{"id":14183,"date":"2015-06-20T09:09:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T08:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ch.imperial.ac.uk\/rzepa\/blog\/?p=14183"},"modified":"2015-06-20T09:09:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-20T08:09:00","slug":"personal-web-pages-on-digital-repositories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rzepa.net\/blog\/?p=14183","title":{"rendered":"Personal web pages on digital repositories."},"content":{"rendered":"
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The university sector in the UK has quality inspections of its research outputs conducted every seven years, going by the name of REF or Research Excellence Framework. The next one is due around 2020, and already preparations are under way! Here I describe how I have interpreted one of its strictures; that all UK funded research outputs (i.e.<\/em> research publications in international journals) must be made available in open unrestricted form within three months of the article being accepted for publication, or they will not be eligible for consideration in 2020.<\/p>\n

At the outset, I should say that one infrastructure to help researchers adhere to the guidelines is being implemented in the form of the Symplectic system<\/a>. This allows a researcher to upload the final accepted version<\/i><\/span> of a manuscript. At Imperial College, a digital repository called Spira<\/a>l<\/strong> <\/span>serves this purpose and also acts as the front end for collecting\u00a0informative metadata to enhance discoverability. The final accepted version is then converted by the publisher into a\u00a0version-of-record.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>This contains styling unique to the publisher\u00a0and the\u00a0content is subjected to further scrutiny by the authors as\u00a0proof corrections.<\/em>\u00a0In an ideal world, these latter changes should also be faithfully propagated back to the\u00a0final accepted version, as\u00a0<\/i>would all the supporting information associated with the article.\u00a0Since most authors do not exactly enjoy the delights of proof corrections, this final reconciliation of the two versions may not always be assiduously\u00a0undertaken.<\/p>\n

I became concerned about the existence of two versions of any given scientific report and that the task\u00a0of ensuring total fidelity in the content of both versions\u00a0may\u00a0negatively impact on the author’s time. Much better if the publisher could grant permission for the author to archive the\u00a0version-of-record<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>into a digital repository.<\/p>\n

Some experiments were needed, and I decided to start them in reverse, by archiving my oldest publications. Since Symplectic now provides a system to do this, I began by\u00a0using it. Symplectic identifies each publisher’s policies for archival, of which the most liberal are known as ROMEO GREEN<\/a><\/span>. To quote from the definition, this colour allows the author to “archive pre-print\u00a0and\u00a0post-print or publisher’s version\/PDF<\/em><\/span><\/strong>“. In an afternoon I had processed most of my ROMEO green articles. You know how it is sometimes, you do not read the fine print! And so the library soon informed me that archival of ROMEO GREEN was in fact only permitted on the author’s “personal web page”<\/span>. Spiral, as an institutional repository, does not apparently constitute a personal web page for me and so none of my Symplectic submissions could be accepted for archival there.<\/p>\n

Time to rethink the experiment. Firstly, I very much wanted the reprints to be held by a proper digital repository rather than a conventional web page. Why? I wanted my reprints to adhere as much as possible to FAIR<\/strong>: findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. Well, at least the first two of those (the last two relate more to data).\u00a0A\u00a0repository is designed to hold metadata<\/strong> in a formal and standards-based manner and\u00a0metadata helps achieve FAIR<\/strong>. So I asked the Royal Society of Chemistry (as\u00a0a ROMEO GREEN<\/span> publisher) whether a\u00a0personal web page hosted on a digital repository would qualify. I was soon informed\u00a0 that I had\u00a0proposed a neat solution here, and they couldn’t see an issue.<\/p>\n

Now, all I had to do is find a repository where I could create such a\u00a0personal web page. The chemistry department at Imperial College has for ten years hosted\u00a0a DSpace repository called SPECTRa[1]<\/a><\/span> which\u00a0already has the functionality for\u00a0individuals to\u00a0create personal collections. I had also picked up on the increasing attention being given to Zenodo<\/strong>, like the World-Wide Web<\/a> itself an offshoot of CERN (of large Hadron Collider fame) and born from the need for researchers to more permanently archive the outputs of their researches. These outputs include software, videos, images, presentations, posters, publications and (most obviously for CERN) datasets. I thought I would include them in my experiment as well. There results are summarised below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>\nDSpace-SPECTRa<\/a><\/th>\nZenodo<\/a><\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Community<\/td>\nHenry Rzepa personal web page
\nreprint collection<\/a><\/td>\n		Rzepa personal computational
\nchemistry data and reprint page<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Collection<\/td>\nRoyal Society of Chemistry reprints<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Publication<\/td>\n10042\/195577<\/a><\/td>\n10.5281\/zenodo.18758<\/a>[2]<\/a><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Thesis<\/td>\n10044\/1\/20860[3]<\/a><\/span><\/td>\n10.5281\/zenodo.18777<\/a>[4]<\/a><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Dataset<\/td>\n10.14469\/ch\/191342[5]<\/a><\/span><\/td>\n10.5281\/zenodo.18632<\/a>[6]<\/a><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Harvesting<\/td>\nOAI-ORE<\/a><\/td>\nOAI-PMH<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The last line of this table includes a link to another design feature of a repository, facilitating the ability to harvest the content. The ContentMine project<\/a>\u00a0(“The right to read is the right to mine!<\/em>“)\u00a0has shown how such\u00a0harvesting of facts from the literature can be automated on a vast scale, and (IMHO) represents an example of those disruptive\u00a0innovations<\/a>\u00a0that have the power to change the world forever. It also enshrines the idea that scientific facts funded by the public purse should be capable of being openly liberated from their containers. A harvestable repository seems an ideal container for achieving this.<\/p>\n

My experiment is part of what might be seen as\u00a0the increasingly subtle interplay between:<\/p>\n