Usage statistics are frequently used by repositories to justify their value to the management who decide about the funding to support the repository infrastructure. Another reason for collecting usage statistics at repositories is the increased use of webometrics in the process of assessing the impact of publications and researchers. Consequently, one of the worries repositories sometimes have about their content being aggregated is that they feel aggregations have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of statistics they collect. They believe that this potential decrease in reported usage can negatively influence the funding provided by their own institutions. This raises the fundamental question of whether repositories should allow aggregators to harvest their metadata and content. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of allowing content aggregations harvest repository content and investigate how to overcome the drawbacks

Anastasiou, Lucas

Knoth, Petr

Pearce, Samuel

English

Open Research Online

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsMy repository is being aggregated: a blessing or acurse?Conference or Workshop ItemHow to cite:Knoth, Petr; Anastasiou, Lucas and Pearce, Samuel (2014). My repository is being aggregated: a blessing ora curse? In: Open Repositories 2014 (OR2014), 9-13 Jun 2014, Helsinki, Finland.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© 2014 The AuthorsVersion: Accepted ManuscriptLink(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://or2014.helsinki.fi/Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukMy repository is being aggregated: a blessing or acurse?Petr Knoth, Lucas Anastasiou, Samuel PearceKnowledge Media instituteThe Open UniversityUnited KingdomAbstract. Usage statistics are frequently used by repositories to justify their value to the management whodecide about the funding to support the repository infrastructure. Another reason for collecting usage statistics atrepositories is the increased use of webometrics in the process of assessing the impact of publications andresearchers. Consequently, one of the worries repositories sometimes have about their content being aggregatedis that they feel aggregations have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of statistics they collect. They believethat this potential decrease in reported usage can negatively influence the funding provided by their owninstitutions. This raises the fundamental question of whether repositories should allow aggregators to harvesttheir metadata and content. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of allowing content aggregations harvestrepository content and investigate how to overcome the drawbacks.The purpose of repositories and the need for aggregationsRequests from repositories that try to avoid being harvested go clearly against the main principle of whyrepositories have been established as documented in the SPARC’s position paper on institutional repositories(Crow, 2002) ­ the primary goal of repositories is to open and disseminate research outputs to a worldwideaudience.The SPARC’s position paper specifically says:“For the repository to provide access to the broader research community, users outside the university must beable to find and retrieve information from the repository. Therefore, institutional repository systems must be ableto support interoperability in order to provide access via multiple search engines and other discovery tools.An institution does not necessarily need to implement searching and indexing functionality to satisfy thisdemand: it could simply maintain and expose metadata, allowing other services to harvest and search thecontent. This simplicity lowers the barrier to repository operation for many institutions, as it only requires a filesystem to hold the content and the ability to create and share metadata with external systems.”In summary, to fulfill their main purpose, repositories must allow external systems to harvest both the metadataand the content. Without the possibility of aggregating repository content, it would also not be possible to realisethe vision foreseen by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), which states:“Each individual repository is of limited value for research: the real power of Open Access lies in thepossibility of connecting and tying together repositories, which is why we need interoperability. In order to createa seamless layer of content through connected repositories from around the world, Open Access relies oninteroperability, the ability for systems to communicate with each other and pass information back and forth in ausable format. Interoperability allows us to exploit today's computational power so that we can aggregate, datamine, create new tools and services, and generate new knowledge from repository content.’’ [COAR, 2011]Is the open access market held back by protectionism?At the moment, the approach of many repositories is that they are designed to be friendly to a predefinedrestricted set of (typically commercial) aggregators, in particular Google, while they are shut to other third­partysystems. This creates an almost paranoid situation in which many open repositories are more open to closedcommercial systems than to the systems developed by the open access community itself.For example, the open access aggregator CORE  has this experience with the French repository Archimer ,1 2which is registered in OpenDOAR . Last year, the Archimer repository manager asked the CORE team not to3harvest their content on the grounds of protecting their own repository usage statistics. This is regardless of thefact that, as discussed in the next section, an entirely opposite outcome might actually be the result.While the CORE team has never received a similar request from a UK repository, which are the primary CORE’starget user group, this situation occasionally occurs with publishers and less frequently with repositories. Manyof the publisher systems provide content under some form of Creative Commons license allowing redistribution,such as CC­BY. These publishers are sometimes even proactively registered in DOAJ. For example, the requestnot to harvest content has been made in the past by the Eurasia journals that were registered in DOAJ andwhose license allowed redistribution, more specifically the content was licensed as CC­BY­SA. We have alsorecorded a similar request from the OTHES repository based at the University of Vienna, despite the universitystaff referring to the content as open access and the repository being registered in OpenDOAR.Restrictions on machine access to open access content seem to be a common practice in subject­basedrepositories (such as PubMed or Europe Pubmed ) as well as the systems of major commercial publishers. In4these situations, however, the reasons for not allowing machine access to open access content are (at least tothe public) unknown.This kind of protectionism is not only unethical and disadvantageous for the scholarly