From eprint archives to open archives and OAI:

the Open Citation project

By The Open Citation Project team

Presented by Steve Hitchcock, Southampton University

These slides prepared for the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) All Projects Meeting, Edinburgh, 24-25th June 2002

OpCit is a joint JISC-NSF

International Digital Libraries Project 1999-2002

About this presentation

The aim is to:

• Report progress since Stratford All-Projects meeting in 2000

• Demonstrate new services developed by the project

• Highlight the role of the project in the Open Archives Initiative

• Outline key tasks remaining

• Look beyond the Open Citation Project

Recap 1: principal partners

• Southampton University, IAM (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia) Research Group, PI Stevan Harnad

Citation-ranked search, EPrints.org, user surveys

• Cornell University, Digital Library Research Group, PI Carl Lagoze

Architecture for reference linking, experiments with the ACM Digital Library and D-Lib magazine, OAI technical support center

• arXiv.org, Paul Ginsparg

Now based at Cornell University. Still the largest archive of freely accessible author-deposited scientific papers

The Open Citation Project: deliverables

The Open Citation Project (OpCit) is developing software and services to support the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). OpCit can help OAI data providers and service providers:

• Citebase: citation-ranked search

• EPrints.org software: free software to build and manage OAI-compliant eprint archives

• API for reference linking, an interface on which reference linking applications can be built

Recap 2: last time at StratfordReference links on pdf copies of papers

Citebase, a new interface to the scholarly literature

Citebase, a citation-ranked search engine

http://citebase.eprints.org/

“Google for the refereed literature”

Citebase is based on a citation database

• Harvests metadata using OAI-PMH

• Extracts reference lists from arXiv papers

• Provides impact (and other)-ranked search based on reference data

• Re-exports metadata + references

Evaluating Citebasehttp://citebase.eprints.org/survey/

The evaluation is aimed at users of arXiv, and all others who use bibliographic services to access the refereed journal literature. You can contribute (June-July 2002) using the form linked above.

Aims of the evaluation:

• Discover the user’s awareness of related services

• Assess usability with a practical exercise

• Invite the user’s views on the main features

• Assess the level of user satisfaction with the service

Citebase: further developments

• OpenURL-enabled: pointing Citebase links at library and journal services

• Google interface using DP9: getting Citebase results, and open archives, into Google

• Metadata format and XML schema for citations: making citation metadata harvestable via OAI-PMH. Possible formats include:

– Academic Metadata Format: a ‘local profile’ format, some collaborative experiments performed within OpCit

– OpenURL metadata, moving towards NISO standardisation

Recap 3: API for reference linkinggetLinkedText – contents of the paper, reference-linked plus lots of metadata for the paper

getReferenceList – this paper’s references getCurrentCitationList – the list of works citing this paper (best knowledge)

getMyData – metadata for this paper

Surrogates in the API

Based on an automatic analysis of the work, a surrogate for a scholarly work (and of other works, for citations), consists of the following three XML files:

• Bibliographic data for the scholarly work

• References contained in that work, and their contexts within the full text

• Citations of that work

API evaluationAPI tested on D-Lib Magazine and the ACM Digital Library. Try demo at http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu/RefLinkingDemo/

Performance (in terms of accuracy of data extracted):

• Reference analysis: 86.7%

• Item analysis (bib data, contexts, and references for a given paper): 82.42 %

Implementability

• Simple interface: Surrogate s = new Surrogate (some-url) • Portable: written in Java, has run in Solaris, Win2K, and NT4

• Installation: API source code plus public domain jar files

EPrints.org softwarehttp://www.eprints.org/

Generates eprint archives that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. EPrints is free (GPL) software. It is aimed at organisations and communities.

EPrints v. 2.0 released February 2002 (now on v. 2.0.1, which fixes bugs and typos). Features:

• Internationalised metadata stored as Unicode

• Support for multiple archives on one server

• Improved user interface

OpCit and OAI

• OAI Aggregator (‘Celestial’): collecting and caching the results from OAI data providers to improve the efficiency of data harvesting http://celestial.eprints.org

• OAI infrastructure: proxies, caches, gateways. Improve interoperability, scalability and reliability of OAI services. Joint work with Old Dominion University, see paper http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0205071• OAI Registration and Validation: performed at Cornell http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl

EPrints and OAI

• EPrints feeds repository URLs straight into the OAI registration process (if so desired by the EPrints administrator)

• A scan of the OAI database of registered sites shows many sites use EPrints software to create repositories

A repository administrator’s view of OAI

“As we have introduced our repository to our faculty and staff, we have emphasized the point that because they would be depositing their material in an OAI-compliant archive, it would automatically and painlessly be discoverable from various other points around the globe. Luckily, we were right.”

Roy Tennant, eScholarship, California Digital Library, June 2002 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2085.html

OpCit user surveys and data mining

Maximising impact Maximising access

Results from Mining the Social Life of an Eprint Archive http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/

When interoperability is not enough: show authors what users do when open access services are available

Key project tasks remainingOpCit formally ends in September 2002. Before then:

• Evaluation and reporting of the results

• Programmer's guide to using the API

• Journal and conference papers

• Final reports to JISC and NSF

Beyond OpCitBeyond the project, the following will continue to be developed:

• Citebase

• EPrints.org

• OAI

… and variously applied in the JISC FAIR programme (start 2002)

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/programmes/fair.html

• Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure (lead institution: Southampton University)

• e-prints UK (RDN, King’s College London) citation analysis service for eprints database

• Machine-readable rights metadata (Loughborough University)

What we have achieved; what we have learned

• OAI is gathering momentum

• Software for building OAI repositories is available

• Institutional archives are being created, but need to be filled by authors

• Attracting authors requires evidence of services that will improve the visibility and impact of their works

• Citation-ranked search and reference linking are examples of OAI services that do this

• The infrastructure supporting OAI services continues to be enhanced

• Resource discovery and current awareness are exemplar OAI services now. Future services may be preservation management, and personalization

Credits

Other contributors to the project include

• Technical development at Southampton is directed by Les Carr

• Research at Cornell by Donna Bergmark

• EPrints.org software is being developed by Chris Gutteridge

• Citebase is produced and managed by Tim Brody

• Project manager is Steve Hitchcock

A copy of these slides can be found on the OpCit Web site

http://opcit.eprints.org/. Look for Papers and Presentations

Contact Steve Hitchcock: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk