 to discuss the findings of recent cyberinfrastructure reports to identify opportunities and strategies for managing information created and used by researchers and scholars in the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The fundamental conclusions of the workshop were:

• The widespread availability of digital content creates opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from traditional ways of using academic publications and research data. We call this “cyberscholarhip”.
• The widespread availability of content in digital formats provides an infrastructure for novel forms of research. To support cyberscholarship, such content must be captured, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly different from conventional methods Arms and Larsen (2007).

Networks of institutional repositories are obviously well-placed to fulfil the requirements of cyberscholarhip.

Europe

OpenDOAR lists over 900 open access repositories worldwide. Approximately half of them are based in Europe, most of which are institutional repositories. Across Europe many more repositories are being set up and supported by national and regional initiatives such as the Repositories Support Project (UK) and IREL-Open (Ireland) Feijen et al. (2007). DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) is an EU funded project that sets out to build a testbed for a future knowledge infrastructure of the European Research Area, it has ten partners from eight EU countries, and is the largest initiative of its kind. DRIVER grew out of the need for a unified approach to managing the challenging and evolving repository landscape, aiming to ensure ‘a high level of interoperability across repositories and allow the development and improvement of retrieval services providing fast and efficient retrieval of content’ Feijen et al. (2007).

Shared resources/ Federated searching

Estland and Neatrour (2007) cite Clifford Lynch who predicted that future institutional repositories would consist of consortial repositories or use ‘federating’ for searching across repositories and involve public organisations that are not necessarily academic libraries. Although they find little evidence that this is the case, the current literature largely deals with projects and initiatives whose focus is shared resources, interoperability, and aggregated searching. Estland and Neatrour (2007) believe that as the deployment of institutional repositories becomes mature, more libraries will take advantage of consortial or regional ties to provide support, training, and expertise in IR development. The move away from silos of information, to national and international developments is a trend that has been both predicted and encouraged in the literature Jones (2007) and Burton et al. (2008).

Utah Digital Repository Initiative

The Utah Digital Repository Initiative was developed to provide a support system for institutions building institutional repositories. The initiative provides a website which allows users to search aggregated metadata of multiple institutions. The framework of support ensures that an academic library of any size can launch a repository. Through providing a unified way to search all of these resources, the State of Utah is able to showcase its higher education materials.

Estland and Neatrour (2007) state that to date very few consortial repositories have been created and most rely on Google for cross-repository searching. The future challenge for the Utah Digital Repository Initiative will be to create an effective and user friendly search mechanism across digital libraries, newspapers, manuscripts finding aids and digital repositories.

The federated approach to repositories is also a challenge in Australia and developing this capability amongst the national network that already exists has yet to be achieved Blackall (2007).

Technical developments for greater interoperability and preservation

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) was developed with funding from the JISC, and was made available in March 2007. The project arose through discussions about the lack of a standard mechanism for deposit. SWORD will allow for deposit into multiple repositories from remote locations in a standard way and has been developed to include use within generic java server, DSpace, Fedora and EPrints environments Allinson et al. (2008).

Another interoperability measure, the development of PLQL (ProLearn Query Language), is a new standard for querying learning repositories. It is a ‘query interchange format’ that accommodates the diversity of different repositories and their capabilities, by combining ‘exact’ and ‘approximate’ search terms Ternier et al. (2008).

Barnes (2007) discusses the development of the ‘Digital Scholar’s Workbench’ as a range of file format conversion and publishing services that overcome issues regarding document preservation.

At the same time that multiple projects are undertaken to increase the likelihood of data sharing at the regional, national and international level, the literature also discusses some identified shortcomings and challenges for repositories at the institutional level.