community and the public,Groom (2004) even suggests it might be illegal as it, among other things, triggers concerns of unfair competition.It is critical that the community recognises that the open access movement cannot be truly successful unlessthe infrastructure market is liberated from abusive/monopolistic practices.Can aggregations add value?The experience of the team around the CORE aggregator actually shows that the majority of repositories areaware of the benefits aggregations bring. This is evidenced by the fact that over the last three years we havereceived far more opt­in requests than opt­out. Overall, the main role of aggregations is to fulfill and support usecases, which cannot be satisfied by individual repositories. These use cases include a) harmonisedprogrammable access to all available OA metadata and content, which is needed to enable content re­use bynew services possibly utilising text­mining, b) transaction access allowing users to explore content acrossrepositories leading to an increased content visibility, for example, through cross­repository contentrecommendation or search and discovery tools, and c) analytical access to information allowing the monitoring ofcontent growth, new trends in scientific disciplines, etc (see (Knoth, 2012, 2013) for more details). Thus,aggregations should functionally complement repositories creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem.Can everybody win?Coming back to usage statistics, we believe that even without the existence of aggregations, the OA philosophydictates that the existence of multiple copies of an article on the Internet is not only permitted, but even1 http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/search2 http://archimer.ifremer.fr/3 http://www.opendoar.org/4 Both sites restrict access to the OA content to machines by predefining a list of agents that can harvestcontent through the website. Agents that are not in this list are disallowed access using the Robots ExclusionProtocol. There is no procedure or a set of criteria for getting added to this list. Our question about what an agentneeds to do to be added was left unanswered, suggesting the inclusion to the list is a result of some sort ofprotectionism. Nevertheless, Boonk (2005) argues that the Robots Exclusion Protocol does not have a legalstatus anyway, thus not respecting it cannot be legally enforced.beneficial. Multiple copies allow for better preservation , lower network latency, might increase visibility, provide5high re­use opportunities and keep the scholarly market free from monopoly. In addition, researchers seem tolike copying of articles.  Articles can thus be found on personal web pages or in systems, such as Mendeley orResearchGate. Spreading of multiple copies of OA content should therefore be seen as something positive.Consequently, there is a need for a truly distributed approach for acquiring OA usage statistics.In understanding of this context, we have realised that the whole issue of lost usage statistics can be resolved byattributing the usage from external systems (including aggregators) to the repositories of origin. We have testedthis approach with the IRUS­UK  service, which is available in the UK, however the same approach can be6applied universally.The implementationThe IRUS­UK software has piloted an authoritative service for benchmarking download statistics fromrepositories. Once the IRUS­UK software plugin is installed into a repository system, it informs the centralIRUS­UK server whenever there is a download request from the repository. The IRUS­UK server is equipped witha smart filtering mechanism to percolate all robots and crawler requests, producing clean comparative statisticsfor repositories.Figure 1: A scenario in which article downloads are attributed to the repository of origin even if the download isrequested from an aggregator.Our proposition is that the IRUS­UK software or a similar benchmarking can be installed also in aggregators.Since aggregators know the origin of the item, the benchmarking statistics can be adjusted on the IRUS­UK5 See, for example, the LOCKSS Program (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)6 http://www.irus.mimas.ac.uk/server so that the repositories do not lose any information about the usage of the repository items.CORE informs IRUS­UK usage monitoring service about every article download request by providing the article’sOAI identifier plus some additional metadata. The OAI identifier itself is sufficient for determining the article’sprovenance. Thus, IRUS­UK uses OAI to identify the repository of origin of the downloaded publication. Thedownload can then be attributed to repository statistics of the repository of origin.The download request is not delayed by the usage monitoring service update as it is issued in asynchronousfashion and there is no dependency of the usage monitoring service update to succeed before serving. In thecase of a network problem, usage updates are stored in a temporary buffer and pushed to the IRUS­UK serviceas soon as it is available, ensuring all download requests are tracked. (no danger of non­tracked traffic becausemonitor service went down).ConclusionThis paper discussed the paradox of repositories needing to disseminate open access content to a worldwideaudience, while keeping the repository usage statistics high to justify funding. Technically speaking, openrepositories must provide unrestricted access to both commercial and not­for­profit aggregators allowing them toeffectively harvest their content. We have experienced a few short­sighted approaches to tackle this problem inthe past.We propose a solution to this issue that satisfies both parties and consequently benefits the ecosystem ofrepositories and aggregators. This approach has been implemented in the UK by integrating IRUS­UK usagestatistics service with the CORE aggregator. Even though the IRUS­UK service is currently available only for UKrepositories, the approach can be extended worldwide.References[Crow, 2002] Crow, R. (2002). The case for institutional repositories: a SPARC position paper.ARL Bimonthly Report 223[Bonk, 2005] Boonk, M. L., de Groot, D. R. A., Brazier, F. M. T., & Oskamp, A. (2005). Agent Exclusion onWebsites. LEA, 13­20.[Groom, 2004] Groom, J. (2004). Are 'Agent' Exclusion Clauses a Legitimate Application of the EU DatabaseDirective?. SCRIPT­ed, 1(1).[Knoth & Zdrahal, 2012] Knoth, P. and Zdrahal, Z. (2012) CORE: Three Access Levels to Underpin Open Access,D­Lib Magazine, 18, 11/12, Corporation for National Research Initiatives,http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/november2012­knoth[Knoth, 2013] Knoth, P. (2013) CORE: Aggregation Use Cases for Open Access, Demo at Joint Conference onDigital Libraries (JCDL 2013), Indianapolis, Indiana, United States[Rodriguez, 2011] Eloy Rodrigues and Abby Clobridge. 2011. The case for interoperability for open accessrepositories. Working Group 2: Repository Interoperability. Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).

