Research Focus Week 22-26th Feb programme

You’ll see it soon on flyers and the e-bulletin – but just for interest here’s the programme for the Research Support Office’s forthcoming Research Focus Week.  The highlight naturally being Thursday afternoon!

Web 2.0 and PEER – reports of interest

I’m spending an hour or so this morning reading through a couple of reports.  One is from the Scottish Library & Information Council/CILIPS and is entitled A Guide to using Web 2.0 in Libraries (weighting in at a digestible 10 pages).  The other is from the LISU at Loughborough (including my team’s very own Valérie Spezi) and is called PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories (93 pages).

Web 2.0

This is a handy sized report that while it perhaps tells me nothing new, is an excellent synthesis of the highlights of using Web 2 and social networking within libraries.  More seriously interested librarians might find it a little light for their taste, and the lack of references for further reading does harm its scholastic qualities.  However, for those looking to get a handle on the terminology and potentialities of these tools then this is a fine introduction.  The report moves through the why use it, the benefits and then into the implementation.  It also considers the staffing and potential legal implications of Web 2 (which in itself could have probably filled the whole report).  Finally it looks at integrating Web 2 within organisational systems (human and technical).

PEER

How authors view the whole journal and repository scene today is something that’s been of interest for a few years, so I was pleased to have a read through this report.  By its very nature it is very scholarly and gives an excellent overview of the scholarly communication and publications fields developments over the last ten years.  The comments on academic’s searching habits are quite telling (a narrowing of focus and restriction to trusted searches and information sources, replacing broader views).  From a library perspective the note that the average number of articles read by academic authors has increased over the years is a shocking one, as we try and maintain journal collections against rising costs (although healthy for the interlending and open access communities)

Ave articles read/year

• 1977: 150
• 2000: 216
• 2009: 280

There is a very good overview of the citation enhancement effect of open access materials – and the questions that remain to be answered in this respect.  While it is one of those qualities of a repository that we IR managers so often espouse, there is a certain truth that should we ever reach a level playing field of 100% open access, that this advantage would dwindle to nothing.

The report also covers the dynamic and changing field within which repository managers operate, and the challenges they face; not least among them engagement and education of our local academic authors.  I know personally that I am still talking to many, many authors about the same issues as I was back in 2006.  These contacts are generally very positive, but it does indicate the somewhat herculean task we still face in bringing OA up the academic agenda.  As one academic I know often says “I’ve got so many other pressing and urgent priorities, the repository just isn’t one of them”.  No wonder we’ve seen the rise of the mandate.  And this comment is mirrored on p55 of the report.

The report goes on to detail the methodology behind their work.  I was interested to see that out of over 2400 scholars invited to attend their focus groups, only 21 attended.  I will feel less down-heartened next time I have a poorly attended focus group myself.

The report then moves on to look at the findings of the academics surveyed and interviewed, with respect to repositories and open access.  I would highly recommend any repository manager, and indeed any academic with an interest in scholarly communication, to read through these results.  They make for sobering, if not at all suprising, reading – at best 30% of academics are aware they have an IR.

I was interested to note (p32) that the study suggested arts and social science academics were more likely to deposit in the IR.  Here at Leicester it has been fairly even across the board from all disciplines.  The section on drivers/barriers to deposit is worth looking at (free access in #1 driver, whereas worries over (c) infringement are the top worry).  That said (p41) shows that 2/3 of the sample feel there is a role for repositories in scholalry communications, with most of the rest unsure rather than negative.  There are some good pull out quotes in the results of the focus group, although given their small sample it’s hard to attribute any great validity to them – much as I can see myself using them in future presentations (especially the “online access doesn’t mean the same as open access”

Information seeking for open access papers relates nicely to a question was asked in Cell Physiology, and seems in this study as well that authors seldom look to OA sources to retrieve their scholarly information.  Indeed it seems the grey trade in PDFs between authors (p61) continues to be the major route to access items that they are not subscribed to in many cases.

This is a very rich report and rather than comment on their conclusions, I’d simply point you towards reading it and forming your own judgements.  I found for my own part that a lot of what they elicited matched with my experiences across a number of universities.  The one thing I didn’t get from the report (and perhaps that wasn’t their aim) was the opinion or feeling of academics towards the effectiveness and operation of their institutional repositories.  If anyone knows of any work looking at that, I’d be interested to hear about it!

Browsing other browsers

Since I stopped working at places that used Netscape, I’ve only really used Internet Explorer. Recently, though, I have come into contact with other things (OK, I admit that one of the “other things” is also IE, but bear with me!)

