UKOLN International Repository Workshop

Have just finshed at the UKOLN International Repository Workshop, twittered at #repinf09. The workshop was a joint JISC/DRIVER event; it had international scope, but there were only a couple of East and South Asian participants, and Andrew Treloar and myself from Oceania.

The intention of the workshop was to formulate action plans which would make sense to fund for international infrastructure for repositories—in the first instance, research publication repositories. I took part in the identifier infrastructure workshop, and I have been cited publicly (though anonymously) as saying that it was "surprisingly pragmatic". The information superstructures that can be imposed over identifiers—and what they identify—can get quite open-ended and intellectually satisfying; but our business was to formulate something concrete, fundable, and realisable over the next year or so. What you put on top of it later is for another workshop.

There were four streams to the workshop: four different kinds of infrastructure that could be put in place. The four streams were:

1. Repository Citation Services: Improving the ways in which citation data relating to open access research papers is shared. Citation data may be forwards or backwards citation. Includes the ability to recognise citations in repositories and the open web.
   
2. Repository Handshake: Improving ways in which repositories can be populated with research papers, including authors, other repositories, publishers and research management systems. The "handshake" involves negotiation between a depositing agent and a repository, building on SWORD.
   
3. Repository Interoperable Identification Infrastructure: Improve identifying entities in repositories and making connections across repositories, and provide useful services to do so.
   
4. Repository Organisation: Provide international organisational support to enable research repositories to work together to meet the objectives of Open Access and eResearch through a confederation of repositories.
   

I'll post:

• summaries of what these streams reported back on the three summary get-togethers in the workshop: a couple of streams really changed direction through the workshop.
  
• Then, some notes on the first session of the identifier stream (which were behind the first report-back). We did not change tack as drastically as some streams, so they will still help inform what the stream eventually came up with.
  
• A summary of the SURF demonstration of their persistent identifier work and their enhanced document work.
  
• And finally (if I get to be so bold), my own take on what the identifier stream came up with.