My repository is being aggregated: a blessing or a curse?

Abstract. Usage statistics are frequently used by repositories to justify their value to the management who decide about the funding to support the repository infrastructure. Another reason for collecting usage statistics at repositories is the increased use of webometrics in the process of assessing the impact of publications and researchers. Consequently,  one of the worries repositories sometimes have about their content being aggregated is that they feel aggregations have a detrimental effect on the accuracy of statistics they collect. They believe that this potential decrease in reported usage can negatively influence the funding provided by their own institutions. This raises the fundamental question of whether repositories should allow aggregators to harvest their metadata and content. In this paper,  we discuss the benefits of allowing content aggregations harvest repository content and investigate how to overcome the drawbacks. The purpose of repositories and the need for aggregations Requests from repositories that try to avoid being harvested go clearly against the main principle of why repositories have been established as documented in the SPARC’s position paper on institutional repositories (Crow,  2002)    the primary goal of repositories is to open and disseminate research outputs to a worldwide audience. The SPARC’s position paper specifically says

Petr Knoth

Lucas Anastasiou

Samuel Pearce

CiteSeerX

My repository is being aggregated: a blessing or a curse

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014General Track Papers and PanelsUsage statistics are frequently used by repositories to justify their value to the management who decide about the funding to support the repository infrastructure. Another reason for collecting usage statistics at repositories is the increased use of webometrics in the process of assessing the impact of publications and researchers. Consequently, one of the worries repositories sometimes have about their content being aggregated is that they feel aggregations have a detrimental effect on the statistics they collect. They believe that this decrease in reported usage can negatively influence the funding provided by their own institutions. This raises the fundamental question of whether repositories should allow aggregators to harvest their metadata and content. In this paper, we discuss the benefits fof allowing content aggregations harvest repository content and investigate how to overcome the drawbacks.Knoth, Petr (Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, United Kingdom)Anastasiou, Lucas (Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, United Kingdom)Pearce, Samuel (Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, United Kingdom

