Open Access News

Catherine Jones, Collecting research output, Research Information, December 2006 /January 2007.  Excerpt:

The positive stance that many research councils take on author and institution self-archiving is a familiar topic. But this goes beyond passive support of the concept. Some research councils are also providing tools that help other organisations to build and maintain their repositories. One example of this is Scitate. This institutional-repository software support package has recently been launched by the UK's Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) and is the platform used by CCLRC's own repository.

CCLRC is one of the eight UK research councils and provides large-scale scientific facilities, rather than giving grants to individual researchers....The results of all this research [in CCLRC facilities] go into CCLRC's repository, ePubs, which has been externally accessible since May 2004. It has over 22,000 metadata records dating back to the mid-1960s, and more than 500 of these have full text attached....

The feasibility study [for the CCLRC repository] included a technology review to look at the well-established DSpace and ePrints tools. However, these software packages had been written with universities in mind, and were not easy to modify to the rather different requirements of a research organisation such as CCLRC. For this reason we decided, in late 2002/early 2003, that it would be more effective to write our own software to meet our needs. The resulting software, which underpins our ePubs repository, is known as Scitate.

The conceptual model for Scitate is based on IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. One of the major features of using this model is that it groups related works in the same metadata record. Examples of this are the ability to link the preprint with the final published version or having the conference slides and paper together. This reduces the number of near-duplicates in the collection....

CCLRC's ePubs implementation of the software uses the CCLRC source of staff information to link a particular author to their unique staff number. This means that if the author is inconsistent about how they name themselves on published works, all the works will be linked together to the approved form used within CCLRC. Authors who have been disambiguated are shown in italics....

ePubs...includes journal articles, preprints, laboratory technical reports, conference presentations and papers, theses and final project reports....

One of the remits of CCLRC is to exploit scientific and technical developments for the benefit of the UK, so we are now exploring the potential market for Scitate beyond our ePubs implementation....

Using the model developed by other suppliers, the Scitate software will be available for free download as an open-source product. However CCLRC is also offering support services to set the system up, to share our expertise in populating the repository, and to provide ongoing support and upgrades to the software....

PS:  Of the eight Research Councils UK, five require open access to the research they sponsor (BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and PPARC) and two are still deliberating (AHRC and EPSRC). The CCLRC is the only one that has already decided merely to encourage it.