SWORD at Open Repositories 2012

Jul 032012
 

The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories in Edinburgh is less than a week away now!  Here is a list of SWORD related presentations at the conference by both the SWORD team, and others:

SWORD Google Summer Of Code opportunity

Apr 022012
 

We’re pleased to advertise the following:

Dryad (http://datadryad.org) is a repository for data associated with scientific publications. As Dryad grows, it is becoming more important to use established standards for exchanging data with other systems. Although Dryad is built on DSpace, the SWORD support in DSpace is not sophisticated enough to handle Dryad’s data model. Specifically, there is no way to submit a SWORD package to DSpace that includes multiple objects with structured relationships.

To correct these deficiencies, Dryad has a summer programming project available through the Google Summer of Code. The general aim of the project is to expand the capabilities of the DSpace SWORD module, allowing for objects wrapped in BagIt (https://wiki.ucop.edu/display/Curation/BagIt) packages and containing OAI-ORE (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) manifests. Although the project is driven by Dryad’s needs, the new results will be broadly applicable within the DSpace community. The project will be developed in a configurable way so it may be included in a future release of DSpace. For more details, see the project description at http://bit.ly/GED8ZX.

If you’re interested, or know someone who is interested, don’t wait! The final application deadline is this Friday (6th April 2012), at 19:00 UTC. Send an initial notification of interest to the phylosoc group (contact information available on the project page). You are highly encouraged to create a draft proposal early this week so potential mentors may give feedback before the final proposal is submitted.

SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios

Jan 162012
 

A new paper about repository deposit scenarios has just been published in this month’s D-Lib:

SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january12/lewis/01lewis.html / doi:10.1045/january2012-lewis)

The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol was designed to facilitate the interoperable deposit of resources into systems such as repositories. The use of an interoperable standard eases the burden of developing clients to deposit such resources. This paper examines nine different deposit use cases, and provides case studies and examples of each use case to demonstrate the wide range of repository deposit scenarios. The use cases range from the deposit of scholarly communication outputs from a publisher to a repository and the automatic deposit of data from laboratory equipment, to inter-repository transfer and collaborative authoring workflows.

Nine different deposit use cases are examined, along with case studies or examples for each:

  • Use case 1: Publisher to Repository
  • Use case 2: Research Information System to Repository
  • Use case 3: Desktop to Repository
  • Use case 4: Repository to Repository
  • Use case 5: Specialised Deposit User Interface to Repository
  • Use case 6: Conference Submission System to Repository
  • Use case 7: Laboratory equipment to Repository
  • Use case 8: Repository Bulk Ingest
  • Use case 9: Collaborative authoring

“How much do you know about SWORD?”

Dec 122011
 

We recently posted a survey about ‘Data Deposit’.  The survey is still open if you wish to respond.

The first question in the survey asks:

  • “How much do you know about SWORD?”
We asked this simple question as we wanted to find out the general level of knowledge about SWORD within the community who responded.  The survey was sent to various email lists with an interest in managing research data, SWORD, and repositories.  The following graph shows the responses to this question (survey responses as at 12/12/2011, number of responses = 35):
The responses confirm our suspicion that a lot of people have heard of SWORD and know what it does, but a reasonable proportion either haven’t heard of it, or don’t really know much about it.  So there is good news, and room for improvement in this result.
We’ll post further results from the survey over the next few weeks.

Survey: Depositing Research Data using SWORD

Dec 012011
 

The SWORD v2 project has been asked by the JISC to look into the applicability of the SWORD protocol for depositing Research Data.  The SWORD protocol has always been agnostic about the type of resource it is depositing, however its initial development stemmed from a requirement for the deposit of scholarly communications outputs into repositories – these typically being small text-based items.

In order to investigate how well SWORD and SWORD v2 would deal with Research Data, we need to know about the different types of research data that you are working with.  This will allow us to discover some of the range of different data types in use, and the general and specific requirements of each.

We’ve tried to keep the survey short – it is only 9 questions long.  If you have a few minutes to share some information with us about the data you work with, we would very much appreciate it.

Visit the survey at http://swordapp.org/sword-v2/sword-v2-data-deposit-survey/

SWORD v2 ready to use!

Nov 082011
 

As part of the SWORD v2 project finding, resources were allocated to implement it in a number of repository platforms.  First off the block to release SWORD v2 implementations as part of their core functionality are EPrints and DSpace:

There are also client code library implementations available if you wish to create SWORD v2 clients.

Looking back at Open Repositories 2011

Jun 182011
 

Everyone is home from Open Repositories 2011 now.  As usual it was a great conference, and we were once again surprised by how often SWORD is referred to in different presentations.