Firstly, I teach one student group that do everything on laptops with Linux, Open Office and Firefox.    The Library has one such machine (to help enquiry staff see things as Firefox users see them, but it has been very handy for me!).   We looked at PubMed, Web of Science and RefWorks in a recent session and had no difficulties (apart from me downloading documents and then not being able to find them). 

Then, my home laptop has Internet Explorer 8 (I installed this as part of a regular Windows Update).   It has tabs, like IE7.  But it has various features that can suggest related sites or search results to you – an enhanced search box which suggests sites to you, and buttons that suggest sites related to the one that you are looking at.  I don’t have the enhanced search box, and I haven’t yet got on very well with the button, so more research needed.  Right clicking things also allows you to quickly send Google Mail email, or blog about things.

The thing that caught my eye, though, about IE8 is the “InPrivate” facility.   This opens a new browser window which does not record any history of what you have looked at.    As long as the “InPrivate” logo is at the start of the address bar, it will not predict sites as you type into that bar, and going to favorites and history will list nothing.    According to Microsoft’s IE8 webpages, this is aimed at people who want to check personal email on a shared PC (in an internet cafe, perhaps), or who want to order presents online.   I can imagine that it might enable all sorts of things to go on, and it does not seem to be possible to turn it off.

Last of all, Google Chrome.   I recently installed Real Player on my laptop and was offered this, so thought “why not”.    I have looked at library webpages and it seems fine, and very quick, which is one of its selling points.   But when I tried to access the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch site to report results, it hung and nothing happened.    More experimentation needed.   I would be interested to hear (or read!) of others’ experience.

We may have users who have these various browsers, so it is good to see them, and hopefully to remember that the browser may be playing a part in any problems we are trying to troubleshoot.  It is fair enough to have a preferred one for University purposes, perhaps, but we need to be aware of the wider browsing world.

MELIBEA

I just became aware of the Policies MELIBEA site via an email asking me to check/confirm the details they’ve got for Leicester’s institutional open access mandate (publication policy).  In colour and style the site very clearly aims to capture the SHERPA/RoMEO look, whereas its function is closer to ROARMAP; all be it providing a clearer overview of the details of each institution’s policy.

It’s an interesting development, although for those of us with mandates in place already I’m not immediately seeing  a major use for it.  On the other hand were I to be at an institution planning  a mandate, then I could see this would be a really handy tool to pick up what elements to make sure we included.

DeepDyve introducing ‘Cloud’ access models?

I’ve just been reading about a case study of the University of Westminster who it is claimed could save £1million by using the Google Apps education edition, so all its students and staff use google docs, email etc.  At the same time I was reading about a new pay per view approach to accessing research papers launched October 2009 via the search engine Deepdyve (which specialises in scientific, technical and medical papers).  Users of this model can read but not download papers as often as they wish for a 24 hour period for $0.99 each.  Publishers such as Oxford University Press, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell can be found there.   There are also subscription services, so for $9.99 users can get 20 free articles a month and for $19.99 they can read unlimited articles.  The search engine also includes open access papers which can be viewed of course for free.  The search engine offers the usual services of email alerts / RSS feeds and interestingly you are invited to copy paragraphs of text into the search box “No need to come up with the perfect 2-3 words. Simply paste an interesting article into the search bar and click!”.  DeepDyve have recently partnered with CiteUlike so their users can also rent articles directly from DeepDyve.

Whilst this is probably aimed at researchers outside of the conventional channels to accessing research literature, I can imagine that lots of post graduate students and academics might be tempted to pay 61p on an occasional basis just to save the trouble of filling and and signing forms which give them free access to journals via traditional document supply.  Then again perhaps signing up for an account is just as much hassle.  I wonder what take up they will have, and what new publishing models could be coming soon?

Innovations in Reference Management Part 3

Moving Targets: the role of web preservation in supporting sustainable citation (Richard Davis & Kevin Ashley)

This was a rather different talk to most of the others at the event as it was looking more at the question of how we can cite the preserved version of ephemeral type of data, such as blogs, that we often see on the web these days.

