Text Mining for Scholarly Communications and Repositories Joint Workshop

The Text Mining workshop was held in Manchester on 28-29th October 2009 and focused on the challenges and priorities associated with integrating text mining technologies in applications to support scholarly communication and repository initiatives. With the vast amounts of information now available on the internet, the benefits provided by text mining for discovering relevant documents have become increasingly significant.

Professor Tony Hey presented the keynote and he spoke about the need for more intelligent data discovery in a multi-disciplinary and collaborative way for Science to move from data and information towards knowledge (DIKW). These complex technologies have been applied successfully to the Science domains, particularly chemistry and medicine and are being adopted by BioMedCentral and Elsevier. Rafael Sidi from Elsevier again spoke of information overload and the importance of building applications on top of content using open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This would allow interoperability and collaboration between publishers' collections and the potential for free access to content with subscriptions for the added services.

Emma Tonkin's overview of the FixRep Project at UKOLN that is examining text mining techniques for automated metadata extraction was particularly relevant to the repository world. Presentations are now available online at The National Centre for Text Mining.

Open Journal Systems (OJS)

During the last WRN video meeting, partners expressed an interest in Open Journal Systems (OJS) which is being used by libraries for publishing and managing journals at low cost. It is open source, has a flexible design, can be installed locally and is easy to use and administer. Morag Watson from Edinburgh University gave a very positive review of this system at the recent Edinburgh Repository Fringe 2009. There will be a further blog post covering this event in the next few days.

Technical Priorities Survey

Work package 4 of the new project is looking to build and implement a variety of technical tools and services to develop and enhance repository infrastructure and usage. A large number of possible tools were suggested within the original project bid:

Workflow

Copyright checking by journal title integrated into the workflow process

Automated metadata completion e.g. gathering journal metadata from external databases

Automatic cover sheet generation for repository deposits

Embargo management

Enhanced metadata collection (author affiliation etc. etc.?)

Import/Export of metadata

Generation of online CVs bibliography web pages from repository content

Export/import of publication information from repository to chosen citation software

Export/import of publication information into other university systems e.g. library catalogue

Export/import of publication information into other repositories

Repository management

Improvement of repository statistics and reporting

Integration of repository in REF requirements for reporting and statistical analysis

Integrating preservation services into the repository

Handling storage capacity for large items such as data and multimedia

User experience

Shopping basket facility allowing users to collect items together and download as a single package

Embedded players and streaming for display of multimedia deposits

We are currently surveying the WRN community as to which of these developments they see as priority for the project team to work on. Project partners should submit their choices by email by Friday 22nd May 2009.