Dave Tarrant, Tim Brody (Southampton) and Ben O'Steen (Oxford), beat a large field of contenders, including finalists from the USA and Australia, by demonstrating that digital data can be moved easily between storage sites running different software while remaining accessible to users (watch video). This approach has important implications for data management and preservation on the Web....
[W]ith the growth of institutional repositories alongside subject-based repositories, and in cases where multiple-authors of a paper belong to different institutions, it is important to be able to share and copy content between repositories.
Meanwhile the repository space has become characterised by many types of repository software - DSpace, EPrints and Fedora are the most widely used open source repository software - containing many different types of content, including texts, multimedia and interactive teaching materials. So although sharing content and making it widely available (interoperability) has always been a driver for repository development, actually moving content on a large scale between repositories and providing access from all sources is not easy.
The OR08 challenge, set by the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG), had just one rule for the competition: the prototype created had to utilise two different 'repository' platforms....
This data transfer was achieved using an emerging framework known as Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a topic that attracted one of the highest attendances at OR08....
Comment. Congratulations to Tarrant, Brody, and O'Steen. I look forward to the day when institutional repositories can harvest full-texts and metadata from disciplinary repositories and vice versa. That will greatly reduce the temperature on the question where researchers initially deposit their work (and where universities and funders require them to deposit their work), and greatly increase the security of deposits (on the LOCKSS principle). Thanks to ORE and the tools developed by the Southampton-Oxford team, this day is not far off.
...The demonstration of the bulk transferability of the contents of one OAI-compliant repository to another is indeed welcome. It shows that it does not really matter from the point of view of either accessibility or harvestability where a research output is deposited (as long as it's in an OAI-compliant repository). But where it is deposited still matters a great deal for the probability of research output being deposited at all, and especially for the probability of deposit mandates being adopted at all -- particularly deposit mandates on the part of institutions, who are the providers of all the research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/16/2008 09:06:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
