D-Lib Magazine
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The Magazine of Digital Library Research
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D-Lib Magazine

January/February 2012
Volume 18, Number 1/2
Table of Contents

 

SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios

Stuart Lewis, The University of Auckland Library
stuart@stuartlewis.com

Pablo de Castro, GrandIR
pcastro@grandir.com

Richard Jones, Cottage Labs
richard@cottagelabs.com

doi:10.1045/january2012-lewis

 

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Abstract

The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol was designed to facilitate the interoperable deposit of resources into systems such as repositories. The use of an interoperable standard eases the burden of developing clients to deposit such resources. This paper examines nine different deposit use cases, and provides case studies and examples of each use case to demonstrate the wide range of repository deposit scenarios. The use cases range from the deposit of scholarly communication outputs from a publisher to a repository and the automatic deposit of data from laboratory equipment, to inter-repository transfer and collaborative authoring workflows.

 

Introduction

Digital Repositories have the ability to be integrated into the life blood of research. They can collect, manage, preserve, and make available research outputs. Research outputs cover a vast range of object types, including journal articles, books and chapters, data sets, rich media, and many others. Movements such as Open Access and funder mandates have pushed digital repositories as central storage and access points to the dissemination of these research outputs.

One of the keys to a successful digital repository is integrating with the research institution in ways that ensure it is able to easily and efficiently capture the research outputs as near to the source of their creation as possible. The SONEX working group [1] have been working to understand the use cases where digital repositories can embed themselves within the scholarly communications lifecycle to capture these outputs. In order to integrate with a digital repository, other systems require a standardised method of depositing digital content. The digital repository community has developed the SWORD protocol for this. SWORD is a profile of the AtomPub Internet standard for depositing digital content, with additional features that allow it to work effectively with scholarly materials. Through the work of SWORD v1 and the new SWORD v2, the use cases collected by SONEX can be fulfilled. This paper describes the different use cases, how they fit into the scholarly lifecycle, and how SWORD facilitates them.

 

SWORD

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) was first developed in 2007 to address the need for a standardised deposit interface to digital repositories [2]. Thanks to funding from the JISC, the project team — made up of UK repository experts — developed the SWORD protocol, and implemented it for the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, and Intralibrary repository platforms. SWORD is based on the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), a widely adopted standard within blogging and other content web sites. AtomPub is designed to be extended for particular uses, allowing SWORD to provide extensions for the requirements posed by digital repositories. The SWORD protocol issued several new minor versions based on user feedback and experiences [3].

SWORD v2 was designed and implemented in 2011 with further funding from the JISC. Its aim was to further extend the support for AtomPub by supporting the whole of the deposit lifecycle. It does this by providing mechanisms to not only deposit resources, but also to update, replace, and delete them (See Video introduction to SWORD v2). Without these extra features, many of the following use cases would not be possible using SWORD.

 

SWORD Deposit use cases

A use case describes a possible interaction between people and systems. The following use cases each describe a different scenario for embedding repository deposit into different aspects of the scholarly lifecycle - the movement of knowledge during the process of research. The use cases were identified jointly by the SONEX and SWORD projects through their interaction with repository communities.

  • Use case 1: Publisher to Repository
  • Use case 2: Research Information System to Repository
  • Use case 3: Desktop to Repository
  • Use case 4: Repository to Repository
  • Use case 5: Specialised Deposit User Interface to Repository
  • Use case 6: Conference Submission System to Repository
  • Use case 7: Laboratory equipment to Repository
  • Use case 8: Repository Bulk Ingest
  • Use case 9: Collaborative authoring

Case studies and further examples are given for each use case. The case studies have been provided by additional authors who either currently use SWORD, or whose systems would be suitable for SWORD. The case studies and extra links are provided to show real-life examples of the use cases in action.

