Towards Easy Deposit: Building a System to Automate Green Open Access

This proposal describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improves user experience of deposit for institutional repository. Background: Ineffective marketing and the lack of author participation are the most significant barriers that hinder green open access. Introduction: Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries are tasked to implement university’s open access policy via its institutional repository. In previous, OSU Libraries dedicated an entire staff position to the solicitation and deposit of faculty research articles produced by OSU faculty. In order to free up these staff resources for other work, we implemented a semi-automated deposit system called Easy Deposit 2. Methodology: Easy Deposit 2 harvests metadata for journal articles authored by OSU faculty using Web of Science API, parses and fetches metadata, and sends a solicitation email to the corresponding author for each article, including a link to a deposit form in Easy Deposit 2. The author can then use the link to deposit a copy of the article manuscript into university’s institutional repository. Conclusion: Since launched in October 2018, Easy Deposit 2 has harvested 1,172 journal articles and 176 out of them have been self-archived by the authors - a rate somewhat lower than when we manually solicited articles from faculty. We will continue to improve the system and have a further analysis after collecting more data

Are we still working on this? A meta-retrospective of a digital repository migration in the form of a classic Greek Tragedy (in extreme violation of Aristotelian Unity of Time)

In this paper we present a retrospective of a 2.5 year project to migrate a major digital repository system from one open source software platform to another. After more than a decade on DSpace, Oregon State University’s institutional repository was in dire need of a variety of new functionalities. For reasons described in the paper, we deemed it appropriate to migrate our repository to a Samvera platform. The project faced many of the challenges one would expect (slipping deadlines, messy metadata) and many that one might hope never to experience (exceptional amounts of turnover and uncertainty in personnel, software, and community). We talk through our experiences working through the three major phases of this project, using the structure of the Greek Tragedy as a way to reflect (with Stasimon) on these three phases (Episode). We then conclude the paper with the Exodus, wherein we speak at a high level of the lessons learned in the project including Patience, Process, and Perseverance, and why these are key to technical projects broadly. We hope our migration story will be helpful to developers and repository managers as a map of development hurdles and an aspiration of success