I'm just about to start arguing on both sides of the fence :-)
Yes, I agree with these points. UCD is important, and we need to look at the
user context, the wider environment in which the user operates, the social norms
which contribute to and mitigate against OA, and the plain old usabilty of our
software.
And yet, and yet, isn't that exactly what we've been doing for a decade?
Certainly a 3-volume independent usability report was one of key components of a
fundamental rewrite of our repository software in 2006. Every single one of
Tomasz' points have been addressed in repository design and development through
(literally) dozens of projects involving a range of end users since 2003.
DepositMO (which I mentioned in my last post) is just the latest, but perhaps
the most radical, look at how the boundaries of self-deposit can be extended
away from the repository itself and integrated onto other parts of a
researcher's normal environment (their word processor or their computer
desktop).
OA describes itself as a "new public good", so there has been and still has to
be a huge amount of adjustment and embedding and attitude shifting and change of
practice within the academic community. UCD, by contrast, "tries to optimize the
product around how users can, want, or need to use the product, rather than
forcing the users to change their behavior to accommodate the product." (quote
from wikipedia).
There has to be a balance between OA innovation and UCD. But Tomasz (and other
commentators) are right - let's improve the balance with some more
user-centredness.
Sent from my iPhone
On 21 Sep 2010, at 22:20, Tomasz Neugebauer <Tomasz.Neugebauer_at_CONCORDIA.CA>
wrote:
I agree, the usability of repository interfaces is inadequately
investigated. More generally, the need for more user-centered
design methodology in open access advocacy and software design has
been apparent to me for some time. User-centered design requires
taking into consideration the context of use of technology, and that
can be complex in the case of OA repositories: balancing legal/moral
obligations (to publishers, institutions, co-authors, funders and
the public), digital document version control
(pre-print/post-print/publisher version), multimedia attachments,
metadata accuracy, web indexing, etc. A computer scientist may have
a different context of use from someone working in the humanities -
yet the interface has to serve all. In addition to the depositors,
the result has to be usable for information seekers (and the tools
that they use for research) as well.
A user-centered design approach poses questions such as: How
efficient and effective are IR interfaces in helping researchers
navigate the self-archiving process? How did a change to an IR
interface improve efficiency, effectiveness and/or satisfaction of
the depositor (and/or information seeker)?
I share the opinion that usability of repository interfaces as a
broad topic has been inadequately investigated and would like to
support user-centered design initiatives.
Tomasz Neugebauer
Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian
tomasz.neugebauer_at_concordia.ca
Concordia University Libraries
1400 de Maisonneuve West (LB 341-3)
Tel.: (514) 848-2424 ex. 7738
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of C Oppenheim
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 10:10 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness
Steve makes an excellent suggestion for further JISC work. I would
be happy to support such an initiative, which should involve experts
in usability studies.
Charles
________________________________________
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Steve Hitchcock [sh94r_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK]
Sent: 20 September 2010 14:10
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness
The points made by Sally and Charles suggest that the 'why should I
bother (to self-archive)?' question is likely to be the primary
thought among authors new to open access repositories. This isn't
surprising and the effect is easily underestimated in our own
enthusiasm. This is the problem addressed by mandates and other
initiatives, but clearly there is further to go and this needs
continued momentum.
It is often convenient or tempting to assume that when a tool or
service is not used as widely as expected that this may be something
to do with system, software, interface, etc., but this tends to
overlook the more fundamental problem of this question above. In
fact, it is hard to measure the effectiveness of such aspects unless
people are using them properly as intended.
Nevertheless, my suspicion is that the usability of repository
interfaces as a broad topic has been inadequately investigated and
therefore, as also indicated in this thread, there may be
weaknesses. A quick scan of Google Scholar reveals some work, but
not an extensive list and not all recent. It's not clear if such
weaknesses might affect all repositories, some repositories
depending on software used, or - since repository interfaces are
customisable - individual or local repositories. There may be scope
for the current JISC projects on repository deposit, such as
DepositMO, to look at this.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/stevehit
Connotea:
http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
On 20 Sep 2010, at 12:56, Sally Morris wrote:
I'm not sure Charles is right - certainly, in the study
I carried out for
the Bioscience Federation in 2007/8, of 648 who said
they did not
self-archive, only 42 said they didn't know how, or had
no access to a
repository or support for self-archiving, while a
further 23 said they
didn't have time. 'Too difficult' was not mentioned at
all
Sally
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex,
UK BN13 3UU
Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286
Email: sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On
Behalf Of C Oppenheim
Sent: 20 September 2010 11:41
To:
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness
I am inclined to think it is a combination of the two;
on the one hand,
it's not a high priority in the eyes of many
researchers; and on the other,
they perceive (wrongly) that it is a chore to
self-archive. Indeed, the
idea that it is a chore may be a convenient
justification for failing to
take the matter seriously. Having, say, a librarian to
take on the job of
doing the self-archiving helps, but doesn't totally
overcome some
academics' resistance.
I also agree that for a mandate to be effective, there
must be negative
consequences if the academic does not co-operate.
