Appendix 2: Description of OA functionalities

From Stellar Deliverable 6.1

Complete documentation is available on the site at http://oa.stellarnet.eu/about/ where a FAQ section addresses all the concerns of the users, and two specific sections explain in details the registration and submission processes.

Following recommendations from the « Open Archives Initiative » (OAI) which promotes the free circulation and communication of the research products, the set of metadata used in the OA is described in Dublin Core and complies with the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Basic functionalities:

Sorting and display of archive content (‘browse’) ;

Searching (‘search’) ;

Submission and editing of resources (‘submit’) ;

Moderation (administration) ;

Management of affiliated institutions and of collections;

OAI interface: The TeLearn archive is referenced as an OAI-PMH data provider and thus it can be harvested by other service providers using this standard protocol. The STELLAR OA will be harvestable as well, the OAI interface standing at http://oa.stellarnet.eu/open-archive/oai

Roles

Different actors play a role in the functioning of the Open Archive, each having specific rights and duties. These are:

'Visitor'

A visitor is a simple user with no particular rights regarding the system. He has access to the basic services: browsing, searching, and download of resources.

'Depositor'

A depositor is a person supplying the requested set of metadata for a given resource. The depositor is a registered user. Registration also grants the user the permission to modify its own resources and to monitor its deposits. The depositor has not to be the author of a publication. An author has just to approve for his or her publication to join the archive, but can let anybody else make the depot. The OA in no way takes part in copyright issues. Depositing a resource is under the responsibility of the depositor; it implies the approval of the whole authors. These authors do keep their full intellectual property rights regarding their resources.

'Relation depositor – affiliate'

For a future depositor to register, he/she must be a member of a registered research unit (‘affiliate’). For its institution to become an affiliate, a research unit representative must provide the requested information proving the adequacy of its research themes and activity with those of the OA. If accepted, this representative will be the referent person of this affiliated institution, and any member of this institution may then register as depositor.

'Referent person'

The referent person is granted specific rights such as update/modify the institutions data, create/modify ad hoc stamps for different purposes. A stamp is a kind of label affixed on resources so as for example to include them in the unit collection or highlight the excellent ones.

'Administrator'

The administrator is (or nominates) the moderator of the archive. He is responsible for the coherency of the archive by scrutinizing the relevance and integrity of the resources submitted. He may provide assistance to the users regarding technical or legal issues.

Submission

Submission is the process engaged by a registered user (depositor) in order to have a resource published in the OA. Two types of resources can at now be submitted: publication and video.

Who can submit?

Everyone can submit, once identified. Identification requires the membership of an institution duly affiliated to STELLAR. If you don't find your institution in the list when you register (see ‘Create account’ menu), then you will have to ask some leader from your institution to affiliate it with STELLAR first. (see ‘Affiliate’ menu)

What can be submitted?

On line document (pdf format)

Link toward a document

Bibliographical description

videos

Becoming a depositor

The depositor is first displayed the current status of the various resources he/she owns. These statuses are:

draft: resource on the way for submission (the depositor can come back to a non completed submission)

submitted: waiting for the moderation decision

published: publicly available (any modification will cause the resource to re-enter the submission process)

rejected: refused for any reason (such as incorrect pdf file, or not relevant to the field of the archive etc.)

The submission form presents several sections according to the resource type and thus the corresponding metadata.

Moderation

In order to ensure a high degree of relevance, the OA is moderated at two levels:

depositors

resources (publication or video)

The goal of the moderation is to reduce the non-relevance but without being an alternative to the scientific experts in the domain. The scientific value of the resources’ content is therefore NOT assessed as could do a peer-review committee.

'Moderating affiliates' Moderating affiliated institutions is a first way to help ensuring the relevance of the resources. The principle being that a research unit dully affiliated will most likely tend to submit relevant resources to the OA. And thus, basically only the institutions involved in TEL (research or R&D) will be accepted as affiliates.

An affiliated institution has a referent person (contact point) who is able to define stamps for this institution. Stamps are used to define collections of resources, should they be numerical (e.g. the whole set of publications of a lab) or qualitative (the set of some remarkable resources along any criterion). The referent also defines the “stampers” for every stamp, and decides whether a stamp will be visible (i.e. public) or invisible (internal use only). An RSS feed is available for every collection.

'Moderating resources' Moderating resources is the time to assess the relevance of any depot. The resources submitted must be of interest to the Tel community of researchers. However, this judgement is not based on a scientific evaluation of the resource at this stage but only on the presence of the relevant keywords and of an appropriate summary. Eventually, the content is quickly checked. The validation process determines whether a given resource will be published or rejected. When rejected, the reasons are always notified to the depositor. The following control points are made to assess the validity of the resource (form and content) but in no way its scientific quality (it is not a peer-review process)

detection of duplicated resource;

relevance regarding the TEL research area;

validity of the files (PDF or video) and web links;

authors and their affiliation: laboratory name at the time the resource was created, order of the authors;

keywords;

In the case of publications, the OA welcomes bibliographical references, links toward other web pages, or full texts (in PDF format). However full text is targeted.

In the case of videos, data can be hosted locally (by the site server) or remotely (distant server). In any case video streaming is preferable.