Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories

In the emerging eScience environment, repositories of papers, datasets, software, etc., should be the foundation of a global and natively-digital scholarly communications system. The current infrastructure falls far short of this goal. Cross-repository interoperability must be augmented to support the many workflows and value-chains involved in scholarly communication. This will not be achieved through the promotion of single repository architecture or content representation, but instead requires an interoperability framework to connect the many heterogeneous systems that will exist. We present a simple data model and service architecture that augments repository interoperability to enable scholarly value-chains to be implemented. We describe an experiment that demonstrates how the proposed infrastructure can be deployed to implement the workflow involved in the creation of an overlay journal over several different repository systems (Fedora, aDORe, DSpace and arXiv).Comment: 18 pages. Accepted for International Journal on Digital Libraries special issue on Digital Libraries and eScienc

Submission of content to a digital object repository using a configurable workflow system

The prototype of a workflow system for the submission of content to a digital object repository is here presented. It is based entirely on open-source standard components and features a service-oriented architecture. The front-end consists of Java Business Process Management (jBPM), Java Server Faces (JSF), and Java Server Pages (JSP). A Fedora Repository and a mySQL data base management system serve as a back-end. The communication between front-end and back-end uses a SOAP minimal binding stub. We describe the design principles and the construction of the prototype and discuss the possibilities and limitations of work ow creation by administrators. The code of the prototype is open-source and can be retrieved in the project escipub at http://sourceforge.ne

Eprints and the Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created as a practical way to promote interoperability between eprint repositories. Although the scope of the OAI has been broadened, eprint repositories still represent a significant fraction of OAI data providers. In this article I present a brief survey of OAI eprint repositories, and of services using metadata harvested from eprint repositories using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). I then discuss several situations where metadata harvesting may be used to further improve the utility of eprint archives as a component of the scholarly communication infrastructure.Comment: 13 page

Linking Literature and Data: Status Report and Future Efforts

In the current era of data-intensive science, it is increasingly important for researchers to be able to have access to published results, the supporting data, and the processes used to produce them. Six years ago, recognizing this need, the American Astronomical Society and the Astrophysics Data Centers Executive Committee (ADEC) sponsored an effort to facilitate the annotation and linking of datasets during the publishing process, with limited success. I will review the status of this effort and describe a new, more general one now being considered in the context of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, to appear in: Future Professional Communication in Astronomy II (FPCA-II

Preservation of Web Resources: The JISC PoWR Project

This paper describes the work of the JISC-funded PoWR (Preservation Of Web Resources) project which is developing a handbook on best practices and advice aimed at UK higher and further educational institutions for the preservation of Web sites and Web resources. The paper summarises the challenges institutions face in preserving Web resources, describes the workshops organized by the project in order to identify the challenges and identify appropriate best practices, and outlines areas in which further work is required

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

The Role of Evidence in Establishing Trust in Repositories

This article arises from work by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Working Group examining mechanisms to roll out audit and certification services for digital repositories in the United Kingdom. Our attempt to develop a program for applying audit and certification processes and tools took as its starting point the RLG-NARA Audit Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories. Our intention was to appraise critically the checklist and conceive a means of applying its mechanics within a diverse range of repository environments. We were struck by the realization that while a great deal of effort has been invested in determining the characteristics of a 'trusted digital repository', far less effort has concentrated on the ways in which the presence of the attributes can be demonstrated and their qualities measured. With this in mind we sought to explore the role of evidence within the certification process, and to identify examples of the types of evidence (e.g., documentary, observational, and testimonial) that might be desirable during the course of a repository audit.

Community next steps for making globally unique identifiers work for biocollections data

Biodiversity data is being digitized and made available online at a rapidly increasing rate but current practices typically do not preserve linkages between these data, which impedes interoperation, provenance tracking, and assembly of larger datasets. For data associated with biocollections, the biodiversity community has long recognized that an essential part of establishing and preserving linkages is to apply globally unique identifiers at the point when data are generated in the field and to persist these identifiers downstream, but this is seldom implemented in practice. There has neither been coalescence towards one single identifier solution (as in some other domains), nor even a set of recommended best practices and standards to support multiple identifier schemes sharing consistent responses. In order to further progress towards a broader community consensus, a group of biocollections and informatics experts assembled in Stockholm in October 2014 to discuss community next steps to overcome current roadblocks. The workshop participants divided into four groups focusing on: identifier practice in current field biocollections; identifier application for legacy biocollections; identifiers as applied to biodiversity data records as they are published and made available in semantically marked-up publications; and cross-cutting identifier solutions that bridge across these domains. The main outcome was consensus on key issues, including recognition of differences between legacy and new biocollections processes, the need for identifier metadata profiles that can report information on identifier persistence missions, and the unambiguous indication of the type of object associated with the identifier. Current identifier characteristics are also summarized, and an overview of available schemes and practices is provided