Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust

A case study of an institutional repository success.

Why set up an institutional repository?

The R D and E Research Repository came from a need from the Research and Development Department (R and D) to capture accurate publications data for their annual reports, which impacted on their research funding. This previously involved time-consuming and complicated searches on PubMed every year.

The Library approached R and D with a list of NHS publication databases and repositories to demonstrate how this data was being captured in other institutions, and set up a trial to the Open Repository Lite DSpace software (originally from BioMed since bought out by Atimire) – a ‘budget’ version of the repository software used in a number of Higher Education Institutions.

R&D were impressed with the possibilities of firstly capturing and reporting bibliographic data, and secondly using it to showcase Trust research, as a repository would be freely available and searchable online. They did a cost-benefit exercise and given the staff time previously put into creating the reports, agreed to fund the software, for a 3 year fixed price period, with the proviso that the repository itself would be managed and administered on a day-to-day basis by library staff – there wasn’t any additional funding for staff in the project.

How did we develop the repository?

The site build started in November 2014, working closely with the Information Analyst in R and D and building it around data requirements and the divisions and departments structure provided by R and D. The repository was initially populated with an initial batch load of data from 2013 and 2014, which had been gathered from previous reports. We have publications data going back to 1984, but given the time it was taking to quality check and format the data for uploading, the decision was made to add just 2 years’ worth of data initially, with the remainder to be added retrospectively.

To capture the current publications data PubMed and Google Scholar alerts (by author affiliation) were set up. Initially we used HDAS alerts too, but this produced a lot duplicates so now we just use PubMed and Google Scholar.  New data is being manually added on a weekly basis by library staff. Data is auto-populated by the software if you have the PubMed ID or DOI, which saves time, and there are usually only a couple of new articles to add every week. At the moment, this is being slotted into the daily work of the Band 5 Reader Services Librarian, as she has previous experience of repositories and Open Access, but will hopefully be cascaded to library assistants in the future.

Given how busy our clinicans are we opted for library staff submission, rather than self-submission. A simple online form set up where staff can submit details of their articles, but it has never been used! However, a lot of staff do engage with ResearchGate, so we may need to re-think the self-submission process.

How did we promote it?

The repository officially launched in March 2015, promoted on the Trust intranet, R and D intranet pages, Library website, Twitter (#rdeauthors), talks at Grand Rounds and local research events and following that, monthly inclusion in the R&D newsletter. There was some interest from a few keen individuals, who sent us their list of publications, and have also set up Researcher profiles.

What goes into the repository?

The primary focus is on published, peer-reviewed journal articles and case reports but we also include books and book chapters and conference posters – a portal for any Trust research output. The R&D report requirements are the published articles, and they have a filter for what publication types they need (e.g. no comments, letters, editorials etc), but it is easy to extract and filter the data for them, using Excel.

What about full-text?

We do try to include full-text articles where we can. If an article is already freely available via Open Access then we upload a PDF copy to the repository (being sure to add the copyright/CC-BY licence statement to the cover sheet). If it isn’t available as Open Access, we look up the journal title on SHERPA Romeo to check which version of the article we can upload, and if there is an embargo on when we can do that. Then we contact the RD&E author to see if they still have the appropriate version they can send us. Chasing this up can be a little time-consuming, and often we don’t get a response, so we need to work on this going forward.

How’s it going?

Since the repository was launched in 2015 we have 1129 bibliographic citations, and 192 PDFs. It is being added to each week. R and D are enormously happy with the amount of time it has saved when they create their annual report, and have now asked us to create quarterly reports for them too! The repository has had over 11,000 site views (from all across the world) and over 6,000 file downloads, proving that RD&E Research is now discoverable!

What next?

We need to continue to market the repository and get researchers on board. We’re continually strengthening our ties with R and D and we’re trying to link articles to specific research projects, matching information in the Trusts’ Research Information System, Edge.

We’re also in the last year of our fixed price deal with Atmire, after which the Open Repository Lite software will no longer supported or developed. They are currently developing an alternative product, or else we’d have to go to the full Open Repository product, which would be much more expensive. We’re going to investigate joining up with the local University repository, or seeing what other products are available that we could transfer our repository too.

Case study provided by Cate Newell  Reader Services Librarian/RD&E Research Repository Manager.