National Library of Finland DSpace Services

1/22  My repository is being aggregated: a blessing or a curse? Petr Knoth CORE (Connecting REpositories)  Knowledge Media institute The Open University  @petrknoth  Open Repositories 2014 Helsinki, Finland 2/22 Some interesting quotes about aggregations   It seems as though when we like it we call it “curation,” and when we don’t we call it “aggregation.” https://gigaom.com/2011/07/13/like-it-or-not-aggregation-is-part-of-the-future-of-media/         "Aggregators and Google News are, to us, the worst offenders. They make money by living off the sweat of our brow.”  https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091014/1831246537.shtml  3/22 OR ? 4/22 repositories aggregators The ecosystem 5/22 repositories aggregators The use cases Enrichment &  harmonisation Data input Data management Analytics Search & discovery Programmable  (machine-to-machine) access Mutually beneficial ecosystem! 6/22 repositories aggregators The problem ? The aggregators have a negative impact on our usage statistics. We are improving the discoverability of the repository content and increasing its reuse potential.  7/22 repositories aggregators A shortsighted solution to the problem Access denied to aggregators 8/22 repositories aggregators A shortsighted solution to the problem Access denied to aggregators Typically achieved using  the Robots Exclusion  Protocol (robots.txt) 9/22 Can be done selectively:   OK   *              Not allowed  repositories aggregators A shortsighted solution to the problem Access denied to aggregators Typically achieved using  the Robots Exclusion  Protocol (robots.txt) For example: - Arch1m3r in Franc3 - OTH3S in Austr1a - 3uras1a journals in Turk3y 10/22 The open access paradox “Open access content is more open for exploitation by commercial services than by not for profit public services.”      11/22 Is protectionism legal? Groom (2004) suggests it might be illegal as it, among other things, triggers concerns of unfair competition.     12/22 The mission of repositories according to SPARC (Crow, 2002)   “… the primary goal of repositories is to open and disseminate  research outputs to a worldwide audience …”      13/22 SPARC’s position paper on IRs   “For the repository to provide access to the broader research community, users outside the university must be able to find and retrieve information from the repository. Therefore, institutional repository systems must be able to support interoperability in order to provide access via multiple search engines and other discovery tools. An institution does not necessarily need to implement searching and indexing functionality to satisfy this demand: it could simply maintain and expose metadata, allowing other services to harvest and search the content. This simplicity lowers the barrier to repository operation for many institutions, as it only requires a file system to hold the content and the ability to create and share metadata with external systems.”      14/22 COAR: About harvesting and aggregations … “Each individual repository is of limited value for research: the real power of Open Access lies in the possibility of connecting and tying together repositories, which is why we need interoperability. In order to create a seamless layer of content through connected repositories from around the world, Open Access relies on interoperability, the ability for systems to communicate with each other and pass information back and forth in a usable format. Interoperability allows us to exploit today's computational power so that we can aggregate, data mine, create new tools and services, and generate new knowledge from repository content.’’              [COAR manifesto]    15/22 What is Open Access exactly? By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.                         [BOAI, 2002] 16/22 Open Access = Access + Reuse  17/22 Multiple copies of content • It would not be right to stop copying of content, as multiple copies mean:  • Better preservation • Higher availability • Lower network latency • Increased visibility • Higher re-use opportunities • Keeping the market free from monopoly • Researchers like copying of content   18/22 Solution • Aggregators must support repositories and help them to fulfill their mission • Repositories must stop believing they are the only access point for open access content (this includes both gold and green OA) • Aggregators must implement reasonable measures to help repositories get accurate benchmarks. 19/22 repositories aggregators The solution ? usage monitoring service 20/22 IRUS-CORE implementation 21/22 Conclusions   • It is possible to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem for both repositories and aggregators  • Open Access is not just about access, but also reuse -  encouraging multiple copies of content.  • The primary role of repositories is to disseminate not to become a single access point • Repositories and aggregators each serve largely a different audience.  • Aggregators should implement mechanisms to give credit to repositories.     22/22 Thank you! 

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My repository is being aggregated: a blessing or a curse?

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