During the last years the debate about scientific publishing as criteria for evaluation of research has been brisk in the Nordic countries. The agenda is about quantitative research evaluation and research funding. The need for better research data has grown in combination with the need for Open Access and better scientific dissemination - as well as new financing models for alternative publishing. Many research registration systems have been developed to support this need for survey and documentation but also visibility and accessibility. The Norwegian model seems to benefit those needs. The changing paradigm in scientific publishing opens up for changing roles of all the stakeholders within scholarly communication. The research and national libraries are seen as very important players in making research visible as well as long term accessibility and preservation. At the same time it is very important to emphasise that the universities and libraries complement each other in the process of research visibility and evaluation and we will not succeed with out one another – we need to collaborate. Nordbib aims through active knowledge exchange to create general awareness and knowledge of Open Access publishing, quality and its consequences by setting the questions on the research political agenda.

Ilkka Niiniluoto, University of Helsinki

Research visibility: Why and how?
The traditional contract between science and society includes the principle that knowledge is a public good. Scientists enjoy academic freedom in their pursuit of truth. By publishing the results of their inquiry in scientific journals, researchers open their contributions for critical discussion and evaluation within the scientific community, and as a reward they gain international fame among scholars. Public information satisfies the need of correct information among citizens and other social agents, and thereby improves the public understanding and support of science.

The publication and preservation of information is thus deeply rooted in the ethos of science. Today research visibility has also other motives: new methods of quality assurance, hopes for success in assessment and ranking, increased interaction of universities and different sectors of society, national and international competition for resources. While the number of scientific publications is still increasing exponentially, and the related costs for libraries and universities are often beyond reasonable limits, ICT provides new tools for managing information and making knowledge accessible. As novel tools of research visibility, Open Access and university library depositories of articles are important alternatives to market-based commercial publication.

Dr Dale Peters, Scientific Technical Manager of the DRIVER project, State and University Library of Göttingen
Institutional repositories and CRIS systems – the role of DRIVER’s infrastructure, concepts and organisation

The dislocation of scholarly communication brought about by Open Access publication requires the re-conceptualisation of academic workflows and new strategic alliances on campus and across the scholarly community. The Institutional repository offers a strong tool for leverage of change, but cannot succeed as a stand-alone phenomenon of the modern academic library.
DRIVER focuses on the aggregating and harvesting of enhanced publications throughout European repositories, maintaining an overview of the new metadata and repository standards as well as the lively communities that use them. In providing a European-wide information infrastructure, DRIVER envisions the full potential of IR’s as an alternative model of scholarly communication, and aims to extend this vision to a world-wide network of scientific content repositories.
This ambitious role entails a close watch on relevant current and surfacing technologies and a state-of-the art report on enhanced publications, comprising complex multimedia digital objects. The focus of this presentation is on discovering possible connections between DRIVER infrastructure and related CRIS infrastructures. Specific attention is given to existing standards, including important developments within CERIF (The Common European Research Information Format)the DDF-MXD exchange format, eSciDoc, SWAP application profiles as examples of best practices of technologies adopted by research communities or by repository providers. DRIVER’s organisational response is framed by dynamic Guidelines to improve data quality and interoperability between growing data infrastructures. A brief review of current standards and technologies will elucidate community-driven use cases of these standards; pointing to the possibilities for interaction with CRIS infrastructures and the impact on DRIVER in future.

Keith Jeffery, President euroCRIS

Institutional repositories and CRIS systems – infrastructure, concepts and organisation

