RoMEO Green at the University of Kansas: Mediated Services to Encourage Interest and Participation among Faculty in Order to Populate the KU ScholarWorks Repository

Abstract

The University of Kansas is exploring ways to provide better access to and preservation of published and unpublished scholarly research created by KU faculty. The University’s institutional repository, KU ScholarWorks http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu, entered into production in October 2004 with participation from selected departments and research centers and opened to all faculty early in 2005.

While the expectation is that faculty will contribute their own submissions, we have initiated a project, RoMEO Green, that will explore other staff-mediated options for content recruitment in order to jumpstart the process. This paper will address the steps taken thus far in the project to populate the repository through this alternative process, discuss results to date and possible implications of these results on future directions.

The goals of RoMEO Green are to: add content to KU ScholarWorks; explore services we might offer faculty in support of KU ScholarWorks; and create an interest in, and demand for, an institutional repository at the University of Kansas. The project investigators created a database with linked tables for publisher, journal, faculty, and citation information. The RoMEO Green database includes information about 65 publishers that allow some form of institutional archiving of articles published in their journals. We examined individual publisher copyright policies and grouped the publishers based on their institutional archiving policy. Then we included the journal titles for the 65 publishers included in the project. Using a multidisciplinary citation index, we conducted searches for articles authored by persons affiliated with the University of Kansas and published in the identified journals during the years 1984-2004. We are generating reports for each faculty author with their article citations grouped according to archiving policy. We will forward the reports to faculty along with a request for the appropriate article version copy, and then post the articles on behalf of the faculty authors in KU ScholarWorks. It is hoped that the project will serve as one of several methods to start conversations with faculty about the university’s institutional repository.

The next phase of RoMEO Green will include an ongoing assessment of both the project outcomes, so that other institutions can learn from our experience, and the assessment of services needed to support faculty in their use of the new institutional repository. Further analysis of the data collected may indicate patterns and trends in KU faculty publishing behavior. The project may also provide a better understanding of how publishing faculty’s behaviors may be influenced to better support a diversified and future-oriented scholarly communication system.