OA-RJ project blog

The Open Access-Repository Junction project is a JISC-funded project running from 1st August 2009 to 31st march 2011, hosted at EDINA.

Welcome to our project blog. We have set up this blog to highlight and record progress we make during the course of this project. We’d like this to be an opportunity for readers to see not just the finished deliverables but also to see our decision making processes and methodologies underlying the work itself. We are going to start with a series of posts which explain the background to the project, the problems we are trying to solve illustrated with use cases, before moving on to presenting a broker model we hope to adopt for the OA-RJ project. Interspersed throughout the blog will be posts recording conferences and workshops the project team have attended, interesting problems and their solutions that we may encounter along the way, and progress towards our goal of developing tools to enable interoperable repository systems. Without further ado lets hear a little about where this project has come from and where we think it is going.

Project Background

The OA-RJ project builds on and enhances previous work carried out under the auspices of the JISC-funded Depot project. One of the objectives of the Depot was to devise an unmediated (computer-assisted) reception and referral service, called Repository Junction, which collected information in order to redirect users to existing Institutional Repository (IR) services. This was a support activity to the principal reason for commissioning the Depot which was to provide a repository for author/researchers at institutions that did not (then) have an IR.

Within the Depot, the Repository Junction (RJ) component carried out the following functions:

i. Institutional affiliation deduction of potential depositors (e.g. by IP lookup)

ii. Query of external directories to locate an appropriate location for deposit

iii. Re-direction of user to the most appropriate repository, given a positive match

The purpose of this project is to extend this type of mechanism in order to support machine-to-machine enquiry as well as to route author/researchers (and their research output) to appropriate repository locations. This routing should be useful in enabling interoperability between emerging services as well as improving the deposit process for all people involved in the deposit process. The next blog post is dedicated to highlighting some of the deposit problems we are trying to overcome.

Aims and Objectives

The deposit of items into repositories is currently akin to a vertical market. A depositor has a one-to-one relationship with the repository service and materials are deposited singly into one location. However we know that research publications are often authored by multiple researchers from multiple institutions who require their publications to be deposited in multiple locations.

The aim of OARJ is to assist deposit into multiple existing repository services by developing middleware that, for a given paper, will aid both discovery of repository targets and delivery of the content to the appropriate locations.

Discovery via the Junction

To realise the discovery role the project will design a junction tool to identify deposit targets. The junction will use a number of data sources and mechanisms will deduce which repositories are associated with an item. This information will be made accessible in a format that can easily be adopted by other service providers and interested parties

Delivery via the Broker

To address the delivery role we will develop a standalone broker which will enable content providers to deposit materials with multiple recipients. Without a broker, each depositor would need to maintain credentials and a working agreement with each possible target – a system that simply cannot scale. Using a broker aids depositors and recipients because the various parties only need to establish their own credentials with the broker and trust the broker to handle all the technical issues for communication.