• Some web preservation already happening: URI/DOI/Handles & other solutions, Wayback machine and UK Webarchive.
• Are we educating people to use links to sustainable archives/ Should we be recommending linking to the UK Webarchive version and not the original version?
• Used the example of citing a blog post that might disappear.
• Will our “collections” look different in future, will they be blog type posts rather than journal articles or books?
• Talked about the JISC project ArchivePress which allows you to use a RSS feed to create a preserved blog archive: this will allow Universities to create their own repository of blogs. For example, it could integrate with Research Repositories that use applications like DSpace. Should the Leicester Research archive be looking into preserving research blogs as well as other research outputs?
• Heidelberg University and others have created a Citation Repository for transitory web pages: this was specifically to deal with the problem that their researchers were having when researching China, due to the volatile nature of the Chinese internet. There might be rights issues with this approach but many of the original web pages had disappeared.
• Should we be teaching people about sustainable resources/publishing as part of our information literacy efforts?
• Can argue that citing a URL is like citing the shelfmark of a book in a library, as it’s the location of the information rather than the information itself. Should we be looking for a better citation system?
• Possible solutions: Institutions can offer archive mechanisms, authors need to use archive mechanisms, if a blog is being preserved than it needs to expose that permanent citable link for people to use (e.g. ArchivePress link) and permalinks should be a bit more “perm”!

Help me Igor – taking references outside traditional environments (Euan Adie, Nature.com)

Euan gave an overview of some of the projects they are working on as part of the Nature.com remit:

• Looked at how referencing might be achieved if you were using GoogleWave as a collaborative tool to write articles etc.
• Decided to create a 3rd party GoogleWave widget called Igor.
• Igor lets you fetch references from Connotea or PubMed and insert them into the Wave: it does this by typing in a command in Wave.
• Igor uses an open API to retrieve data (XML or RDF) and is only a proof of concept widget at the moment. it is OpenSource and people are welcome to develop it further.
• Euan did point out that the formats that most reference software uses (RIS/BIBtex) are not very easy to use with web APIs.
• Mentioned ScienceBlogs: an initiative to aggregate well known science blogs through Nature.com. E.g. finds if blogs link to Nature articles (via html, DOI, PubMed): blogs already comment on articles when they’re published so Nature wants to link the comments/blog posts to the articles.
• Have a API available that allows you to feed in am article DOI and see what blogs aggregated through Nature.com mention that article.
• Mobile devices: have made Mac app Papers available on iPhone. thinks people are not as likely to read articles on mobiles but save the reference for later instead.
• Nature.com always willing to experiment and collaborate with other projects.

Innovations in Reference Management Part 2

These talks focus more on tools for researchers:

Social Bookmarking for paper discovery, or why keeping your references openly on the web is good for academia (Kevin Emamy, CiteUlike)

Kevin gave an overview of how CiteUlike sees its role in helping researchers and how it works.

• There is a huge amount of research information out there, so how do you find the good stuff?
• CiteULike helps you save reference data as you search via a CiteULike browser button, or inputting hte URL into your CiteULike account. You can gather the references from a lot of well known science resources, add it to a CiteULike group and/or tag it for you and other people to find. Tags help subject collections grow.
• Can have RSS feeds at tag, article, user or collection/library level.
• Helps with social discovery by automatically making your collection of reference open for anyone else to see/search.
• If you visit someone you find it interesting to browse their bookshelves – CiteULike allows people to do the same thing with your personal research bookshelf/library.
• Allows you to find socially filtered information and follow users/groups/tags you like.
• Can search the CiteULike database and also see what the post popular papers are via CiteGeist.
• Can also get data out by downloading machine readable data sets/libraries etc and/or export to other tools such as Mendeley/EndNote/RefWorks.
• Set-up recommendations (you might also like…) service to find tags/articles/people you might like.
• No interest in providing cite’n'write type functionality as main function is the social discovery aspect.

I do wonder how biased this and other tools are towards the sciences? Are there other subjects using them, or do they tend to use other tools such as delicious?

 Mendeley: from reference management to real-time impact metrics (Victor Henning)

I’d been hearing a few things about Mendeley in the twitterverse, so I was interested to see it in action.

