Attending the first NORFest to give a talk on Community, Technology and Open Repositories
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My talk, ‘Strengthen and align Ireland’s network of open access repositories,’ was part of Lightning Talk Session 2: Achieving 100% Open Access to Research Publications, a very interesting and varied panel of speakers chaired by Dr Marion Boland, Head of Research Policy at Science Foundation Ireland.
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At 7 minutes, the talk was a short overview of the progress of a two-year NORF-funded project to align Ireland’s network of open access repositories metadata standards with international best practices. I began by outlining the project’s aims and objectives, and highlighting ongoing work in the data collection phase, which is drawing to a close, including a survey of institutional repositories’ metadata practices, interviews with repository managers, and interviews with strategic national stakeholders and international leader. A report on the survey data, 'Advancing Open Repositories in Ireland: A Survey and Strategic Recommendations for National Progress, was published recently and can be read in full at https://zenodo.org/records/10390626. You can also read a brief summary by Cillian Joy here: https://hardimanlibrary.blogspot.com/2023/12/advancing-open-repositories-in-ireland.html.
Much of the talk was focused on what the project team 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 among the Irish repository community. The project really can be boiled down to two integrated concepts, technology and community, which was the central theme for the talk and the project more generally. The project’s community approach is demonstrated by the diversity of the project board and their institutional affiliations.
I also wanted to emphasise the often-unsung practitioners of open access repositories, especially repository managers and library staff. It can sometimes be easy to focus more on the technological aspects of open access, or on the communities of researchers whose important work is being shared and built upon. But at the heart of the everyday work of running the repositories and making sure the content is accessible and findable, are the people who make such open sharing possible, and who work under major resource and time constraints. Part of the major aim of this project, at least from my perspective, is to make their job easier by building up the community support that they have access to, sharing expertise, resources, and training to the benefit of the entire repository and research community.
During the Q&A an audience member asked an interesting question about increasing resource allocation, particularly human resources, and I think this issue really highlights the disparities we found between different institutions through the data collection and analysis. While some repositories are well-resourced and supported, many others are not, and this is reflected both in the qualitative interviews with managers and in the survey data. A community approach needs to be aware of these disparities moving forward, and to put forward solutions that will ameliorate these differences.
In the next phase of the project, we aim to facilitate a national consensus on adopting international metadata guidelines for open access for institutional repositories. We will do so by fostering community agreement, developing community guides, and establishing a sustainable governance infrastructure for managing and updating this work. However, before then, some important publications will share the project data and outline important next steps.
My thanks to the NORF, DRI and RIA teams who made the event a great success.
Dr Chris Loughnane
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