Invited presentation given to open access event in Izmir, October 2017, as part of "open-access week"

1. Paul Walk
Director, Antleaf
Managing Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
Web: http://www.paulwalk.net
Email: paul@paulwalk.net
Twitter: @paulwalk
www.antleaf.com www.coar-repositories.org
Next Generation Institutional Repositories

2. 3 cheers for the current generation of repositories!

3. cheer #1:
proven technology,
ubiquitous in our
institutions

4. cheer #2:
strong community
support

5. cheer #3:
distributed policy
control

6. about the COAR Next
Generation Repositories
Working Group

8. Next Generation Repositories Working Group
• Eloy Rodrigues, chair (COAR,
Portugal)
• Andrea Bollini (CINECA, Italy)
• Alberto Cabezas (LA Referencia,
Chile)
• Donatella Castelli (OpenAIRE/CNR,
Italy)
• Les Carr (Southampton University,
UK)
• Leslie Chan (University of Toronto
at Scarborough, Canada)
• Rick Johnson (SHARE/University of
Notre Dame, US)
• Petr Knoth (Jisc and Open
University, UK)
• Paolo Manghi (CNR, Italy)
• Lazarus Matizirofa (NRF, South
Africa)
• Pandelis Perakakis (Open Scholar,
Spain)
• Oya Rieger (Cornell University, US)
• Jochen Schirrwagen (University of
Bielefeld, Germany)
• Daisy Selematsela (NRF, South
Africa)
• Kathleen Shearer (COAR, Canada)
• Tim Smith (CERN, Switzerland)
• Herbert Van de Sompel (Los
Alamos National Laboratory, US)
• Paul Walk (Antleaf, UK)
• David Wilcox (Duraspace/Fedora,
Canada)
• ▪ Kazu Yamaji (National
Institute of Informatics, Japan)

9. To position repositories as the
foundation for a distributed, globally
networked infrastructure for scholarly
communication…

10. objectives
• cross-repository interoperability
• encourage the emergence of added-value services
• transform the scholarly communication system by emphasising:
• collective, open and distributed management of open content
• collective innovation

11. principles
• distribution of control of scholarly resources
• inclusiveness: different institutions and regions have particular needs (e.g
diverse language, policies and priorities) and this must be supported
• for the public good
• intelligent openness

12. Intended outputs
• direct outputs:
• the Next Generation Working Group will collectively produce:
• reports
• conceptual models
• recommendations for particular technologies
• indirect outputs:
• some individuals independently of the Next Generation Working Group
will:
• implement software changes to repository platforms
• build infrastructure (micro-services)

13. design assumptions
• focus on resources
• not just associated metadata - treat them equally
• pragmatism
• favour the simpler approach
• evolution, not revolution
• use existing software and systems where possible
• convention over configuration
• standardise only where necessary and minimise constraints
• engage with users where they are:
• integrate into environments and systems where users are already engaged
Not all users are human, some are machines!

14. repository ‘behaviours’
and user-stories

15. “behaviours”
• Supporting discovery of content
• exposing identifiers and links between resources
• supporting navigation
• supporting batch discovery
• actively sharing or exposing notifications
• Participating in the social network
• Global identification of people in the repository network
• Annotation, commenting and reviews - e.g. Open Peer Review
• Logging and exposing of user interaction data across repositories
• Preservation
• Supporting other processes
• Declaring licenses at a resource level
• Exposing standardised usage metrics
• Content transfer (e.g. for text and data mining)

16. user stories
as <some actor>,
I want to <do something>,
in order to gain <some benefit>

17. user stories relating to repository ‘behaviours’
Example user-stories for the behaviour “Discovery through navigation”:
• as a human or machine user, I want to easily and uniformly identify the
metadata in a repository record, so that I can ascertain the relevance
of the resource.
• as a repository manager, I want to be able to access the metadata in
my repository in real time through an API in order to build views or
services on any platform using the data.
• as a research manager (funder or institution), I want to be able to track
the research outputs related to a specific funded project to
demonstrate value and compliance with policy

18. characteristics of the next
generation repository

19. repositories must be deeply connected
• outgoing:
• individual content resources
• directly accessible on the network
• individual metadata records
• not just in batches
• individual users
• as part of a variety of professional and social networks
• incoming:
• using all appropriate global identifier systems
• accepting automated deposit of content and data from other systems (e.g.
scientific instruments)
• allowing external services to interact with content
• content mining
• annotation services
• etc.

20. repositories need to be active
• the next generation repository needs to talk to the world
• publishing events to notification hubs and notifying users
• and to listen, and respond:
• respond to requests for content and metadata, equally
• continuously improve the information it has, adding value where it can by:
• responding to and supporting annotation and peer review
• not just allowing text/data-mining, but supporting it and benefitting from the
derived information
supporting user workflows - providing and accepting data

21. active repositories
• repositories could become pro-active
components in an event-driven
scholarly system
• publishing ‘events’ such as the addition
of a new item to one or more
notification hubs
• third-party systems ‘subscribing’ to
these notifications - many potential
applications
• would involve very little or no effort by
repository administrators
• modest software development

22. being of, not just on, the Web
• obvious…but not really done yet
• the ‘splash page’ requiring human
mediation is a real problem
• “signposting the scholarly web”
• link HTTP headers
• would involve very little or no effort
by repository administrators
• a small amount of software
development in repository systems
http://signposting.org

23. content, metadata and people
Diagram by Herbert Van de Sompel

24. conclusion
• the goal:
• To position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally
networked infrastructure for scholarly communication…
• we already have much of what is needed:
• ubiquitous distribution of open repository platforms
• the desire to challenge the status quo
to work in the square (meydan), not the tower (kule)
together, we can establish a scholarly communications
infrastructure that we can be proud of, and that our
children will thank us for!

25. Paul Walk
Director, Antleaf
Managing Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
Web: http://www.paulwalk.net
Email: paul@paulwalk.net
Twitter: @paulwalk www.antleaf.com www.dublincore.org
Teşekkürler!
More information:
http://bit.ly/coar-repo-ng