 

Use case 1: Publisher to Repository

Given the increasingly common funder mandates for open access availability of research, as well as a grass-roots drive towards open access in higher education, the ability to move content directly from the publisher environment to a digital repository is increasingly attractive. The publisher has definitive bibliographic metadata regarding the publication, as well as the content itself (possibly with supporting materials such as datasets). Meanwhile, an institutional repository has sufficient information to tie the bibliographic information to user and administrative data internally, giving the opportunity to create a rich archive; if the publisher can supply the content then the repository will not only be a valuable resource but will also help authors meet their funder mandates.

SWORD can be used by the publisher to push content into the repository in a fire-and-forget fashion. The publisher also has the option to engage in a more complete deposit lifecycle. For example, newly published content could be archived immediately in the repository with an embargo set so that the content is not published until the copyright policy permits it. The publisher could then return when the embargo has expired to authorise publication of the material, or return periodically and request information about the item to ensure that its policy requirements have been met. Alternatively the publisher could archive the metadata of the item immediately, and return at a later date following an embargo period to update the record with the content.

Case Study: BioMed Central and MIT
By: Richard Rodgers, Head of the Software Development Group, MIT Libraries

Following the establishment in 2009 of the MIT faculty's Open Access Policy, members of MIT's library started talking to publishers who allowed the legal posting of final published versions of journal articles. In order to make the capture of these outputs as easy as possible for the faculty, they worked with BioMed Central, who are one such publisher, to achieve efficiencies by automating the deposit process direct from the publisher to the repository, without the need for any input from the faculty member. In addition, it reduces the workload in the library by automating the collection of complete and accurate metadata.

The process works by BioMed Central selecting items that appear to be created by MIT-affiliated authors, and which fit the criteria of the MIT open access collection policy. When items match, they are deposited using SWORD into the MIT repository along with their metadata.

See: Duranceau E F, Rodgers R (2010). Automated IR deposit via the SWORD protocol: an MIT/BioMed Central experiment. Serials, 23(3), pp: 212-213. doi:10.1629/23212

 
 

Case Study: Annals of Geophysics and Earth-Prints by INGV
By: Andrea Marchitelli, CILEA

Earth-prints was born in 2005 as the institutional and disciplinary open archive of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV). Its aim is to maximise research impact, to promote communication between scientists and the public, to provide wider dissemination of contents in a specialized community and to make research results in geosciences more openly known. The efforts of INGV librarians and researchers, DSpace customised features, CILEA's technical support and INGV's institutional commitment contributed to make Earth-prints a rich and high-value tool for research assessment and the first Italian repository in the Ranking Web of World Repositories. In 2010, INGV's open access policy concentrated on the international journal Annals of Geophysics. The journal moved online to the Open Journal Systems platform at the beginning of 2010, also with CILEA's technical support. Recently, the journal has experienced an increase in submissions, site visits and downloads of published articles.

Once an issue of Annals of Geophysics is published, the contained articles are automatically sent to the DSpace, via SWORD protocol, for preservation and alternative diffusion purposes.

See: OJS
See: Repository

 
 

Case Study: Open Access Repository Junction
By: Theo Andrew and Ian Stuart, EDINA

The JISC funded Open Access Repository Junction aims to simplify the process of publisher to repository deposit by facilitating two processes:

The first process is to act as a broker between publishers and repositories. Rather than each publisher having to manage one-to-one relationships with many repositories, they can manage a single relationship with the Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ). The OA-RJ could in turn manage one-to-one relationships with the repositories. When a paper is ready for deposit by the publisher, the publisher can deposit it once with the OA-RJ broker service, who can then deposit it in the repository. This can minimise the number of relationships for most parties, as each publisher or repository only needs to manage the single relationship with the broker server.

The second process is to facilitate multiple deposit. Based on information from the publisher, the broker can choose where to deposit, with choices including the institutional repository of each of the authors, subject-based repositories, and funder repositories. The current version of the broker only parses author affiliation to determine appropriate institutional repository targets. The intention is that future versions of the broker will be able to decide which variants of the options are possible based on author affiliation, subject, and sponsor information about an item.

See: OA-RJ

 
 

Case Study: The PEER Project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research)
By: Laurent Romary, INRIA

The objective of the European Commission-funded PEER Project is to study the impact of large scale green open access on the ecology and economics of scholarly publishing. In this context, the project has developed a portal (or PEER Depot) to aggregate scholarly publishers' data (metadata with author's manuscript as PDF file), which come in in various formats, normalise the representation as a TEI-based (Text Encoding Initiative) structure and automatically deposit the information further in several publication repositories (among them the Göttingen State and University Library, Max Planck Society, University of Bielefeld, Kaunas University of Technology, University Library of Debrecen and Trinity College Dublin Institutional Repositories, besides Koninklijke Bibliotheek Amsterdam specific repository for preservation purposes).

The SWORD interface has actually been implemented to allow this deposit of XML/TEI representation together with the associated PDF files.

Figure showing SWORD interaction between PEER Depot and repositories
Figure: SWORD interaction between PEER Depot and repositories

See: D2.2 Final report on the provision of usage data and manuscript deposit procedures for publishers and repository managers

 
 
 

Use case 2: Research Information System to Repository

Research Information Systems are often sources of good bibliographic metadata regarding publications and other institutional assets (such as laboratory equipment), and are often well embedded in the user's working environment because of their importance for activities such as the national research reporting exercises. These systems often provide an enhanced user experience by offering structured file content storage alongside all their other data. Since the repository can offer such content storage, SWORD can be used to create a high quality storage service for the research system, while simultaneously fulfilling the archiving and open access goals of the library.

There are two possible approaches that can be undertaken with SWORD. The user may upload files one at a time through an interface in the research information system which passes them directly through to the repository. The research system is therefore able to create and update the item in the repository, and then when displaying the file content to the user, the system will retrieve it directly from the repository in a Retrieve operation. The user may also later wish to remove files or replace files. The other possibility is that the research system offers its own storage solution, but synchronises with the repository periodically. This could consist of multiple push operations using SWORD to send entire packages of content over to the digital repository, which must then be able to create or update the items.

Case Study: JISC RePosit project
By: Lizzie Dipple, Symplectic Ltd

In the JISC-funded RePosit project, five institutions — University of Leeds, University of Exeter, Keele University, University of Plymouth and Queen Mary, University of London — have collaborated with Symplectic Ltd to investigate methods of increasing academics' engagement with repositories through a simplified deposit model. Symplectic's Repository Tools product connects each institution's CRIS (Symplectic Elements) with its repository (provided by DSpace, EPrints or IntraLibrary), allowing the depositor to simply 'click' on an item in Elements and choose to attach and upload their full-text file into the repository, using the metadata provided by the CRIS. The interface also provides SHERPA/RoMEO copyright information, helping researchers to make informed decisions about what to deposit. In most cases the Repository Tools connection has gone live at around the same time as the institutional repository, meaning that this is the only deposit model that users have known.

Via advocacy campaigns and in training sessions, the project group demonstrate the ease with which deposit is made. They are running a survey to find out more about the incentives for, and barriers to, deposit via this method and have provided a forum for discussion and sharing of experiences on related topics.

See: RePosit

 
 

Case Study: Research@StAndrews
By: Janet Aucock and Anna Clements

The essence of the strategy in use in St Andrews to acquire full text material for its digital repository is to integrate deposit within the framework of a CRIS and an Open Access repository.

St Andrew's uses the PURE system supplied by Atira and managed by the Research Policy Office. In terms of workflow the CRIS is the primary system for collecting bibliographic metadata for publications. Repository staff monitor the research outputs added to Pure by researchers, carry out standard copyright checking and quality control tasks and trigger the transfer of full text research outputs to the Open Access repository Research@StAndrews which is a DSpace system hosted by SDLC and managed by the Library.

A very persuasive driver to promote the use of the CRIS is research assessment and the forthcoming UK REF exercise. In addition there is a strong institutional strategic need to manage all aspects of research and showcase that research to a wider audience. A key strategy has been reuse of data. The fully integrated repository becomes a layer, avoiding the competitive nature of collecting similar data and allowing researchers to concentrate on one interface and process. We are continuing to build on these drivers and create an environment which informs research staff about new models in scholarly communication and also encourages Open Access deposit. We have invested in new dedicated repository staffing. We initiate communication and still do advocacy training with researchers but the CRIS environment facilitates engagement and is a particular advantage. Rich data in the CRIS about research projects and funders is an asset in encouraging compliance with Research Council and funder policies on Open Access.

