RePosit Skype conference call no. 6
21 March 2011, 11:00am–12:30am

Present: Lizzie Dipple (Symplectic), Rachel Proudfoot (Leeds), Nicola Cockarill (Plymouth), Richard Jones (Symplectic), Sarah Molloy (QMUL), Ellie James (Keele), Ian Tilsed (Exeter).

Apologies: Jill Evans (Exeter), Bo Middleton (Leeds), Jodie Double (Leeds).

Chair: Lizzie Dipple

Minutes: Lizzie Dipple

Agenda
1. Work groups approach

2. Advocacy materials:

3. Survey:

4. Google group discussions:

5. topics arising from Ellie's initial advocacy:

6. Action points review:

7. AOB:

1. Work groups approach

This was the concept Lizzie outlined by email that project work could be dealt with by small teams looking after different areas. Everyone was in agreement that this is a good idea going forward and they were happy with the suggested split. Rachel will talk to Jodie about it.

Ian gave a staffing update as regards Jill being off long-tem sick. She’s due to return but only part time to start with, so Ian will reassign Gill Still (currently working on Exeter’s Symplectic project) to help with RePosit advocacy work. Gill can also cover Ian’s project survey work whilst he’s away in April.

2. Advocacy materials

Discussing the new poster designs from QMUL, everyone agreed that putting the ‘sticker’ with the wording on top of the images doesn’t work – they appear to be defacing and obscuring the images. However, we do like the sticker as a stand-alone concept. Sarah will go back to the designers and ask them to go back to banner-style working of the screenshots below the main images.

When looking at the Keele-produced postcard and poster, Ellie expressed concern about whether it’s misleading to say ‘It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3’ since the process is quite complicated. Sarah said in her one-to-ones people hadn’t found it that hard. Rachel reminded us that with RePosit our message is that using the CRIS for deposit is a simplified system. However through the project we can send feedback on whether that message works and is true. We need to manage expectations without putting people off. Sarah felt that a lot of work is in educating researchers building up knowledge in departments, but that what is acceptable and what is open access is always an issue.

Lizzie reminded Ellie and Sarah that their designers need to produce final materials in a format where names, logos and URLs can be swapped in/out, plus under a suitable Creative Commons licence.

3. Survey

We discussed the potential overlap with the RSP survey and the general consensus was that the timing is unfortunate, but that our RePosit project work is the main priority so our survey is the one to get completed. However, Ian still needs to talk to Jill about this.

Rachel will be getting more survey testing feedback later this week, but so far the common thread is that customising even the core questions so that they use the institution-specific language is best. This works out OK though, because the benchmarking quote from BOS was rather too high for us. By doing the survey using BOS but controlling it ourselves, we can use local names at each institution, even in the core survey questions. However BOS did give us some useful feedback about having fewer free-text response boxes (e.g. having options lists for department and grade, as the RSP survey does). Ian is to double-check whether BOS surveys really cannot manage alternative question flows.

4. Google group discussions

The Google group seems to be working well as a discussion area – we’ve had two useful topics with many posts.

Richard reviewed the responses to the question of where to store our project outputs. The consensus is that they must go in a repository and the options seem to be either the JISC IE repository or alternatively one of our project partner institution repositories. The JISC repository seems a bit sparse and there may not be easy access to a group of objects stored there. DSpace’s communities and collections functionality might work well for our requirements, since it gives a URL and allows for some branding and information around a collection of stored objects. Sarah and Lizzie to talk about whether it would be possible to use QMUL’s repository for storing project outputs outside the call.

Later topics for Google group discussions are likely to come out of actually doing more and more advocacy. However, Richard’s list is still worth working through.

5. Topics arising from Ellie's initial advocacy

Ellie received lots of feedback of the ‘why’ slides in her advocacy presentations. Academics think depositing is a great idea, but they want someone to do it for them. However, Rachel pointed out that this could cause versioning issues, since only the academic knows which is the correct file. Richard outlined some possible future deposit developments, whereby systems automatically acquire content from academics (e.g. Archive and UKPMC) – auto deposit. The DepositMO JISC project is looking at accessing word processing files for this. One of the feedbacks from RePosit must be that we need more automation of deposit, to lower the barriers even further. There was discussion about presenting academics with a personalised list, thus encouraging/nagging them from the front end. However, one concern is that too much support becomes untenable for repository staff with volumes of deposit. In the future it would be good to acquire the content even earlier in the research cycle – and perhaps one way is to target particular subject areas (those less enganged) or particular academics from an early stage.

The RoMEO colours have proved surprisingly frustrating with certain difficulties (as discussed within the Google group thread). There isn’t a good solution – this is an ongoing issue. Perhaps the wording could be improved because people who don’t know the RoMEO well don’t understand the intricacies. For instance, a publication might be coded ‘yellow’ because of a long embargo time, despite the fact that eventually the article could be open-access (and therefore ‘green’). Also there is confusing terminology for file versions: ‘author version’, ‘post-print’ and ‘accepted manuscript’. Sarah agreed to start a Google group discussion thread about this. We should feed this back to Nottingham. N.B. Some Keele colleagues are going to the RoMEO/CRIS event on 1st April.

Richard explained some of the thinking behind the way Repository Tools has been developed, because putting full RoMEO information on the system put people off using it to deposit entirely. RoMEO only gives a broad brush idea of a publisher’s attitude to open-access in general. However, Ellie found the failures had a disheartening effect, possibly leading to disengagement. Sarah felt some of the problem can be helped with educating researchers to keep their post-print versions. Richard suggested a more positive approach to failures – that the repository could include archive (non open-access) files which cannot be downloaded. Then the message to academics is that their research has been archived for future safe storage but that if they want to go one step better they could upload a version that can be made openly accessible.

6. Action points review

We had a quick review of outstanding blog posts, which are due from Rachel, Jodie, Richard and Ellie. Lizzie reminded everyone that feedback for Pablo de Castro on his SONEX paper is due by this Friday.

Then we reviewed the action points from the Leeds project meeting, which are given below.

7. AOB

If anyone wants to go to the JISC innovation takeaway event, the preferential registration period for JISC projects is Friday (25th March). Sarah might be going.

RSP need to know the best dates in July for our dissemination event.

We discussed who is actively involved in their advocacy campaigns at the moment. Ellie is, Sarah has just started and at Leeds it’s an ongoing process, but Rachel wants to crack on more within the RePosit time frame. At Plymouth, Nicola’s master plan for advocacy involved trying to warm people up as they move closer to going live with Repository Tools.

Ellie has named her session at the ARMA conference ‘The Repository Rollercoaster’.

ACTIONS