4.  Issues

Content recruitment

Carr and Brody (2007) state that the key to a successful repository is sustained deposits. To achieve sustained deposits, community engagement is necessary Henty (2007). The lack of community engagement evidenced by the difficulty in recruiting content for IRs highlights the fact that current work practices in scholarly communication need to be considered in the design of repositories. This, in turn, is problematic, as different practices exist in different academic disciplines. Kingsley (2008) states that there are different cultures between academic disciplines that will determine their willingness to deposit, and that in particular, the information-seeking behaviour of a cohort will determine the likelihood of individuals voluntarily embracing repositories. In general terms, an academic is most likely to seek deposit for their work in forums they would likely use seeking the work of peers and colleagues Kingsley (2008). There is an inherent conflict between the needs of the institution and those of academics “invisible colleges”, as repositories exist to serve the institution and funding bodies, rather than the individual.

Heath et al. (2008) have reviewed recent UK discussions and evidence about e-publishing and open access, and their impact and implications for researchers in the arts and humanities. They find that arts and humanities researchers differ in a number of ways in their use of library services. They are much less aware and make significantly less use of e-publications and open access services of all kinds. This may be partly because the pace of the advance of knowledge in the arts and humanities is typically slower than in other disciplines, and although timely access to the latest literature may still be important, researchers are more likely to be interested in the final versions of articles, or post-prints, rather than pre-prints. The pre-prints culture in the arts and humanities is much less developed, in some ways this could encourage deposit in institutional repositories, as the conflict with journal publishers may be mitigated. However, the reverse is usually the case. A related issue is the very long shelf-life of humanities journals Heath et al. (2008). Researchers may need to review relevant literature for a century or so back, thus the half-life of the use and citation of journals is typically much longer. One potential consequence is that publishers may be less willing to allow open-access posting of e-prints even after an embargo period. The authors note that in practice many journals do allow authors to make their material available through repositories, thus they are prepared to accept the risk of a fall in subscriptions, their willingness in some cases outruns the inclination of authors to self-archive Heath et al. (2008).

All respondents in the Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S. reported having difficulty recruiting content from faculty and grad students. The study found that the more mature the IR is, the more sceptical respondents have become about the success of any given recruitment strategy. The findings challenge IR definitions that posit IRs as an alternative tool for the current scholarly publishing model McDowell:2007(?). In the census, they could not identify any evidence of IRs influencing the traditional scholarly publishing paradigm as anticipated Rieh et al. (2007).

Local efforts to embed the repository within the research processes of an institution are not always successful. Feijen et al. (2007) suggest that what is needed is the embedding of repository use in research and research publication processes on a large scale.

Mandated vs voluntary deposit

Mandates for open access and deposit are proliferating internationally Thomas and McDonald (2007). The limited data available on mandatory-deposit repositories indicates authors represented in such repositories tend to contribute more of their intellectual output, as might be expected Cochrane and Callan (2007). The findings from a study of author/depositor distribution patterns within scholarly digital repositories favour institutional mandates Thomas and McDonald (2007).

The small number of items captured in IRs reflect worldwide trends. Voluntary use of IRs has stagnated at about 15% of total scholarly output Kingsley (2008). This has prompted some institutions to implement mandated deposit from their academics. In New Zealand, mandated deposit is required at some institutions by PhD and Masters degree students (namely Otago University and Auckland University).

The University of Minho found that the most effective measure in getting academics to deposit was to provide a financial incentive to the departments with the highest numbers of self-archived material Ferreira et al. (2008). They also found that the provision of value-added services, such as a statistics add-on, aided implementation of their IR, providing academics with downloading and access reports.

Single vs multiple repositories

Work at Monash University on repositories led to an acceptance that in some instances multiple repositories, albeit interoperable repositories, would better meet the needs of stakeholders than a single institutional repository. While implementing a single repository that is integrated, interoperable, and flexible was initially attractive, the approach was found to suffer from a range of implementation challenges and failed to provide adequate management solutions for data generated by researchers over the entire research lifecycle Harboe-Ree and Treloar (2008). Harboe-Ree and Treloar (2008) discuss the use of three types of repository domains – research, collaboration, and public – and suggest a further management concept, the curation boundary, which provides a mechanism for determining when and how objects can be moved between the domains.

The Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S. Rieh et al. (2007) found that one quarter of institutions pilot-testing or implementing an IR have two or more IRs available to their institution’s learning community. Rieh et al. (2007) ask what will happen at institutions with multiple IRs. They note that it appears the majority of institutions have not yet decided their IR’s focus in terms of digital content and its recruitment, or even which particular directions to take. Lack of strategic planning is an issue in these cases.

Funding

A related issue to the lack of strategic direction and planning, is the issue of funding for IRs. The typical approach to funding is through a special initiative fund, or by absorbing its cost in routine library operating costs. From the perspective of sustainability, the lack of a strong funding model could potentially be a problem for IRs. “Given the fact that most IRs promise long-term preservation to their community, limited funding based on simple reallocation from library budgets could possibly hinder future migration of IR content and metadata to new versions of current systems as well as to entirely new systems” Rieh et al. (2007, p.11). Responsibility for the long-term management of research data is often ill-defined, with no clear guidelines for administrative responsibility Henty (2007).

Institutional vs subject repositories

There is also a case for using subject repositories as the prime destination for research data, where curation and preservation may bring particular challenges Heath et al. (2008). Heath et al. (2008) note that researchers are not interested so much in the research outputs of a particular institution, but rather what is available in a particular field. They argue for effective mechanisms for harvesting and cross-searching, and much better arrangements for interoperability between different datasets, and between data and publications.

Metadata

The APSR highlight the importance of metadata-rich applications to the future of institutional repositories. A range of projects were undertaken in 2006–2007 in the areas of digital preservation, repository interoperability, and collection-level discovery services Burton et al. (2008). The aim of these projects were to improve metadata creation, management and sharing within the Australian higher education and research sector, in general through extending the metadata capabilities of repositories, but also overlapping with trends in the Web 2.0 space. For repositories to be effective in this space, Burton et al. (2008) dictate that they must provide first class service, and this will only be achieved through the collection, curation and preservation of good metadata.

In New Zealand, there are plans to set up a working party to look at metadata standards nationally, and to align them with international standards (Institutional Repositories mailing list, 2008).

User interface and accessibility of data

A study of the findings from the Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S. found that overall IR system functionality is satisfactory, but user interfaces, including controlled vocabulary searching and authority control, need serious reworking Rieh et al. (2007).

Feijen et al. (2007, p.1) also note that researchers and other users of digital information have high expectations for the provision of digital content. “Retrieval should be fast, direct, and versatile. Ideally, retrieval of full text should be just one click away”. The current state of institutional repositories does not fully support these expectations. While there are many services that search and retrieve bibliographic records, the resource itself is sometimes hidden behind several intermediate pages, obscured by authorisation procedures, not fully presented, or not retrievable at all.

Version identification

Puplett (2008) discusses the number of potential versions created as part of a contemporary research project, and the potential number of relationships between iterations, variations, and manifestations. This is further complicated by projects with co-authorship and collaborative work. Puplett (2008) suggests that versioning problems arise from reader confusion over the publication status of the content they find in a repository. The most significant issue for repository managers then, is how best to organise these multiple versions, and how best to describe them so they can be properly found. Decisions also need to be made over which version should be ingested. Academics often want the final version alone to be ingested (which raises the issue of updating or replacing versions), whereas repository managers prefer to ingest everything to reflect the research process. There are also issues with software limitations, such as the inability to store items in anything other than linear relationships, or provide links between different file formats of the same item. Suggested taxonomies to define version status have also been found to be problematic. The Version Identification Framework (VIF) project is developing a framework for the identification of versions of digital objects in repositories and securing community acceptance of the recommendations.

5.  Summary

The literature clearly identifies strong interest from Governments and national organisations in developing frameworks that support research capability, equally the literature identifies the significance of technology and innovation, and developments of e-research tools, to enhance this capability. There are many issues identified regarding institutional repositories that have yet to be addressed that could very well hinder the success of wider endeavours in this field. There is also a gap in the literature identifying the future direction for repositories in New Zealand and also in Australia, with the abandonment of the RQF.