It's true, this development does not diminish the importance of the
repository, and particularly the IR, in terms of deposit and
management interfaces and repository services.
Instead its primary import is that *potentially* it: (1) frees up the
storage layer, (2) offers a route to more flexible and economic
computing infrastructure (large-scale, 'cloud' computing), (3) opens
up new services, e.g. preservation services, and (4) reduces
repository software lock-in.
So potentially a step change in interoperability for repositories.
Steve Hitchcock
Preserv Project Manager
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
http://preserv.eprints.org/
At 14:38 23/04/2008, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/394-Data-exchange-among
> -disparate-repositories.html>Data
> exchange among disparate repositories
>
>
>
>
> Comment from Stevan Harnad: The demonstration (below) 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
> <http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=+site%3Alistserver.
> sigmaxi.org+central+%28institutional+OR+distributed%29&btnG=Search>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.
>
> The importance of the new
> <https://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/notices/publicnotices.php?notice=1782>OR08
> demonstration of the transferability of
> <http://roar.eprints.org/>Institutional Repository (IR) contents is
> hence greatest for confirming that both institutional and funder
> mandates can and should require deposit in the author's
> institutional IR, from which central harvesters, indexers and search
> engines, as well as Central Repositories (CRs) like PubMed Central,
> can then harvest/import them. This
> <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html>convergen
> t
> synergy would be best for the progress of OA.
>
> (The fact that external deposits can also be back-harvested to the
> depositor's own institutional IR is also welcome and useful, but it
> certainly does not imply that depositing willy-nilly anywhere is as
> likely to scale up to systematic OA policies, generating universal
> OA, as depositing, systematically and convergently at the universal
> source: the researcher's own IR -- and then, where desired,
> harvesting/exporting externally therefrom.)
> Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C.,
> O'Brien, A., Hardy, R. and Rowland, F. (2005)
> <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11001/>Delivery, Management and
> Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further
> and Higher Education. JISC Technical report.
>
> Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C.,
> O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005)
> <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/>Developing a model for
> e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher
> education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40.
>
>
> [re-posted from Peter Suber's
> <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/04/data-exchange-among-disparate.
> html>Open
> Access News]
>
>
> ----------
> <https://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/notices/publicnotices.php?notice=1782>ECS
> developers win $5000 repository challenge, a press release from the
> <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/>University of Southampton School of
> Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), April 15, 2008.
>
> Excerpt:
> Developers from ECS, Southampton, and Oxford University won a $5000
> challenge competition which took place at the
> <http://openrepositories.org/2008/>OR08 Open Repositories
> international conference.
>
> 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
> <http://www.zepler.tv/multimedia/OR08-CRIG/iPod/Mining_with_ORE.mp4>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
> <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG>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
> <http://www.openarchives.org/ore/>Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a
> topic that attracted one of the highest attendances at OR08....
>
>
> Comment [from Peter Suber]. 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.
>
Received on Fri Apr 25 2008 - 13:45:28 BST