• It is being produced by ex-researchers or recent postgrads (no librarians… they said this is a blessing and a curse!), and the main aim is to help researchers manage and discover knowledge.
• Venture capitalist funded (some of the people behind Skype and Last.fam) and they have taken a lot of their ideas and model from music sites like Last.fm.
• There is a Mendeley desktop app and a web account, which you can synch up.
• The desktop app is designed to retrieve bibliographic data from PDF articles you have saved, and create a searchable database of your PDFs.
• Can also read and annotate PDFs. helps you organise your research material and allows you to search within the fulltext a PDF and across all the PDFs you have saved.
• Citation plugin (write’ncite type app) for Word and OpenOffice.
• Can drag and drop references into Googledocs, emails and other apps.
• Can create shared collections (up to 10 people) and synchronise your PDF libraries across everyone’s desktop app.
• The desktop app synchronises with the web account and uploads/downloads your data and PDFs (but 500Mb limit on amount of data).
• Social aspect: Mendeley automatically makes all your references private, but gives you the option to share with your Mendeley contacts if you wish using collaboration tools.
• Getting data into Mendeley (other than via your saved PDFs): import from CiteULike or Zotero, bookmarklet fro extracting data from academic databases or web sites using COinS
• Data goes into web account and then downloads to desktop app when synchronised.
• Impact Data: can look into what is the most read document/author/tag on the desktop app. Also working on a recommendation engine based on user preferences and analysing keyword and fulltext of papers.
• Can creat public collections: subscribe by email or RSS and embed collection in other websites.
• Web app has user profiles where you can share info on your publications, appearances, teaching etc
• More than 100k users and 11million fulltext research papers uploaded (217 million references) – at current rate of growth it could become the biggest research database within a year!
• What could this mean for impact factors? – potential for Mendeley to measure the interaction with the actual documents: the audience for it, how long people spend reading it, repeat readings, peer-review via comments/ratings, data available in real-time once paper published. Data on type of reader, impact within discipline or regions of world.
• Real-time Mendeley stats available via web app and will be releasing an API to make data freely available for people to study.
• Future plans: sustainable funding by charging for premium accounts (where you can have more file space), for fine grained stats, for shared accounts with more than 10 people and an enterprise version for companies.
• Future plans: collaboration tools for assigning tasks and for discussion, recommendation engine, search (but not download) fulltext), custom stats, integrate with library systems/openURL resolvers, free alternative to EndNote etc, free addition to Scopus/WoS.

As the event had quite a few Librarians in the room, one of the first questions was about the legality of sharing PDFs and copyright implications, as when you create a shared collection for up to 10 people the whole group gets access to all the PDFs everyone else in the group has uploaded. It wasn’t particularly clear to me from victor’s answer exactly what they are doing about copyright implications other than taking PDFs down when publishers notify them that they are unhappy (they mentioned Springer).

Their argument seems to be that there is a lot of research papers that are free to share, so there are legitimate uses for the software. Another is that researchers often email papers to each other and this offers a more efficient way to share them, and that staying within copyright law is the responsibility of the individual rather than the software. Not sure how the publishers will react to this over time…!

I’ve not had a chance to play with CiteULike or Mendeley yet so I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with them.

As a library service we need to discuss whether we teach/train people on these tools, as well as on the ones we already have available (EndNote/RefWorks), and the support implications. I’m leaning towards doing sessions to make people aware of these free services but making it clear that we cannot provide technical support for them. What do others think? Anyone else already teaching them? (I know AJCann was looking at using CiteULike in a Biological Science course.)

Innovations in Reference Management Part 1

So, on Thursday January the 14th I made my way down a very foggy M1 to the Innovations in Reference Management Event, hosted by the JISC Telstar Project in Milton Keynes. 

I’m going to break the event down into a couple of posts, so this first one deals with the interesting things people are doing with RefWorks.

Telstar Project: Integrating References into VLE: Moodle & RefWorks (Owen Stephens and Jason Platts)

 The aim of this part of the project was to bring together references in a standard, structured format which could be inserted into course materials, and various parts of the VLE. It also allowed students to download, copy of annotate references so that they could become more active participants.

All OU material and sites have to sue the standard OU Harvard style for references, which has been made available via RefWorks. What bliss, to only have one style for the whole University!  We can only dream…

Reference links with the moodle course site have persistent, dynamic links via OpenURL/SFX where possible, or no links if it’s a printed resource. The students can select the references and export into their moodle, MyStuff area, or RefWorks or collaborative area or download as RIS or RefWorks XML content.

Constructing the reference lists: option in moodle to import the references from a standard data set, which then interacts with RefWorks to produce a OU Harvard style reference list. the same can be done via a RefShare RSS feed. The same system is used for inserting references into OU structured course content using a Word template.

MyReferences moodle module: powered by RefWorks. A “RefWorks Light” that allows students to use RefWorks functionality without leaving the VLE.  So they can create bibliographies within moodle as well. All the data in MyRefs automatically appears in their RefWorks account as well, in case they want to use the full RefWorks functionality at any time (e.g. the cite’n'write options). Staff have extra functionality which allows the creation of shared accounts and reference lists.

To allow students to share references within te VLE they can export them from a reading list to the collaborative area. This creates script which they can then cut and paste into forums etc and it will then be rendered in the MyRefs format to allow others users to select/export etc.

I thought this looked fab for OU students, so they can easily get all the references from their course into their own area and create bibliographies in the OU style, which could be cut and pasted into their assignments. Obviously not an option for Leicester as it is based aroud Moodle modules and no mention of Blackboard equivalent.