Repository services are becoming embedded into centralised research information management and this in turn is becoming embedded within the research community of the University.

See:

 
 

Other examples:

  • The DURA: Direct User Repository Access project, lead by the University of Cambridge with Mendeley Ltd and Symplectic Ltd as consultant firms, aims to embed institutional deposit into the academic workflow at almost no cost to the researcher, by using Mendeley and Symplectic tools to allow researchers to synchronise their personal research collections with institutional systems.
  • CRIS-OAR in the UK: the current situation
 
 
 

Use case 3: Desktop to Repository

Besides the ingest of published full-text documents into digital repositories as seen above, there is another use case for bringing (not just text-based) content into repositories from the author's desktop during preliminary phases of his writing. The SWORD protocol, aided by desktop client tools, allows for a direct work transfer from the desktop to a digital repository.

A desktop authoring environment has access to the author's content at a variety of stages in its lifecycle, as well as some limited metadata about that content. It is easy to imagine the author wishing to effortlessly submit content to his/her publisher, and be able to track the progress of the submission through the publication process. SWORD could be used to push content from the author's local environment into the publication workflow. Later, change requests and other feedback may come back from the publisher, and the author would be required to engage in an interactive workflow through review to final publication. Additionally, the author may wish to find out more detail about when the paper was published and perhaps obtain other associated information about the work.

By using the repository not just as a means for work discovery, but also as a storing tool, this archiving procedure also provides solutions for online document writing and editing by a group of authors. However, this use raises the issue of whether Open Access is a desirable alternative for this type of collaborative authoring. (See Use Case 9).

Case Study: MS Research Authoring Add-in for Word
By: Alex Wade

In order to improve search effectiveness, it is important to provide the means for authors to at least enter information about themselves and the article at authoring time, and for this information to be easily accessed by different tools, and for it to be preserved as part of the document throughout the publishing process and into the archived file. Capturing metadata directly from authors should increase the amount and accuracy of the information, as well as simplify the publishing workflow, by reducing the need for tagging of XML files during the publishing step.

The overall solution provided as part of this effort aims at:

  • Improving the ease of content discovery by enabling more metadata to be associated with articles as part of the writing process.
  • Simplifying the conversion process to and from the National Library of Medicine formats, which are increasingly being used for the archiving of articles, while preserving and providing access to metadata within Microsoft Word.
  • Simplifying the article submission process, by enabling document templates to present the required article structure to authors, and to associate a set of rules to validate the document before submission.

From Microsoft Article Authoring Add-in User Guide (Beta 3 Preview)

See also: Alex Wade, Digital Library Interoperability, slides 54-71

 
 

Case Study: DepositMO: Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits
By Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant

DepositMO is developing and trialling tools for repository deposit by authors of in-progress or just-completed works. Two tools have been used in initial tests: a pop-up interface for Word 2010 to enable direct deposit in a selected repository for the work being prepared in the application; and a more general Dropbox-like drag-and-drop tool that works with desktop file management systems such as Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. In the Word case deposit is accomplished without leaving the application. In the file manager case the object is dragged or copied to a 'watch folder' which runs a script to deposit the item in the repository.

When considering the requirements for deposit of in-progress work, the need for SWORD v2 becomes clear, with its support for more interactive communication with depositing authors, its facility for update, deletion and general file management capabilities.

Those initial project tests have used a demonstration EPrints repository with a SWORD v2 endpoint based on the current draft specifications, and this approach will be extended to provide a similar service for DSpace repositories.

What we have learned already is that authors depositing material in this way demand greater control and transparency from the deposit process, and that even apparently simple deposit processes can quickly become complex when analysed from the perspective of the range of actions possible, the types of materials that users could deposit, and the different requirements among users for metadata description. It's too early to say whether such tools will improve the usability, performance (speed) and impact (volume) of repository deposit, but it already seems likely that if such improvements can be shown, then the range of materials that authors will consider for deposit will widen significantly.

