Just a couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be in Brisbane for OR2017. With this being my third OR in as many years, it was great to be able to catch up with attendees from previous conferences as well as meet some of our repository administrators in person for the first time too! OR provides an excellent opportunity to meet up with both our repository administrators as well as seasoned developers, providing a wide range of different perspectives and opinions to take home to the team!
As well as networking there were also a number of posters and talks by the EPrints Services team to present. First there were 3 posters on display in QUT’s remarkably impressive “The Cube“. The first poster, “Annual Research Planning with EPrints at Glasgow School of Art” examined some recent developments we’ve been working on with GSA to help provide CRIS like features within an institutional repository context. Next we had “A Multi-Stakeholder Analysis of Scholarly Communication and its Implications for Data Repositories in Enabling Open Science“, based on my PhD research I undertook whilst working with EPrints Services, which aimed to investigate the role repositories can play in helping to enable Open Science, through enabling knowledge management within the lab, rather than just being an end point for research outcomes. And last (but by no means least) was “EPrints – Past, Present, Future“, which presented a timeline of EPrints developments from 2000 all the way through to today (and beyond).
This final poster touched upon EPrints’ transition from version 3.3 to 3.4, and with it, EPrints’ ability to be customised to suit a range of institutional needs. This was expanded upon further in the conference during the “Repository Rodeo Redux” session, where all of the big repository providers were given a chance to present their latest developments. With 3.4 introducing the notion of flavours – repository configurations aimed to support different needs, including the sharing of educational resources, hosting research data, recording impact, and harvesting data from social media – not only can we support the expanding needs of institutions, but also explore new markets for development, a notion that the rodeo panel agreed was important for the future of funding and development in our community. The rodeo also presented an opportunity, to not only hear what some of our fellow repository developers are up to, but also to highlight some of our most recent developments, including updates on IRStats2.5, ORCID Support, data visualisations, list creation and curation, faceted search and reporting framework developments!
More EPrints highlights could be found in the EPrints Interest Group sessions where Paula Callan and Matthew Kerwin presented their innovative approaches to repository stats; and William Nixon presented our ‘Impact’ repository flavour, that helps institutions record all the outcomes of research that can’t be measured simply by publications, including activities such as public outreach or media appearances for example. Denis Pitzalis gave a very interesting talk on the “UNESCO Mediabank” repository, an EPrints repository that meets the demands of hosting UNESCO’s vast and ever increasing multimedia content, sourced from around the world; and Alan Stiles demonstrated the Open University’s ORCID plugin for pulling publication content from ORCID.org as well as the OU’s attempts at ORCID advocacy. Overall there were a lot of very interesting presentations and much to learn from what the wider community has been up to!
And needless to say Australia itself was amazing!
-Will, July 2017-