Charles
________________________________________
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of
Sally Morris [sally_at_MORRIS-ASSOCS.DEMON.CO.UK]
Sent: 20 September 2010 11:36
To:
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness
I am not convinced that the primary obstacle is the
difficulty of deposit.
The impression obtained from the studies I did was that
the majority of
scholars did not know (or had a very vague and often
inaccurate idea) about
self-archiving, and most had no particular interest in
depositing their own
work
A question of mote and beam, perhaps?!
Sally
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex,
UK BN13 3UU
Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286
Email: sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On
Behalf Of Leslie Carr
Sent: 20 September 2010 10:21
To:
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness
On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bjork_at_HANKEN.FI wrote:
Firstly I have recently uploaded my central
30 articles to our (D-Hanken)
repository,
In what I would consider best practice
fashion. You can check the results
at
http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took
me about one week's workload
in all including finding the proper files, reformatting
the personal
versions, checking the copyright issues etc. The actual
task of uploading,
once I had everything ready, took perhaps the six
minutes suggested, but all
in my experience around an hour would be more
appropriate.
Thanks for providing some actual experience and feedback
to the list. I have
had a look at your user record in your institutional
DSpace repository, (how
is that related to your home page?, is the material
automatically generated
by the repository for inclusion in the home page?) and
the 24 items that are
available for public view (perhaps some are stuck in the
editorial process?)
appeared at the following times
3 items on 2010-Apr-28
5 items on 2010-Jun-01
8 items on 2010-Jun-17
5 items on 2010-Aug-12
3 items on 2010-Aug-16
DSpace does not reveal whether you submitted them in a
single batch and the
library processes batched them up, or whether you
deposited them in batches
and they were made available immediately.
I think that the pattern of deposit is important in
determining the overall
impact of the workload on the author - and more
importantly, on the
psychological impact of the workload. It must be the
case that depositing
thirty articles seems like a substantial administrative
task, especially
when there are so many other activities demanded of an
academic's daily
time. Even five or six items a day is a substantial
diary blocker! This is
the backlog phenomenon - any new repository (or new
user) has to face the
fact that getting started is the hardest part of using a
repository.
Depositing a reasonable representation of your recent
(or historical) output
is A Huge Chore. However, once you have achieved that,
then the incremental
workload for depositing an individual paper when you
have just written it
seems trivial. Especially compared to the job of sorting
out the references
:-)
This was certainly the case for our (school) repository
in 2002, when we
decided to mandate the use of EPrints for returning our
annual list of
research outputs to the University's admin office.
(Stevan may remember
this!) People whined, people complained, people dragged
their heels, but
ultimately they did it. But the following year, there
were no complaints,
just a few reminders sent out. And an incredibly
onerous admin task (a
month's work of 6 staff to produce the departmental
research list) was
reduced to a 10 minute job for one person (using Word to
reformat the list
that EPrints provided). And since then, we haven't
looked back.
There is a report available which details the study we
did at that time to
determine the effort involved in self-deposit:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
It includes all the data that we collected, and some
visualisations of the
Web activity that was involved in depositing several
hundred records. That
is where the 6 minute figure comes from, if you are
interested.
We are helping out some other key
researchers at my school to upload and
there are many non-trivial task. For instance
researchers in Finance whose
"personal versions" consist of text files and several
tables which are
provided to the publishers as sheets in excel files.
There may be several
hours of work to format a decent personal version of
such a papers. Since
some of best authors are very busy (dean and vice dean
of the school) this
has to be done by admin staff.
You can make a "Sunday best" version of the papers and
the spreadsheet
tables, or you could just deposit the texct and the
tables separately - if
that is acceptable to the authors. (This is a common
phenomenon in Open
Educational Resources - people's teaching materials are
never finalised, and
there are always just one or two more adjustments to
make to prepare them
for public view. And so a desire for the best sometimes
means that material
is never shared.)
Secondly the situation reseachers face in
making the decision to upload a
green copy resembles the situation faced by any
individual deciding whether
or not to take into use a new IT system. There is a
large body of literature
on this in Information Systems (my field) research and
the UTAUT model :...I
would suggest that using a model like these to model how
rational scholars
behave could be could quite fruitful, rather than
staring from scratch.
It would be interesting to analyse some of the Open
Access experience from
the last decade in terms of these models, but we are not
starting from
scratch in this area. The MIS models are very general,
and the OA experience
is very specific. Harnad, for example, maintains a list
of 38
rationalisations that people make against the use of
repositories:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/ . Still,
adopting an accepted
theoretical framework to talk about this issues can't be
a bad thing!
Uploading green copies to a repository may
not be so different from
starting a profile and uploading stuff to Face Book or
other similar
voluntary IT acts we have to decide on.
Except that voluntary participation in Facebook is a
million miles away from
formal scholarly communication, in ways that we can all
articulate at the
drop of a hat. "Publish or perish" for one!
---
Les Carr=
Received on Wed Sep 22 2010 - 12:11:16 BST