See: DepositMO and the future of SWORD

 
 
 

Use case 4: Repository to Repository

Several document filing processes call for repository-to-repository solutions. For instance, authors may often be obliged by several overlapping mandates to make their work simultaneously available in several institutional or discipline-specific digital repositories. Or, a corresponding author may file an article with her/his institutional repository, wanting it to be transferred automatically to the co-author's own repositories. Another situation where repository to repository deposit is useful is where an institution runs a dark or closed repository alongside an open repository. Items can be placed in the dark archive if they have to be restricted either permanently or temporarily. Once the temporary items can be made openly available, for instance if they are subject to an embargo which has expired, then they can be pushed from the dark archive to the open archive.

Other types of specialised information systems with inbuilt repository components can also make use of repository to repository deposits. Examples include Web Content Management Systems that wish to archive some file types for long term preservation in an external system, or Virtual Learning Environments that wish to publish their learning objects in institutional repositories to encourage their wider use.

An efficient system for submission management within a digital repository should be able to deal with repository-to-repository SWORD-assisted transfer by having set a previous target repository definition or using tools such as the broker developed by the Open Access Repository Junction Project.

Case Study: Open Access Repository Junction
By: Theo Andrew and Ian Stuart

The Open Access Repository Junction makes use of an intermediary repository that accepts SWORD deposits from publishers before again using SWORD to deposit them in relevent institutional, subject-based, or funder repositories.

The OA-RJ broker can choose where to deposit items. The current version of the broker only parses author affiliation to determine appropriate institutional repository targets. The intention is that future versions of the broker will be able to decide which variants of the options are possible based on author affiliation, subject, and sponsor information about an item.

See: OA-RJ Overview

 
 

Case Study: HyperArticle en Ligne (HAL) to arXiv transfer
By: Simeon Warner, Cornell Information Science and Cornell Library IT

arXiv implemented SWORD to replace an ad hoc automated upload interface. The interface is documented and has been used for over 5000 deposits. Early implementation experience was described in SWORD V1 Case Study — arXiv.

  • Submissions from arXiv's remote submission proxy HyperArticle en Ligne (HAL) in France are uploaded via SWORD on a daily basis. Over 4000 articles have been uploaded via this route.
  • The SWORD interface is also used to automate deposit from journals, both for archiving traditional journals (e.g. the journals of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, over 500 articles) and to use arXiv as the terminal point of an overlay journal workflow (e.g. Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science).

See: "SWORD in, SWORD out: A stab at arXiv as workflow component", Simeon Warner, Thorsten Schwander, OR2011

 
 
 

Use case 5: Specialised Deposit User Interface to Repository

Most repository platforms have an inbuilt deposit workflow that can be used to perform deposits directly into the repository. These deposit systems tend to be configurable to allow the deposit screens to be customised to suit a specific purpose. However, they are often still rigid in some ways, and require depositors to know where the repository is, how to use it, and have signed up for an account and had it authorised to perform deposits. For some specialised and high-throughput types of deposits, this makes the deposit process too hard.

Specialised deposit user interfaces can be created to assist in making these deposits easier. The interface can be customised precisely for the requirements of the depositor to collect the required metadata and digital content. Developing a specialised deposit user interface is usually more expensive than relying on the repository's inbuilt submission system, but for large-scale collection activities (for example, yearly electronic thesis deposit deadlines) this investment can be worthwhile.

Case Study: EasyDeposit
By: Leonie Hayes, Research Support Services Manager, The University of Auckland Library

Every year The University of Auckland Library collects digital theses for archiving in its institutional repository. Many of these are made available freely online using Creative Commons licences, with a small proportion requiring some type of embargo. Instead of requiring theses authors to create an account with the repository, and perform the deposit directly into the repository, a simple custom deposit interface specifically for digital theses was created. The interface uses SWORD to perform the deposit into the repository.