IRs (Institutional repositories) increasingly are being constructed to manage the IP (intellectual property) of a research organisation in the form of peer-reviewed publications and grey literature including e.g. technical papers, theses. They usually are OA (Open Access) and may store the full publication, present a URL to a publisher’s database or both depending on copyright agreements. In an IR the metadata is usually something like DC (Dublin Core). The persons, organisations and projects related to the publication are at best ambiguous and at worst not recorded.
CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) are used to manage research by research organisations, research funders and innovators. An EU recommendation to member states - CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) - has been developed and is becoming more widely used. CERIF provides a formal syntax and declared semantics (unlike DC until recent attempts to produce a RDF based version) and allows complex interrelationships between entities (such as persons, projects, organisations, publications) with temporal duration and role to be recorded and used.
Increasingly funding organisations (and some research institutions) are demanding evaluation of research based on outputs (publications, patents, products). Clearly – for publications - this could be done either using a CERIF-CRIS or an IR – however the structured CERIF-CRIS has great advantages for statistical analyses based on accurate data.
It is possible to have metadata relating to a publication both in the IR and the CERIF-CRIS. The CERIF-CRIS provides higher quality (structured) information and facilitates interoperability. Metadata for the IR can be generated from the CERIF-CRIS.
Finally other repositories can be (and are being) constructed e.g. for patents, products, research datasets and software. The CERIF-CRIS can act as the relator between these and the IR but also links all outputs to persons, organisations, projects and other related information in a formal, structured way.

Bård Smedsrød, Professor and Head of Institute of Medical Biology, University of Tromsø, Norway
Why should (or shouldn't) researchers support OA publication?
In this presentation I will focus on the importance of understanding the forces that influence the way researchers choose their publication channels. This knowledge is fundamental in order to successfully motivate our researchers to prefer OA publishing.
Implementation of an OA regime in scholarly publishing is presently being discussed in an increasing number of research institutions in several countries. OA publication is believed to i) increase availability of scholarly published results; ii) make better use of university resources (why should research institutions allocate a significant part of their budget to "buy back" scientific publications?); iii) regain control over the way quality in research is evaluated. Discussions on how to implement an OA regime in scholarly publishing are conducted at several levels, both at Universities, government research departments, and in other national as well as international fora dealing with research policy. However, more focus should be directed towards trying to understand the way the researcher perceives the situation. Has the researcher been asked the question as to "Why should OA publishing be preferred"? How do the researchers themselves feel about OA publication? Can a research institution expect that its researchers choose to publish their results in OA channels? Or: Should the OA movement "revolution" start by forcing researchers to publish their results in OA channels?
I will discuss issues that influence the motivations and choices of researchers of where to publish their results. Issues such as i) building a competitive CV, ii) creating an honorable and prestigious career, iii) seeking high status among fellow researchers, and iv) ability to succeed in getting funded, are the primary forces that currently influence researchers and direct their choice of publication channel. Knowledge about these and other driving forces are pivotal in seeking to increase the use of OA publication channels. Changing to an OA publication regime will involve a gradual change of "publication culture", both from the point of view of the researcher and the levels above. A successful implementation of OA publication will require an altered flow of research funding money - from today's naive sponsoring of the high ranking journals that drain research money from our scholar institutions, to a system where these same resources are used to ensure evaluation of research quality in a way that is controlled by the research institutions.

The result of the JISC study: Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models - based upon the Australian study by John Houghton, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, Melbourne

Neil Jacobs, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), United Kingdom

JISC has funded a project whose aim is to inform policy discussion and enable stakeholders to better understand the institutional, budgetary and wider economic and social implications of three emerging models of scholarly publication, and thereby enable them to respond to the opportunities and challenges presented in the rapidly evolving research and scholarly communication environment.
The project seeks to build upon and extend recent work on the costs and benefits associated with alternative scholarly publishing models. This will involve two major project elements:

Part I: Identification of costs and benefits:
• Describes in detail three models of scholarly communication (i.e. subscription publishing,
self-archiving, and open access publishing); • Identifies all possible dimensions of cost and benefit for each of these three models; and • Identifies which of the main players in the scholarly communication system would be affected, and how they would be affected, by each of the costs and benefits noted.

Part II: Quantification of costs and benefits:
• Will, as far as possible, quantify the costs and benefits of the three models (identified in Part I); • Identify, and where possible quantify, the cost and benefit impacts for each of the main players in the scholarly communication system; and • Where possible, compare the costs and benefits of each of the three models for the main players in the scholarly communication system.

While wide-ranging in scope, one important focus of the work will be on the implications of the three models for UK universities and for journal publishing. In particular, Part II will examine in detail and compare the costs and benefits of each of the three models for UK universities, and explore their budgetary implications for individual universities and for the university sector as a whole. Emphasis will be on scholarly journal publishing, but other forms of research output will also be considered.

