Revealing a new Dynamic: Interaction in an Open Access Archive

The talk will show that open access works for authors and users, and reveals some new aspects of the social life of an eprint archive. Illustrating software and services developed as part of the Open Citation Project, and using data from our associated studies of arXiv user behaviour, it will be shown that a new 'dynamic', the speed of interaction between users, becomes evident when access to full resources is free, open and unrestricted. This is important for all those who are building open archives, and for those who are tentatively moving towards building open archives (e.g. the biomedical community)

Revealing a new Dynamic: Interaction in an Open Access Archive

The talk will show that open access works for authors and users, and reveals some new aspects of the social life of an eprint archive. Illustrating software and services developed as part of the Open Citation Project, and using data from our associated studies of arXiv user behaviour, it will be shown that a new 'dynamic', the speed of interaction between users, becomes evident when access to full resources is free, open and unrestricted. This is important for all those who are building open archives, and for those who are tentatively moving towards building open archives (e.g. the biomedical community)

Evidence of Hypertext in the Scholarly Archive

Quantitative studies of archive use by researcher

PRESERV: Preservation Services for OAI-Compliant Repositories

The OAI-PMH has become the de-facto standard for exposing metadata. In the PRESERV project we have explored new models for enabling thedigital preservation of and long-term access to content in Institutional Repositories (IRs). We envision digital preservation being achieved through simple preservation services working with standards-based, interoperable repository software. As support for the OAI-PMH matures so repositories are providing more robust mechanisms to access their content through OAI, e.g. community standards for using Dublin Core, support for METS or DIDL. Based on this, we have developed an exemplar File Format Profiling tool in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), utilizing OAI and PRONOM DROID. PRONOM-ROAR is a first step to preserving digital content through simplifying content file format management for IR Managers by providing file format profiles and alerts

Preservation for Institutional Repositories: practical and invisible

With good prospects for growth in institutional repository (IR) contents, in the UK, due to the proposed RCUK policy on mandating deposit of papers on funded work, and internationally due to the Berlin 3 recommendation, it is timely to investigate preservation solutions for IRs. The paper takes a broad view of preservation issues for IRs - based on practice, experience and visions for the future - from the perspective of Preserv, a JISC-funded project. It considers preservation in the context of IRs. Based on the OAIS preservation model, an architecture is proposed to support distributed preservation services for IRs. Work performed so far involves adapting the IR user deposit interface in a pilot version of EPrints software for building IRs, and determining accurate file format information using Pronom software. The paper looks ahead briefly at the role of preservation service providers, working for the IR, within this architecture. The strategy is to take practical steps that are, as far as possible, invisible to all but those concerned with the preservation process for IRs

Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments

We describe “digitometric” services and tools that add value to open-access eprint archives using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Celestial is an OAI cache and gateway tool. Citebase Search enhances OAI-harvested metadata with linked references harvested from the full-text to provide a web service for citation navigation and research impact analysis. Digitometrics builds on data harvested using OAI to provide advanced visualisation and hypertext navigation for the research community. Together these services provide a modular, distributed architecture for building a “semantic web” for the research literature

PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services

To date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs