NOTE: Draft project proposal now available for community review and comment.
Repository Citation Services
Draft Action Plan for International Coordination
Document information
Version: 0.2
Scope
This action plan is about improving the ways in which citation data relating to open access research papers is shared. The papers may be in repositories, open access journals or elsewhere on the web. The citation data may relate to the objects those papers cite, or the objects citing those papers (backward or forward citation). The data may be held anywhere on the web. The services based on such data may be for researchers, research managers, funders or others.
The importance of citation data to the research community has skyrocketed in recent years as research evaluation has become a national and systematic phenomenon. While citation statistics and h-factors were a matter of significance only between a consenting individual and his/her promotion committee, then the collection of citation data was a matter that could be left to (and purchased from) one or two commercial organisations as the need arose. Now that an increasing number of national governments expect that citation data should figure in the periodic evaluation of every researcher’s work and every institution’s impact, it is of vital importance that institutions and individuals can not only catalogue every one of their research outputs (the Open Access agenda), but also that they can capture the detailed evidence of the impact that those items have on the community. Although impact can be evidenced in many forms including repository downloads, it is the citation of items by a third party that still carries most weight.
The scope of this action plan is not only the sharing of citation data (once gathered), but also the ability to accurately recognise citations in research, scholarly and technical outputs in repositories and on the open web.
Benefit
International coordination to enable effective sharing of citation data will enable:
- researchers to track and manage their online reputation
- publishers to gain more accurate information about the place of the papers they publish in the overall scientific citation map
- research managers or funders to have a better insight into the impact of the research manage or fund, and so make more effective decisions
- librarians and others to build innovative services to improve the ways in which papers are discovered, accessed and used
Background
See Alma’s briefing materials, especially
· https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/display/digitalrepositories/Prestige+and+profiling+services
Work Packages
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#
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Activity
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Cost
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Timescale
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Resourcing
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-1.
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Author Support Tools
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Collaborators: Microsoft, arxiv, pubmed, zotero.
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Desirable. Important to the agenda if not to the im-plementation
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JISC developer type activity. Low overhead, high end user benefit leads to community methodologies.
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0.
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Repository Manual Reference Deposit & Editing WOrkflow
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DSpace / EPrints / Fedora.
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Important.
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1 month per platform.
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1.
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API for Reference List plugin
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DSpace / EPrints / Fedora.
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Fundamental.
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Short email discussion.
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2.
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OAI-PMH sharing
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OAI experts.
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Fundamental.
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1 month email discussion and experimentation.
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3.
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Reference List plugin
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Students / RAs / any developers.
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Crucial.
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Competition. 1 month deadline. $5,000 prize.
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8.
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Large Testbed of Representative Documents
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International Repository Managers Community.
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Critical.
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1 month and $0 to gather. 1 month paid manual data entry.
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7a.
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Relationship and Potential Collaboration with CrossRef
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David Prosser/Les/Tim Brody.
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Crucial.
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1 month to organize a joint lunch.
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7b.
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Relationship and Potential Collaboration with other publishers (e.g. University Presses)
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Meetings to schmooze with University presses and other interested parties.
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Desirable.
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-
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4.
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Reference Deconstructor
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Lots of groups have tackled this, but none have produced an all-encompassing open solution.
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Critical.
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Proper grant; 2-3 years international collaboration between US, European and Asian centres of expertise. Open extensible framework required.
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5.
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Basic services: Citation Databases
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Citebase / CiteSeer / OAIster.
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Crucial.
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A “build it and the major players will come” attitude is insufficient. Funding required – probably equivalent to 3 months effort.
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6.
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Exemplar advanced services (e.g. network visualization and trackback)
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Same as above?
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7.
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Auditing and QA services (critical to research assessment)
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External parties by definition who must define their own criteria for service success
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Important
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?
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Deliverables
1) Author Support Tools
2) Repository Manual Reference Deposit & Editing Workflow
4) OAI-PMH citation schema
3) Reference List plugin
4) Large Testbed of Representative Documents
5) Reference Deconstructor Software
6) Basic services: Citation Databases
7) Exemplar advanced services (e.g. network visualization and trackback)
8) Auditing and QA services (critical to research assessment)
Comments (2)
Chris Rusbridge said
at 9:26 am on Apr 8, 2009
Additional things that could be done:
- note Peter Sefton's suggestion that journals build up databases of their citations from their own articles; repositories could do the same, with tools to help depositors upload their references from common reference managers.
- work with the citation microformat people to accelerate standardisation of hcite
- develop CLADDIER's RDF encoding of citations, ensuring that all the major elements in citations of different kinds of material can be captured
- develop the ability to encode RDF into PDF, see recent blog post http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2009/04/semantically-richer-pdf.html and particularly its comments from key Adobe developer.
herbertv@lanl.gov said
at 7:56 pm on Apr 9, 2009
I am afraid I was not at the meeting, so I may be missing some information. I am wondering what the "OAI-PMH citation schema" refers to. I was thinking that, if we were going to start exposing citations in a uniform manner that we would use the web- and resource-centric ORE as a basic model for the description of a scholarly item and that we would then hang citations made by the scholarly item off the ORE Aggregation that was minted for it. As is shown (for isReferencedBy) in http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/atom.html#ReferencesCitations . Doing so, scholarly citations and the scholarly citation graph would become part of the Web of Data, which is where they belong. Because that is where the RDF-ized scholarly knowledge itself is eventually going to end up too. Think efforts such as the NeuroScience Commons and many others.
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