Feed me weird things: Using RefWorks RSS for new title lists (Paul Stainthrop, University of Lincoln)

Their catalogue doesn’t have an option to create lists of new resources bought/received so they were still creating manual/printed lists for their users. Paul looked for a way to do this electronically using existing or free resources.

Solution: Subject librarians imported new book data into RefWorks ~ shared the RefWorks folder and created RSS feed ~ yahoopipes was then used to process the feed (takes the ISBN & scrapes Amazon for product description), it formats the html and inserts the book cover from Amazon, creates link back to library catalogue for the title & creates a “clean” RSS feed ~ Googlefeedburner then used to create a short URL & allow email subscription to feed & gives usage stats ~ used Feed2JS (freeware) to create a java script that could be embedded in Blackboard etc.  also includes buttons fro links to services such as export to RefWorks, Catalogue, GoogleBooks & xISBN service (allows notification of new eds).

This looked like a nifty and ingenious solution for a service short on time and resources. Paul was concerned about the stability of the service and whether he’s created an expectation that the same thing could be done for journal table of contents!

With our current RefWorks subscription here at UoL we can’t create shared folders or RSS feeds because we don’t have the RefShare functionality, which is a separate subscription for us early adopters! All newer RefWorks subcription get it included (like Lincoln). In response to me asking about RefSahre at the event one of the RefWorks reps told me that all subscriptions should include RefShare in future, so *fingers crossed* we’ll get extra functionality to play with in future.

The rep also confirmed that the license now includes alumni use – which means any student who creates a RefWorks account while studying with us can continue to use that account free of charge after they leave as long as the University still has a subcription. Yay! Just waiting for official email confirmation before advertising this to students.

Digital signatures and document supply – investigation continues

Following on from this earlier post, I’ve had a couple of very useful interchanges with Anne Bell (Cardiff) and Graham Titley (Portsmouth) on this subject.  I was pointed in their direction and some other folks by quite a few of my followers on twitter – so thanks Mairie, Georgeina, Sarah, Damyanti and all the rest.  I’m waiting on a few other people I’ve contacted, not to mention those on a distribution list, to come back to me as well. 

hopefully this should give me a broad idea of the state of the art in the UK right now.  I’m editing together everything I’ve learned so far into a review document, distilling the experiences I encounter and raising the questions that we need to answer for ourselves before we can move in this direction for definite.  But since others have already gone down this path I’m hoping the only challenges we face are operational and technical, and not legal.

We’ll be having a meeting next week at which we’ll be discussing the initial thoughts and next steps, and at which point doubtless I’ll have more to report back on.

[Edit Tue evening: Thanks to Peter Suber for pointing out that Charle's site has now evolved in to the Bibliography of Open Access Wiki.  The old site still contains some bookend material but is now static.]

Open access bibliography

Most scholars concerned with open access are aware of Charles Bailey’s bibliography of open access.  I’ve also been collecting a more modest list of papers and sites that I’ve read in the last few years, and that underpin a lot of the work that we do here at Leicester.  I brought this collection together as part of the handout for the postponed academic staff session on open access and scholarly communication.  Rather than let it sit festering on my hard-drive until I deliver the session in March, I’ve made it available on the LRA’s Web pages.  And will be updating it from time to time as I read new papers or sites of interest.

Setting up a twitter feed from a repository RSS feed

I’ve been keen to set up a feed from our blog (the LRA) for new additions for some time, but I’ve always thought it would be a technological challenge.  Turns out that it’s pretty easy if you’ve got an RSS output already, which we have. 

I had a word with my contacts on twitter and as usual they came up aces with the answer – two suggestions a site called Twitterfeed or using HootDeck.  This is how I did it.

1. I registered a new twitter account for the repository UoLLRA.  You don’t have to do that you can just use your own account – but I wanted this to be separate from my online identity.
2. I went to Twitterfeed.com. 
3. I opted to register using an OpenID account, although you can set up your own personal registration on the site.  Since the LRA has a GMail address I used this.
4. Once logged in I created a new feed
5. I named the feed and copied in the URL of the RSS feed of new additions to the site.
6. I selected where this was to be posted to – in this case Twitter.  As I was still logged into twitter I only had to authorise this access, rather log in again.
7. And that was it – all new items added to the repository will automatically gain a little more exposure to the electronic world without me taking any additional action.

Now I just need to keep promoting http://www.twitter.com/UoLLRA to a few people and we can take it from there.  Much much easier than I expected!  Thanks to all the people who offered advice and suggestions via twitter!

A feed to follow

The David Wilson Library has set up a twitter feed where news from the library will be tweeted.

http://twitter.com/uoldwl

Likely of use to academics, students and administrative staff alike