Collaborative reputation management in the HKU IR based upon DSpace

Abstract

In response to a new initiative, “Knowledge Exchange” (KE), at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), a collaboration between The HKU Libraries (HKUL) and CILEA created “ResearcherPages” or author profiles to show in addition to publication items in The HKU Scholars Hub (The Hub), the HKU IR, which is hosted in DSpace. The HKU authors were quick to realize the potential these pages have for correctly, or incorrectly, showing their achievements to the public, and very vocally asked that their data be displayed in certain ways and not others. In response to these requests, we created new methods of display and a limited content management system within The Hub, for HKU authors to actively control their data and the ways in which it is displayed.

Our HKUL Scholarly Communications Team imports most of the data shown in these ResearcherPages from different silos at HKU, and beyond. Our main source of publication data is the HKU Research Output System (ROS). However authors found that this data was many times erroneous or lacking. In order to present a publication list to meet the standards expected by our authors, we import data from Scopus, Web of Knowledge, and others. This required HKUL to design a new system, which CILEA engineered, for de-duplication, that would match incoming entries to existing Hub entries, and then allow a batch process or an operator to choose which incoming data element, say, “subjects”, should overwrite the existing element.

These regular imports ensure that ResearcherPages are consistently current, unlike ones usually maintained by individuals or departments. After import, HKU authors can add certain fields such as research interests, or change their picture. However, although they cannot delete or change imported data elements, they can hide any of them. With HKUL design and CILEA engineering, this same function has now been extended to publications in The Hub; allowing HKU authors to hide certain publications, or choose others to appear in a “Selected Publications”. Publications that are marked “hidden”, will still be visible in The Hub, but will not display on the ResearcherPages.

Many HKU authors want their more important publications to appear first, and hide less important ones; such as a conference presentation which later became a refereed journal article. Therefore ResearcherPages show publications in this order: i) Selected Publications, ii) Journal articles, iii) Books & book chapters, iv) Conference papers & presentations, v) Patents, and vi) Others.

Because The Hub has set up data harvesting and import from many silos, bringing disparate data together in one mash-up, it is now the source for other projects that would also re-use this data. At the request of the HKU Law Faculty, The Hub resends designated data to SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network, to display there in a branded HKU Law Faculty page of Research Paper Series. The HKU Faculty of Dentistry harvests Hub data to build their own departmental author profiles. The Bibliographic Knowledge Network People (BKNpeople) hosted by UC Berkeley, funded by the US NSF harvests Hub metadata on researchers in mathematics.

The Hub displays bibliometrics for each publication, collection, community, and author. The Hub generates and displays view counts and download counts for each of these, and allows RSS and email alerts on these statistics and on content newly added. Users may choose on which publication, collection, community, or author to receive these statistics and content alert, and the time frequency; daily, weekly or monthly. Users may also export publications with or without fulltext, in RIS and other formats, which has proved useful in preparing new grant applications.

The Hub also imports and displays article-level and author-centric hyperlinked bibliometrics from Scopus, ResearcherID, Biomed Experts, SSRN, RePEc, ACM Digital Library, MathSciNet, and Mathematics Genealogy Project, with some imports in real time on-the-fly, and others done weekly. In the beginning a handful of authors objected to certain numbers, say the h index from Scopus, being shown on them. As The Hub allows them to hide these individual numbers, while still displaying a hyperlink into the source, these authors were satisfied.

Other authors in the humanities and social sciences were not happy with the bibliometrics shown by Scopus or others. For these we created a procedure in which they can use Harzing’s Publish or Perish on Google Scholar data, to gather bibliometrics, and then load into their ResearcherPage. As Google Scholar covers all subjects, includes books and book chapters, and begins from the beginning of time, some HKU authors have chosen to hide Scopus, and show Google Scholar instead.

Outsourcing this work to CILEA has been successful. On HKUL’s design, CILEA has quickly engineered an elegant product integrated logically and physically with the original DSpace 1.6 structure, easily extensible into future releases of DSpace, and easily maintained by existing HKUL staff. This collaboration has allowed HKUL to meet deadlines set by the University’s Office of Knowledge Exchange, without hiring new expert staff.

These several features allow reputation management to be done collaboratively by the individual authors and their institution. Individual author reputation management benefits the authors, their university, and their library, which has created and now maintains this reputation management platform. The desire for enhanced reputation by the authors complements and drives The Hub in fulfilling its role as a vehicle of HKU KE, which is to make HKU research and researchers more visible. Greater visibility will result in increased readership, increases in research collaboration, and mutual benefit between HKU and its community in Hong Kong, China, and the world.