Thesis deposit metadata requirements are very simple: the student uses his/her institutional login to sign in, provides the thesis title, uploads the file, and chooses the appropriate access option. Creative Commons licences are available with useful guidance notes. Additional metadata is completed at a later date by the library cataloguing team.

The regulatory requirements around theses were extended to enable Masters students to deposit a digital copy for archiving in the Campus Only collection. The success of the deposit interface for digital PhD theses enabled the smooth transition for Masters theses. The flexible framework was used to apply alternative access requirements for Campus only access. EasyDeposit is the end result — a flexible and configurable open source deposit tool that can be setup to create different web-based custom deposit clients using the online administration tool. We are now able to create new customised deposit interfaces with very little work.

See: EasyDeposit

 
 
 

Use case 6: Conference Submission System to Repository

Conference proceedings are an important communication and publication venue in some disciplines, notably in computer science. As such, a useful source of items that can be automatically deposited into a repository are conference submission systems. These are typically used during the submission and review stages of a conference. By archiving the items submitted to the conference, a repository of papers presented can automatically be created.

Case Study: MS Research Conference Management Toolkit (CMT)
By: Simeon Warner, Cornell Information Science and Cornell Library IT

In collaboration with Microsoft, we have used the SWORD interface to allow automated upload of conference articles from the Microsoft Conference Management Toolkit and Microsoft eJournals. This facilitated the upload articles from the CIDR2009 conference, for example.

See: CMT Online Help (External Publishing link) for more information on the use of CMT for publishing conference papers to arXiv

 
 
 

Use case 7: Laboratory equipment to Repository

Digital Repositories can collect and store many types of content. As well as collecting research outputs such as journal articles or book chapters, they can also store raw experimental data. Many items of laboratory equipment now include interfaces to allow automatic capture of results in an information system. It is possible to upload this data directly into a repository without the requirement for human intervention. Data gathered this way can have additional advantages as the laboratory equipment may be able to report additional data (metadata) about the data collected, how it was collected, and the conditions in which is was collected.

Fully automated laboratories may go so far as collecting and preserving the data from complete experiments, including hypotheses, designs, environmental data, results, and videos of the experiment taking place.

Case Study: TARDIS dataset repository
By: Steve Androulakis

TARDIS is a federated metadata catalogue and repository with a focus on the publishing of large, scientific datasets. The internal database and storage mechanism was created from scratch using Python and the Django framework.

A complementary service for private data called MyTARDIS has been developed and deployed at instruments and facilities such as synchrotrons so researchers can manage and access their private data long before its publication. Metadata can be added to the catalogue via METS XML documents, sent via a RESTful web service. Instrument middleware can be scripted to automatically produce METS documents that are periodically sent to the MyTARDIS catalogue, describing new data. Eventually this data can be published to the TARDIS central index, also via a METS document transfer.

The METS XML implementation used here closely follows TARDIS' internal model of Experiments, Datasets and Datafiles and describes everything from the files and their logical structure, to the metadata parameters associated with datasets and files. Currently this format is specifically created for a TARDIS metadata catalogue, though a SWORD file-handler could easily be written to deal with this specific implementation of METS XML for any number of repositories (such as Fedora Commons). This would result in data following the TARDIS model being able to exist any number of different repositories that are currently deployed at universities and other institutions worldwide.

See: TARDIS

 
 

Other examples:

  • Repository for the Laboratory (R4L)
  • Robot-generated Open Access Data (ROAD)
 
 
 

Use case 8: Repository Bulk Ingest

Repositories often need to bulk ingest item from other sources. This can occur when items must be exported from another system into the repository for archival purposes. Other reasons include the import of a collection of materials that is complete, or the import of items that have been subjected to processing and are now ready for ingest.

Repository platforms often provide tools for performing bulk ingest of items, but this usually requires the items to be packaged and described in a format specific to the that repository. An alternative model is to use SWORD to ingest the items into the repository. If the packaging format used is supported by more than one repository platform, the underlying repository can be changed without having to re-write bulk ingest tools. Additionally, multiple ingests into different target repositories cant take place at the same time.