Gunnar Sivertsen, Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education

Quality, Transparency and Access in the Scholarly Publishing System

Norway is developing a National Research Information System (NRIS) for all universities and all other research institutions in the public sector. The NRIS will be a further development of 'Frida', the Current Research Information System which is presently used jointly by the four largest universities in Norway. The driving force behind the further development of a NRIS in Norway is an output indicator for scholarly publications that has been introduced to the formulas for the basic funding of the institutions. All types of scholarly publications in all fields of research are included in the indicator, and the NRIS is designed to secure complete, verifiable, and structured bibliographic data from the institutions. Information about projects, persons, groups, and organizations will also be available in the NRIS, and it will be online and open to society at large.

One of the principles behind the NRIS in Norway is that it should reflect that the scholarly publishing system is a shared infrastructure for quality control and dissemination of research among research institutions and across national borders - and not just something going on within an institution or a publishing house. Concepts such as the quality of research, the quality of the metadata, the transparency of the data production and of the statistics of the indicator, as well as links and access to other bibliographic data sources and to the full text of the publications, become important when the activities in the shared infrastructure of the scholarly publishing system are measured for an output indicator in a funding formula. Therefore, we now have a strong focus on quality, transparency and access in scholarly publishing from at least two perpectives: NRIS and Open Access. But these two perspectives are not all the same. Where do they converge, and what can they still learn from each other?

Bertil Dorch, University of Copenhagen
An e-print archive for Nordic arts and humanities (hprints)

In 2007 Nordbib financed the project "A Nordic Arts and Humanities e-print Archive" for the period of one year. This has resulted in the open access archive hprints (www.hprints.org), in an agreement with the French Research Council CNRS. The aim of the project is to contribute with a technical infrastructure that makes open access to research possible within the humanities. The thesis of the project that this will result in a number of advantages for what concerns electronic accessibility and visibility of the humanistic research areas.

At first the aim is to give access to Nordic research through an open access online full text archive. The archive is a so-called subject repository and will primary consist of research eprints in the forms of preprints, working papers, conference reports, invited reviews, lecture manuscripts and similar. The archive is set up, maintained and promoted by The Royal Library and the project consortia which also includes Museum Tusculanum Press, Lund University Libraries, University of Oslo and Faculty of Humanities at University of Copenhagen. The deposit of electronic text material for the archive is decentralised and takes place at author level.

Joel Peltonen, National Library of Finland

Development of information environment architecture for Nordic countries

The project Development of information environment architecture for Nordic countries, hereafter referred to as the project, is a joint venture of the Finnish National Library (with coordinating responsibility), the Swedish National Library, the partners of the Norwegian NORA project University of Oslo and BIBSYS, and a joint work group of Danish archiving and standardizing operatives.

The project decided early on to concentrate especially on the publishing of dissertations. Activity was divided into three sub-areas concerning the metadata, persistent identifiers (with main focus on URN), and harvesting. To define main problems in these areas a survey was conducted in 2007 among universities and university libraries.

For the metadata part the survey was not seen as sufficient, so a further comparison of national metadata standards was made. However, as the comparison did not reveal any evident problems and furthermore projects trying to find solutions for metadata problems already exist such as the DRIVER, the project decided to promote existing models instead of creating yet another.

On persistent identifiers the survey confirmed that URN is actually the most important. Therefore a workshop was organized in May 2008. The participants agreed to start a global resolution service that can and will finally be able to resolve any kind of persistent identifier.

The survey demonstrated that the most important method in harvesting is the OAI-PMH -protocol. As this is already well-known, the project decided to organize a workshop on the next step OAI-ORE in September 2008.

Inga-Lill Blomkvist, librarian and webmaster at NIAS Nordic Institute of Asian Studies

Open Access: Networks and knowledge dissemination in Nordic Asian Study Institutions. NIAS Nordic Institute of Asian Studies

The project’s basic idea, then, is to offer an integrated set of services to support Open Access publication, research communication and dissemination within the Nordic Asia research community. Key concepts are open access to research outputs including digitalization of older material, common access to databases and electronic journals, and scientific collaboration among Nordic researchers and students.

