Developing Community Consensus on Adopting International Metadata Guidelines for Irish Open Access Repositories

The University of Galway Library is leading a two-year NORF-funded project to align Ireland’s network of open access repositories' metadata standards with international best practices. The Project Board is comprised of experts from institutions across Ireland (https://www.universityofgalway.ie/openrepositories/team/). 

I joined the project as NORF Open Access Repositories Project Manager in June, when the project was already well underway. Twenty-nine repositories are registered for the Inventory of Open Access Repositories, comprising a range of institutions, including universities, colleges, schools, and government departments. You can view the complete list here: https://universityofgalway.ie/openrepositories/inventory/. 

A survey of institutional repositories’ metadata practices is now being analysed and will inform the work of the project board as the project progresses towards its first set of deliverables, due in December 2023, which includes the publication of an Irish repository landscape report. 

Stakeholder Interviews and Expert Guidance 

Our current work includes preparing for stakeholder interviews with repository managers, strategic national stakeholders, and international leaders. Over the next few months, we will conduct semi-structured interviews to gather operational and strategic institutional insights on metadata standards, international guidelines, potential issues related to local requirements and compliance, and the role of the institutional repository in a complex publishing ecosystem. We will ascertain how to best align current repository working practices with internationally established metadata best practices which enable open scholarly infrastructure. We will also explore with participants how to build a sustainable community around these standards and to discuss the applicability of best practice metadata guidelines.

These interviews will provide concrete information on current working practices in the field and key contextual information on repository strategy and strategic alignment with national and international standards, including funding requirements. We seek to understand how to best align current repository working practices with internationally established metadata best practices alongside key challenges to standardisation and the role of the parallel commercial publishing market in open access development. Understanding the broader OA publishing landscape both in Ireland and internationally from the perspective of different types of research institutions will help us to contextualise the role of OA repositories in academic publishing ecosystems that include commercial publishers and to assess their costs and benefits in contrast to commercial OA publishing agreements i.e., transformative agreements. This will assist the writing of a national OA metadata roadmap that accounts for the wider publishing environment and demonstrates both the benefits and challenges to institutions of repository metadata alignment. 

Calling Upon Community Expertise 

By conducting interviews with these key figures involved in the Irish OA repository landscape and internationally, we can not only compile a detailed composite picture focused on current metadata practices but also begin to conceptualise a community approach that could include anything from community-managed guides up to the proposal for a more formal national repository infrastructure. The key to our multifaceted approach is to understand what is needed right now to ease the metadata challenges faced by those working in repositories, to describe what we discovered through the data-gathering process, and how we are using the process to engage and build community support for OA metadata guidelines and compliance. Based on the findings at this stage, we hope to discuss how to facilitate a national consensus on adopting international metadata guidelines for open access for institutional repositories by fostering community agreement, developing community guides, and establishing a sustainable governance infrastructure for managing and updating this work. From there, we can move onto the project's next stage focused on agreeing on a community-agreed and refined metadata approach aligned to international best practices, and piloting this in two to three repositories. The result will be a national metadata roadmap that draws upon the expertise and guidance of the institutional repository community across Ireland. You can view our project timeline here: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/openrepositories/plan/.  

Dr Christopher Loughnane is the NORF Open Access Repositories Project Manager at the University of Galway Library