Required and Desirable metadata in a repository from OA Forum

Bill Hubbard is spot-on on the utility of am explicitly  searchable
field indicating whether or not an item has been peer reviewed. The
EPrints software has such a tag.

(It is only likely to be useful at a harvester level, as individual
repositories (IR) are only likely to be searched for
institution-internal purposes. So this is a metadatum worth displaying
for harvesters, and harvesters should set up in such a way as to make
it possible to search on only the peer-reviewed items, if the user
wishes.)

I am not certain, however, about the usefulness or urgency of a
"copyright" tag at this time, for either author or user: This might
possibly be useful institution-internally (e.g., for IP vigilantes --
though one wonders whether they would trust an author's
self-assessment!) but I doubt they would be useful at the webwide user
level.

Individual users certainly don't need to see or know the copyright
information, in order to view the item on-screen, download it, print it
off, and store it locally. (Users certainly don't worry about that in
accessing the billions (trillions?) of other kinds of items that are
web-readable!)

It would only be relevant if the individual user wished to re-post or
republish the journal article -- and I'd be inclined to treat that rare
and non-fundamental usage-need as a special case, one not requiring a
universal tag to facilitate it at this time -- especially because as OA
content will grow, the copyright picture will change, and these extra
re-use rights will eventually become part of the default conditions for
OA content.

I'd be inclined to say the same about the utility of an explicit
copyright status tag for the sake of harvesters who wish to put the
article in a database or to data-mine it: Again, harvesters like Google
do this already, without further ado, for the billions (trillions) of
items on the web already. It is hard to imagine that the minuscule
portion of all that web content that OA content represents (c. 2.5
million articles per year) warrants or necessitates explicit copyright
tagging at this time.

Stevan Harnad

On 08-02-29, at 12:10, Hubbard Bill wrote:

[Hide Quoted Text]
Dear Colleagues,

Just picking up on Ian Stuart's question as to opinion on "Required"
and
"Desired" metadata fields for eprints records.

Could I ask colleagues how they view a "peer-reviewed" field?

In terms of what users want, my own experience from talking to
academics
is that when faced with a mass of Open Access eprints the great
majority
have asked unprompted about how to search only within peer-reviewed
material.

And for this facility we need to give services a peer-review field,
unless they start interpolating from other metadata features like
journal-title or somesuch.

Copyright and peer-review (p-r) are the two topics that can be
guaranteed to come up in academic discussions in relation to
repositories: the first from their perspective as an author, the second
from their perspective as researcher/user.

My strong suspicion is that most of those academics that haven't asked
about a p-r filter would want the feature before they used OA material
as a habitual source for research. Again, it may be that they didn't
ask
because they assumed that it was all p-r, or, that it was all non-p-r.
(I have found repositories have a slighted reputation in some quarters
(often BioMedical) as being all referred to as "pre-print servers").

In terms of ingest, I think that the author is the best person to know
if their eprint has been p-r'd and that a peer-review tick-box would be
an acceptable additional task. Authors are generally pleased that their
article has passed p-r and would probably be happy about noting that.
As
to how that information is recorded, that is another matter.

Does this agree with other colleagues' experience? Is a p-r field
required to facilitate future use of the material?

Regards,

----Original Message----
From: Repositories discussion list
[mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Ian Stuart
Sent: 21 February 2008 14:41
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Required and Desirable metadata in a repository

[This is primarily a question for those involved in repositories for
e-prints, but others may have interesting views]

Within your own Repository, what [primarily metadata] fields are
*Required* and what are *Desired*?

If you were advising a fellow Institution about setting up a
repository,
what fields would you advise as *Required* and what are *Recommended*?

If you were to harvest[1] from a repository, what fields would you
consider essential, and what would you consider helpful?

Following on from that: if you were to harvest the Depot (or even the
Intute Repository Search), how would you hope to identify[2] deposits
that could be imported into your own Institutional Repository

[1] This is where I come in: The depot will have a transfer
service, but
what to transfer?
[2] I've had loads of thoughts on this one, and they all seem
to spiral
and knit and knot and hide their threads, and not actually
conclude in
any meaningful way.... for me.

--

Ian Stuart.
Developer for The Depot,
EDINA,
The University of Edinburgh.

http://edina.ac.uk/

--

Bill Hubbard
SHERPA Manager

SHERPA - www.sherpa.ac.uk
RSP - www.rsp.ac.uk
RoMEO - www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo
JULIET - www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet
OpenDOAR - www.opendoar.org

SHERPA
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University of Nottingham
Queens Medical Centre
Nottingham
NG7 2UH
UK

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