“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/

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.

Where does SWORD fit into the future?

May 212011
 

Are you coming to the Open Repositories 2011 conference?  If so, you might be interested in the ‘Developers Challenge‘.  The theme of the the challenge this year is:

“Show us the future of repositories!”

This competition will be fascinating, as it will allow repository users, managers, and developers to team up in order to show us glimpses of the future, and how repositories will be playing a role in that future.

This year there is an extra prize for the most innovative use of SWORD in an open-repositories context.  In order for repositories to be successful, they need to solicit content.  How do you see SWORD fitting into that?

Many of the SWORD team members, past and present, including a lot of the current SWORD v2 project developers will be at the conference.  If you’d like to talk about SWORD, get a bit of advice about how to prototype with SWORD, or how SWORD could feature in your ‘developers challenge’ submission, come and find one of us for a chat.

Finally, if you’ve not signed up yet but want to come, we’ll be running ‘The SWORD Course‘ again at the conference, between 8am and 12noon on Tuesday June 7th.  Email info@swordapp.org if you’d like to join us.

Retirement of old demonstration servers

Mar 212011
 

Since the very first SWORD project, there have been two demonstration SWORD servers provided.  These were funded by the original SWORD project.  They have been in existence for a number of years, and have served as excellent demonstration servers for SWORD clients. However, they have now had to be retired.

http://dspace.swordapp.org/ used to provide a demonstration DSpace system. Instead, it is possible (thanks to Duraspace for making this available) to use the http://demo.dspace.org/ server.  http://fedora.swordapp.org/ has not been replaced, but if anyone knows of a public test instance of Fedora that could be used, we’d be happy to update this page.

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/

WANTED: SWORD case studies

Sep 232010
 

We’re looking to improve the SWORD website and inspire new uses of SWORD by collecting and publishing a collection of SWORD case studies.  We’d love to hear from you if you’ve written a SWORD client, or made use of an existing client in a new way.  There is a lot of good work being undertaken that uses SWORD, and we want to make sure that everyone knows about it.

If you have a case study, please either email it to us (info@swordapp.org), or get in touch. If you’d prefer we could arrange to interview you instead.  We’ll publish the case studies on the SWORD website, and we’ll look into other options for disseminating them further.

The SWORD Course

Sep 212010
 

The complete slides and videos from the SWORD course are now online. To access the course materials use the ‘The SWORD Course‘ link in the menu bar at the top of the site.

Here is an overview of the materials available:

  1. An Introduction to SWORD: Gives an overview of SWORD, the rationale behind its creation, and details of the first three funded SWORD projects (Slides | Video)
  2. SWORD Use Cases: Provides an introduction to use cases, and examines some of the use cases that SWORD can be used for (Slides | Video)
  3. How SWORD Works: A high level overview of the SWORD protocol, lightly touching on a few technical details in order to explain how it works (Slides | Video)
  4. SWORD Clients: The reasons for needing SWORD clients are shown, followed by a tour of some of the current SWORD clients (Slides | Video)
  5. Create Your Own SWORD Client: An overview of the EasyDeposit SWORD client creation toolkit, including the chance to try it out (Slides | Video)