SWORD was promoted by the team twice at the conference:

  • The SWORD Course: The course was presented by Stuart Lewis and Richard Jones. The slides from the course are available online. This year saw the addition of a new module, ‘An introduction to SWORD v2′.
  • SWORD v2 debut presentation: This was the first time that SWORD v2 has been presented at a large conference. The presentation was delivered by Stuart Lewis and Richard Jones, and showed the evolution of SWORD v1 to v2, demonstrated the benefits and use cases of the new version, and looked at the implementations that are under development.  The slides can be viewed on slideshare.

SWORD also played a part of the Developer Challenge, with a special prize being offered to the the most innovative use of SWORD in an open-repositories context.  The prize was won by a group made up of DSpace developers from New Zealand (The University of Auckland Library, and the Library Consortium of New Zealand) and an EPrints developer from the UK, currently living in Korea.  Part of their submission involved an Android mobile application they had created that could deposit geo-tagged photos directly into a repository using SWORD.

SWORD v2 development effort starts

Apr 212011
 

Following a meeting of the SWORD v2 developers earlier this week, development work to implement the proposed SWORD v2 standard has now started.  Our aim is to have things to show by the time of the Open Repositories 2011 conference in June this year.

The SWORD v2 standard is not yet finalised, however it is hoped that lessons learned during the implementations will allow the final wrinkles to be ironed out and agreed upon.

Thanks to generous funding from JISC, the project is able to fund multiple repository and client implementations.  Each of these will be made openly available, and are listed below.  Once development locations or code repositories for these become available, links will be added to this post.

In addition, a Python Simple SWORD Server (http://sword-app.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/sword-app/sss/trunk/) has been developed to aid initial testing, and a further automated validation test suite will be developed.

SWORD wikipedia entry

Jan 282011
 

SWORD now has a wikipedia entry!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWORD_(Protocol)

The page does not have much detail on at the moment, so if you have a minute or two, please take a look at the page, and see if you could add / edit / correct / improve / enhance the page.  If you know of any other entries that should link to or reference the SWORD entry, please could you add those in too.

If you have any SWORD-related content or links that you would like to be added to this site (links to implementations, code, documentation, blog entries, papers) please pass them on to info@swordapp.org and we’ll get them added.

SWORD and the Open Journal Systems (OJS)

Dec 092010
 

As part of the ongoing SWORD development process, we’re hoping to bring you a set of short case studies demonstrating the wide variety of different resource deposit use cases that SWORD enables.  In the first of these case studies, we have a quick chat with the technical architect for the Public Knowledge Project, Alec Smecher.

Alec is the lead developer of Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS), Open Harvester Systems (OHS), and the PKP Web Application Library (WAL).

SWORD: Alec, could you give us a bit of background about what OJS is, and why it was developed?
Alec: Open Journal Systems is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.  OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing.  Through its management systems, its finely grained indexing of research, and the context it provides for research, OJS seeks to improve both the scholarly and public quality of refereed research.

OJS is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale.

SWORD: How and why did you decide to use SWORD with OJS?
Alec: Our SWORD support came about via a bit of proof of concept funding from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) for a project called the Big Digital Machine (BDM).  We worked with DuraSpace and cnx.org on interoperability so that the apps could feed each other data via SWORD. For example, OJS can deposit to Fedora or DSpace for archiving, or into cnx.org as a way of spinning a journal article into textbook content.

SWORD: What different options do OJS administrators have for making use of the OJS SWORD functionality?
Alec: We implemented a number of ways for SWORD deposits to work, in the interests of giving users the flexibility to experiment with different models:

  • Administrators can deposit articles at any time
  • Authors can deposit pre-prints into their own institution’s repository when they’re accepted by the journal (green road open access)
  • Authors can deposit into Journal Manager-specified deposit points
  • Automatic deposits can be configured so that articles are deposited on acceptance, e.g. for journals backed by a repository for archival purposes

SWORD: And how about the future, where do you think OJS and SWORD interoperability could go in the future?
Alec: Ideologically, one of our primary interests is open access (OA), including so-called “green road”, whereby authors are free to deposit articles into their institution’s repository for public consumption, even though the journal might be subscription-based. This is a good idea but authors often don’t follow through, because they don’t trust OA, or don’t have the initiative, etc.  We thought that semi-automating the process might push them towards green OA — when they receive an acceptance email from a journal, they also receive one from the SWORD facility within OJS prompting them to follow a link to specify their repository’s deposit point and complete the deposit.

Of course, authors will almost certainly have no idea what their deposit point is, so a typical thing to do would be to involve their institution’s librarian — a common practice might be for the journal prepare the email that the author receives automatically to include instructions for them simply to forward it to their librarian.

We just write the software, and are at best at arms’ length from the journals themselves, so we typically have to follow an iterative process with new and experimental tools like this — we’ll make some assumptions, some will turn out to be incorrect, and with feedback from users, we’ll refine things from there. By providing tools without prescribing a workflow, we also ensure that journals will have the freedom to try things that we haven’t foreseen.

If you would like to know more about OJS and its SWORD interface, please visit http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs.  For further information about SWORD, please explore the rest of the SWORD website: http://swordapp.org/

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