CORE participated at the Open Repositories conference (10 – 13 June 2019), which took place in Hamburg, Germany. This year’s conference theme was “All the user needs”, where CORE received much attention and participated actively with 5 presentations.
Assessing Compliance with the UK REF 2021 Open Access Policy
The recent increase in Open Access (OA) policies has brought forth important questions concerning the effect these policies have on the practice of publishing Open Access. In particular, is there evidence to support that mandating OA increases the proportion of OA outputs (in other words, do authors comply with relevant policies)? Furthermore, does mandating OA reduce the time from acceptance to the public availability of research outputs, and can compliance with OA mandates be effectively tracked? This work studies compliance with the UK REF 2021 Open Access policy. We use data from CrossRef and from CORE to create a dataset containing 1.6 million publications. We show that after the introduction of the UK OA policy, the proportion of OA research outputs in the UK has increased significantly, and the time lag between the acceptance of a publication and its Open Access availability has decreased, although there are significant differences in compliance between different repositories. We have developed a tool that can be used to assess publications’ compliance with the policy based on a list of DOIs.
This presentation shows the importance of aggregations in our ability to monitor open access uptake. It also explains how core can be used to support the monitoring the OA policies and sell that CORE will be used at the REF2021.
Comparing the Performance of OAI-PMH with ResourceSync
In this work, we conduct experiments comparing OAI-PMH with ResourceSync along a set of dimensions, scenarios and implementation setups. Our results are the first to disclose that OAI-PMH performance varies significantly across platforms, explaining why it is difficult for aggregators to stay synchronised with data providers. We also provide evidence showing that ResourceSync is, if applied in suitable synchronisation mode, substantially faster and more effective in synchronisation of resources and puts also lower load on the data providers than OAI-PMH. By comparing the performance of OAI-PMH with ResourceSync on the task of metadata harvesting (small files), i.e. the most challenging scenario for ResourceSync, we demonstrate that ResourceSync performs up to about 10x faster in the Batch mode than an average OAI-PMH repository.
CORE is trying to develop new tech for repositories to improve aggregation and make it faster and seamless.
CORE Analytics Dashboard
Despite being controversial, research metrics are becoming a key component of research evaluation processes globally. Nevertheless, accessing research metrics to support these processes in a timely manner is not a straightforward task, as it requires either having access to expensive commercial solutions such as Elsevier SciVal or Clarivate Analytics’ InCites, or having substantial knowledge of existing APIs and data sources as well as the ability and skills needed to analyse large amounts of raw scholarly data in-house. This is especially the case on a department or institutional level where large amounts of data have to be aggregated prior to analysis. To alleviate this problem we have designed and prototyped CORE Analytics Dashboard – a tool for analytical evaluation of research outputs of universities. The aim of the CORE Analytics Dashboard is to help universities analyse their performance using a variety of metrics captured from openly available data sources, including citation counts and social media metrics, and to help them compare their performance with other institutions. This paper presents the motivation behind developing this dashboard and its main features.
This presentation demonstrates that the scholarly community can develop low cost systems for monitoring the performance of research.
Analysing the performance of open access papers discovery tools
Open Access discovery tools aim to locate freely available copies of research papers which might be behind the paywall on a publisher’s website. Our study, which was funded by Jisc, provides the first large scale quantitative performance comparison of four OA Discovery tools: Unpaywall, OA Button, CORE OA Discovery and Kopernio on a randomly selected sample of 100k DOIs from CrossRef.
The future of scholarly communications professionals
The scholarly communications profession is constantly changing, and a wide range of skills are required in the advertised job descriptions. In an effort to investigate what kind of skills future information professionals need, during the period March 2015 to September 2017 job postings advertising positions relating to Open Access were collected. The total number of the collected job postings was 72. The collection was done manually throughout this whole period from job advertising sites, such as Jobs.ac.uk, CILIP Lisjobnet and the Times of Higher Education. In addition, the author is subscribing to open listserves, such as the Jisc-Repositories, OAGoodPractice and a closed one, the UKCoRR-Discussion list, and managed to collect job descriptions from those list servers as well. The aim of this work is to identify the most important skills required in the jobs advertised in our field, educate the new comers in the field and identify how our profession is evolving.
During the conference CORE announced the launch of a new service, the CORE Discovery, a browser extension and repository/webpage plugin which offers one-click access to free copies of research papers whenever you hit the paywall.
Through CORE’s presentations the project received plenty of interest from the attendees and other projects.
We very much enjoyed this year’s OR2019 and looking forward to next year’s conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
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