Helsingin yliopisto
The survey’s key message to OpenAIRE is related to the changing metadata requirements. National coordination in OpenAIRE harvesting is seen as a solution for laborious metadata work. This is a short summary of the survey; a more detailed report is available in the OpenAIRE blog (in Finnish).
At the beginning of April 2018, Helsinki University Library sent a survey to 15 Finnish institutional repositories to gather information, views and experiences on OpenAIRE harvesting. By OpenAIRE harvesting we mean metadata harvesting which strives to make the Finnish research publications available in digital repositories findable through the OpenAIRE search portal – OpenAIRE gathers research output related to European funding streams. By the end of May, seven OpenAIRE-compliant repositories and seven non-compliant repositories responded to the survey.
The OpenAIRE-compliant repositories were asked the following questions by email:
- When and why was your repository integrated with the OpenAIRE infrastructure?
- What kind of preparatory work was included in the validation process? Was the registration a laborious process?
- What are the benefits of your OpenAIRE compatibility?
- Do you have any other ideas or observations regarding OpenAIRE validation or harvesting?
And the questions for the non-compliant repositories were as follows:
- Is your repository planning to integrate with OpenAIRE infrastructure? Why?
- What has prevented or slowed down the validation?
- Have there been any disadvantages from being outside OpenAIRE harvesting?
- Do you have any other ideas or observations regarding OpenAIRE validation or harvesting?
The following OpenAIRE-compliant repositories participated in the survey: Jultika (University of Oulu), Aaltodoc (Aalto University), TamPub (University of Tampere), Theseus (universities of applied sciences), JYX (University of Jyväskylä), LUTPub (Lappeenranta University of Technology) and UEF eRepository (University of Eastern Finland). Further, the following non-compliant repositories participated in the survey: Jukuri (Natural Resources Institute Finland), TUT Pub (Tampere University of Technology), Tietoarkisto (Finnish Social Science Data Archive), Julkari (Ministry of Social Affairs and Health), UTUPub/Tutkimusportaali (University of Turku), VTT Publications Register (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland) and Lauda (University of Lapland).
In this blog post, we will present a summary of the results of the survey. A more detailed report of the results can be found in the OpenAIRE blog (in Finnish).
Need for national co-ordination
Generally, the issues that were raised in the respondents’ answers were in line with the previous feedback from the repositories. Most of the answers were quite short, and the content of the answers was quite consistent.
The main reason for a repository to have an OpenAIRE connection was the reporting obligation for EU-funded research publications – for example, in the H2020 Online Manual OpenAIRE is seen as ”the recommended entry point for researchers to determine what repository to choose”. Nevertheless, repositories without an OpenAIRE connection had not been hindered by the lack of integration – even so, OpenAIRE integration was planned in six out of seven non-compliant repositories.
OpenAIRE harvesting improves the visibility of the publications deposited in the institutional repositories – this was seen as a key benefit of the OpenAIRE connection both in compliant and non-compliant repositories. However, there was also some uncertainty about the benefits, and the respondents described the benefits very shallowly.
As expected, the respondents estimated that the most laborious part in the OpenAIRE validation and integration process was the preparatory and maintenance work related to metadata harvesting. Accordingly, for non-compliant repositories the laborious metadata work in the validation process was a central obstacle to OpenAIRE registration. Many respondents also felt that their organisation had insufficient resources for the validation process.
One of the most interesting results of the survey was the repositories’ support for stronger national coordination in OpenAIRE harvesting. Coordination was seen as a solution for laborious and duplicate metadata work, both in the validation phase (non-compliant repositories) and in the metadata maintenance process with its changing compatibility requirements (OpenAIRE-compliant repositories). Both the registered and unregistered repositories’ respondents mentioned the same VIRTA meeting in April 2018, in which VIRTA (Publication Information Services) contact persons outlined that the VIRTA service can be utilised in OpenAIRE harvesting.
Messages to OpenAIRE
The survey’s key message to OpenAIRE is related to the changing metadata requirements. According to the respondents, new requirements cause extra work in poorly resourced OpenAIRE-compliant repositories. Accordingly, changing requirements act as a slowdown for non-compliant repositories. Further, the validation process itself needs to be considered. Although the respondents felt that the process is “fairly clear” and technically supported (the validation tools were considered functional), the validation process was also seen as slow because of the Helpdesk response delays and difficulties related to the guidelines. It may also be worthwhile to think how to concretise the benefits of OpenAIRE harvesting, for example, how it improves visibility for publications – not to mention other benefits: for instance, no respondent mentioned how OpenAIRE’s usage data could be used at the repository level.
Helsinki University Library operates as a national open access desk (NOAD) for OpenAIRE cooperation. The key results of the survey will be shared with OpenAIRE.
Pauli Assinen (Helsinki University Library, OpenAIRE NOAD)
Kimmo Koskinen (Helsinki University Library, OpenAIRE NOAD)
Juuso Ala-Kyyny (Helsinki University Library)