QMRO reaches 1000 items!

Some milestones come around much quicker than you expect!  Since April 2010, 1122 items have been approved and are now available in the repository to view and use.  The majority of this content at the moment is etheses, but we'll be working to get more content from academic staff submitted in the future.

Major thanks for the Electronic Services team in Library Services for all their hard work adding and uploading, and performing the essential QA on all these items.

Queen Mary Research Online - live at last

I am very pleased to announce that Queen Mary Research Online (QMRO), the open access institutional repository of research outputs, is now fully live and publicly accessible.  

This first public release is the initial fully working version and will require further development; but all the basic functionality (search, browse; by date, author, title) should be there.  We'll also be developing a strategy for ways to reuse the deposited content in our research publications systems (providing links to content with bundled bibliographic data to departments for example) and trying to tie these in more closely with broader research information around the College.  Watch this space.

For anyone not aware of the survey currently running on use of the repository and PubLists; we are asking for feedback on methods of deposit to QMRO from members of academic and research staff, and research administrators/managers.  If you haven't completed the survey yet, please do, we would really like to hear your views:

https://surveys.qmul.ac.uk/qmro

REF 2014 Research Impact Weighting announced

The Research funding councils have today announced the weightings that published research will have on the overall 'quality profile' for REF 2014.

The weightings are as follows:

• research outputs - 65 per cent
• impact - 20 per cent (increasing in subsequent REFs)
• environment - 15 per cent

This is the first time that the positive impact of a piece of research will be assessed.  The elements and their weightings will apply to all units of assessment.  The formal announcement is here (HEFCE)

An update on progress

So, it's been a while since I posted to this blog.  In that time we must have made some progress on the Publications System and QMRO right?

Well, yes and no.

Here's a little update

Publications:
PubLists has been upgraded to version 3.6 of Symplectic Elements.  This has been scheduled for a while and seems to have gone pretty smoothly.  Thanks to my ever diligent colleague in IT Services for making it happen.  New features in version 3.6 should make the battle with verification a little easier, as well as helping us get at the information we really want.

The Publications website, now re-christened (again) as Research Publications has finally been approved and is now awaiting launch.  Launch of the website is tied very closely to developments and fixes still required for the repository, more on this below.  It's looking really good, and fits in very nicely with the College's apparent move to streamline and link information held in various places to central systems.  Get us!

Repository:
QMRO content is growing apace and we are really pleased with uptake.  There are currently nearly 850 items somewhere in the repository (no, we haven't lost them!), mostly either live in the archive or waiting for attention by repository staff in the workflow.  We're also concentrating some effort on the eThesis collection, getting up-to-date with this for 2009-10 in a bid to catch up with ourselves.

And so, the difficult bit... when will QMRO finally go public?  Well, the same bugs that have been causing the delay to launch up to now are still plaguing us.  With some time allocated to fixing this both by IT and Symplectic people we hope to have to finally sorted out by the end of February, but as with all previous 'forecasts' this comes with the proviso that we're able to get some resource to identify and fix the problem.

In other news, we've just taken out a consultancy contract with @Mire, who are specialists in DSpace and will therefore be helping us to turn it into the all-singing all-dancing repository that I had envisaged!  More on this when we get the development under way.

Lastly, an upgrade of the DSpace software to version 1.6.2 is scheduled for completion by end of February, so it's going to be a busy month on the repository.  Again, more on this when the dates are finalised...

Keep watching

Repository and Publications Q&A

Post your comments and questions below concerning QMRO, PubLists and the Staff Publications website.

Open Access - co-operation between funders, academics and libraries

Announcements have been popping up all over after a very successful Open Access Week, and JISC Future of Research Conference outlining co-operative efforts between academics, funders and libraries to support open access.

More highlights from both events to come

QMRO update

We've been working hard in the background of the repository, QMRO, to make improvements before launching the service to the public.  Most of these improvements have been concerned with mapping fields in PubLists to the right fields in DSpace so that a useful set of information about the item is displayed.  This has caused some problems and having applied a new set of configurations is still not quite right.

We're also moving to a new domain name for QMRO http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk which will be the permanent URL for the service once it has been launched.  Unfortunately, work on this has been only partly successful and the site has been temporarily taken offline.  Please also be aware that QMRO downtime means that there will be no full text upload service via PubLists.  The rest of PubLists is working as normal.

We hope to have the repository back online by Monday 1st November, but watch this space.

There is still much to do with the repository, but we are making progress and hope to have a public launch date soon.