The winners of the poster competition (as decided by popular vote)were announced at the conference dinner last night. It’s interesting that while the presentations at Open Repositories are mostly technical (often at too high a level for most repository managers), the posters focus more on general repository management issues like open access policy, publishing trends and copyright. This flavour was reflected in the winner of the competition, a poster titled “Open Research Online:a self-archiving success story” (Smith & Yates) and the runner up, a poster from the Sherpa team outlining “Major improvements to the RoMEO service” (Smith & Millington).
Smith and Yates from Open University UK challenged the popular belief that self-deposit doesn’t work without a university-level mandate. They reported impressive contribution statistics (higher than most coverage levels in mandated repositories as indicated by my own reading of the literature). They argue that the secret to encouraging contribution is providing a service that appeals to researchers rather than just university administration. This is something we’re well aware of in Australia, and it’s something I believe we’re going to need to observe carefully in the post-ERA days.
The RoMEO team are building a new version of their database expected to be released later this year. Last year they improved the clarity of policies around archiving published versions within their database. This was a great development and something from which we in Australia have benefited for some time through the OAKList database.
Now Sherpa is working on an ambitious project to reorganise their records around journal-level policies, rather than publisher-level records. This will be particularly useful for society journals published by Wiley (previously under the Blackwell banner), where both copyright ownership and embargo periods differ between journals but this can be difficult to establish from the publisher or journal website.
Copyright Rebecca Parker, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>