Based on the vast and important experiences already obtained, the project’s aim is to implement a Web-based set of tools that will significantly increase access to and visibly of Nordic Open Access publications. By using the Open Access platform (which is an integral part of AsiaPortal.info) and with further development of the Nordic Asia Studies joint approach to Open Access and research communication, the project illustrates how Open Access models can be used as a mean of solving the problems of information dissemination and exchange of research outputs.

The project aims to develop mechanisms to support the harvesting and digitalization of Asia-related material that then can be stored in repositories and Open Access archives. Of especial interest are documents/material that scholars from participating institutions of the NIAS Nordic Council (NNC – see Appendix F) wish to make publicly available through the public area of the AsiaPortal and to create easy-to-use systems for self-publication and archiving.

The project has proved how important it is to involve the research community in creating an efficient system for Open Access.

Bo Alrø, Partner and Product Director, Atira A/S

Addressing multiple and diverse requirements with a single CRIS system
PURE is a Research Information System or CRIS handling meta-data and full-text. It supports cost-effective (framework-based) implementation of formal structured data models such as CERIF, which allows entity types such as persons, projects, grants, organisations, publications or patents to retain their complex real-life interrelations.

This highly structured data can be used for reporting and statistical analyses by a set of reporting features available from the user interface. New reports can be defined, but a number of standard reports are also available. Output formats are XML, CSV, HTML, RTF and PDF.

PURE deploys meta-data and full-text to web by means of either the built-in web services(Document/Literal and REST) or by use of the included PUREportal framework. Further, PURE exhibits data over OAI-PMH in several formats for general harvesting and over Z39.50 for library system integration. Generic XML export is available, as well as export in several standard desktop file formats.

PURE's synchronization framework and default connectors facilitate cost-effective integration with warehouses, LDAPs and Active directories, SAP and other financial systems, library systems and DSpace and FEDORA. PURE also offers a data modelspecific file format (PXA) for structured data import.

A customizable workflow and a roles/rights model provides controlled manual ingestion and other user activities, and self-import enables users to import existing publications from PubMed (online), ArXiv (online), Reference Manager (file), BibTeX (file), BibCode (file), PURE (online and file) and DDF-MXD (file). Further, admins can configure classifications, research areas, help texts and system messages from the user interface.

Finally, PURE's application architecture supports sharing of data model and custom features between research communities without violating the standard application codebase. This also allows cost-sharing between PURE owners.

Martin Jägerhorn, partner and co-founder of AVEDAS AG

Tracking your research footprints with CONVERIS

AVEDAS software platform CONVERIS is a completely customisable research information system giving research organisations an individual workflow and process support. Universities and other research organisations across Europe use CONVERIS primarily for managing publications and research contracts, but the flexibility offered by CONVERIS allows the solutions to evolve with changing needs. Often, the solutions therefore start small and grow over time to full-scale research information systems including the handling of patents, study plans and many other types of research activities and results.

Kristoffer Holmqvist, Lund University Libraries Head Office
LUP - Lund University Publications
LUP, acronym for Lund University Publications is a repository software and full text publication service developed by Lund University Libraries, Head Office. The aim of LUP is:

to give researchers and students at Lund University an easy way of making their publications visible and freely available.
to give a single entry point to publications by researchers with affiliation Lund University.
to distribute information about publications from Lund University to other services.
The full text of publications is made freely available where possible. In LUP you will find research publications, refereed and un-refereed and doctoral dissertations from 1996 onwards. LUP employs open standards as MODS, SRU, OAI-PMH. The system aims to make the reuse of records as easy as possible for different uses as bibliometrics, funding applications, integration in personal home pages, etc.
LUP is developed by Lund university libraries, Head office. Further development is underway in cooperation with Universiteit Gent, Belgium and a finalized product is expected to be available in the spring of 2009.

Celina Ramjoué, Ph.D., European Commission, Directorate-General for Research Access to scientific information in the digital age: European Commission initiatives

The presentation will give an overview of the European Commission's policies and initiatives to promote access to scientific publications and data, including open access. In this policy area, Commission policy is connected both to European research policy and information society policy. The Commission acts both as a policymaking body and as a funding body. In short, as a policymaking body, the Commission's policies can be seen within the wider Lisbon Agenda of "becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world". As a funding body, the Commission can determine rules on access to and dissemination of publications and data resulting from the Framework Programme, the European Union's main research funding programme.

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