Use case 9: Collaborative authoring

The process of collaboratively authoring a paper has traditionally occurred offline, with authors passing the document amongst themselves using methods such as email. An alternative model is to store the paper in an information system whilst it is being developed. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint offer this functionality integrated directly in office productivity tools. However, an alternative model could be to store the developing article in a repository: either the final destination repository, or a local repository of working papers.

To perform collaborative authoring the author uses a client which saves the document into the repository. When updates are made, the document is updated in the repository. The client software being used by the collaborating authors poll the repository for updates, and when they see that the document has been updated, they retrieve a copy of the updated item.

Another form of collaborative authoring occurs when different authors contribute the various parts of a deposit package, perhaps made up of a data set, some supporting analysis files, and an article, for example, DepositMO.

 

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the contributors of each of the case studies, and for their time in reviewing the complete paper. Additionally they acknowledge the generous funding of JISC to both the SWORD v2 and SONEX initiatives, without which this work would not have been undertaken.

 

References

[1] Burnhill P, de Castro P, Downing J, Jones R, Sandfær, M (2010). Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: the SONEX Workgroup. Pre-proceedings of the 2nd DL.org Workshop "Making Digital Libraries Interoperable: Challenges and Approaches", p. 45-56 (Donatella Castelli, Yannis Ioannidis, Seamus Ross, eds.). Online at http://hdl.handle.net/10016/9257.

[2] Allinson J, François S, Lewis S (January 2008). SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit. Ariadne, Issue 54. Online at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/.

[3] Lewis S, Hayes L, Newton-Wade V, Corfield A, Davis R, Donohue T, Wilson S (2009). If SWORD is the answer, what is the question?: Use of the Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit protocol. Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol 43, Issue 4, pp: 407—418, doi:10.1108/00330330910998057, Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Online at http://hdl.handle.net/2292/5315.

 

About the Authors

Photo of Stuart Lewis

Stuart Lewis has worked with open repositories in various roles over the past six years. Currently he holds the position of Digital Development Manager at The University of Auckland Library in New Zealand. He is the Community Manager of the SWORD v2 project, which continues to develop the SWORD repository deposit standard. Stuart is one of the core developers and committers for the DSpace open source repository platform. He maintains the EasyDeposit SWORD client creation toolkit, and the Repository66 mashup map of open repositories. Prior to working in Auckland, Stuart worked in a UK university where he led a technical team that undertook funded research into open repositories, including open access and data repositories. He was a key player in the UK's JISC Repository Support Project (RSP), a support and guidance service to higher education institutions with respect to open repositories. Stuart blogs at http://blog.stuartlewis.com.

 
Photo of Pablo de Castro

Pablo de Castro has been working in the field of digital libraries and repositories since 2005. After performing institutional repository dissemination and Open Access advocacy at Carlos III University Madrid, Spain, he currently directs GrandIR, http://www.grandir.com/en/, a startup aiming to promote Open Access and support the setting up of Institutional Repositories he co-founded in Dec 2010. He previously worked as project manager for setting up and developing Digital.CSIC institutional repository for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), http://digital.csic.es/?locale=en. Since June 2009 he coordinates the JISC-funded SONEX workgroup for Scholarly Output Dissemination and Exchange, http://sonexworkgroup.blogspot.com/. SONEX first goal was to identify and analyse deposit opportunities (use cases) for ingest of research papers (and potentially other scholarly work) into the repository space, later providing a global picture of deposit within the JISC Deposit Project strand, from which it cooperates with SWORD, OA-RJ and other deposit -related projects.

 
Photo of Richard Jones

Richard Jones has been working, until recently, for a company producing a leading Research Information System and integrating it with a number of open source digital repository systems. He is a long term contributor to open source software, and in particular the DSpace repository platform of which he was a founder member of the committer group. During this time he has been involved with several interoperability standards, including holding the position of technical lead for the SWORD v2 project, and being on the OAI-ORE technical committee. He is an advocate of Open Access, and has written numerous articles on the subject, as well as co-authoring a book on a related topic. He has worked for a number of large HE institutions over the years, including the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bergen in Norway and Imperial College London.

 
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