Institutional Repository
An institutional repository (IR) collects, preserves, and disseminates in digitial form, the intellectual output of an institution. IRs usually provide open access on items held within the IR. The "HKU Scholars Hub" is the IR for HKU.
Publisher Policies
An author's work is only placed in the Scholars Hub after we have confirmed that publisher's policy permits the item to be self-archived in our institutional repository. Most publishers, allow some form of self-archiving, although the version of the work that may be used, and the conditions imposed, vary from one publisher to another.
The Hub closely follows the defintions describing publishers' policies, estalished by Sherpa Romeo. This UK based database contains many hundreds of publishers' policies, and is updated and maintained from funding bodies in the UK, it is administered from the University of Nottingham. This database is often cited as the source of the policy information used in the Hub's own publisher policies database.
Definitions of the most common policy terms used in the Hub:
Postprint: The version of the article after peer review, with revisions suggested by peer review having been made.
This means that in terms of content, a post-print is the article as published. However, in terms of appearance, this might not be the same as the published article, as publishers often reserve for themselves their own arrangement of type-setting and formatting. This also means that in many cases an author cannot use the publisher's (or final) pdf file, for submission to the Hub. However, authors can create their own pdf or have Hub staff do this for them. Having said this, some publishers that allow post-print archiving, insist that authors do use the publisher generated pdf of the final version.
Other publishers, and funders such as NIH or the Wellcome Trust, use other names for a post-print. Some of these alternative names are:
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"Author's final copy"
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"Author's version"
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"Author's manuscript"
Pre-print: A preprint is the author's version of the article before peer review.
Self-archiving: This term is often used to describe the author's right to submit and deposit a digital copy of some version of the article (preprint, postprint, or published version) on the author's personal web page, his or her departmental web page, or in an institutional repository such as the Hub.
Conditions: Publishers that allow self-archiving often impose conditions. An example of one publisher's conditions is shown below as an example:
An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website and his/her institution's repository, including his/her final version; however he/she may not use the publisher's PDF version which is posted on www.springerlink.com. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com".
Embargo Period: A publisher may allow posting of a version of the article to the Hub after an "embargo period". This means the author may not submit to the Hub until a number of months after the journal publication date. The length of the embargo period (6 months - 12 months etc) varies depending upon the publisher.
Permision Required Statement: The publisher allows authors to deposit a specified version of their article in the Hub, using a permission statement.
Open Access
Items in open access (OA) are digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Users anywhere in the world may read, download, copy distribute, print, search, or link to these items.
A growing number of research funders now make it a condition of grant that a duplicate of any research paper be placed in a Repository for open access. These mandates are applied as a condition of grant, so resulting research papers can have archiving conditions already attached before submission to any journal.
Open access Publishing: When referring to OA publishing, it is important to distinguish between two different approaches, sometimes called Gold OA and Green OA. The distinction between gold and green is only about venues, and not about user rights, or "fee or free". The two approaches are defined below:
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Green OA: the author self-archives into his or her personal web page, departmental web page, or institutional repository, some version of his or her article (preprint, postprint, or published version).
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Gold OA: the publisher places the authored item in open access within the published journal. Some journals are OA, without fees involved. Other journals may charge the author, his or her institution or funding body, an "OA charge" so that the article may be placed in OA. This last model is sometimes called the "hybrid model". The usual fee is US$ 3,000 per article.
- The two approaches are not incompatible and can co-exist. Other conditions may or may not also be involved, such as embargoes, permission statements, etc.
Further reading on Open Access
The Open Access Directory
An open access overview
Green, blue , white and gold
Sherpa on Open Access
SCOPUS Citations
SCOPUS is an international abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources. SCOPUS covers more than 15,000 peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, medicine and social sciences from over 4,000 international publishers. The SCOPUS Citation Tracker records citations data year by year for a specific author or topic.
If a Hub article has been tracked in SCOPUS there is note at the end of the Hub meta data record that gives the number of citations made to the item, and a link to the tracked record in the SCOPUS database.
More information on SCOPUS citation tracking is available on the SCOPUS web site.
The Hub's Search Features
The Hub uses the DSpace system software jointly developed by MIT and Hewlett Packard. Many organisations and scholarly institutions also use Dspace for building their institutional repositories. Dspace comes with the powerful Lucene search engine and the Hub has further enhanced search and retrieval capabilities by integrating content with Elsevier's full text retrieval software SCIRUS, and also the SCOPUS citation analysis tracking system.
Quick Searches
The Hub's Home Page has a "Quick Search" form. Terms entered in this form search the entire collection and retrieve records with matching words from any of the following Hub fields: author, title, abstract or series name.
Quick Phrase Searches
To search for multiple words as a phrase or name, place quotation marks around the words. For example, to search for an exact phrase such as "climate change" enclose the phrase in quotation marks as indicated in the following illustration:
Quick Name Searches - where the exact name is known
Quick Searches for author names work best when enclosed in quotations. For example, "TSE, TH" will retrieve all works with this name.
Quick Name Searches - where the exact form of name is unknown
The Hub uses the author's name as it appears on each work or article. If an author writes under varied forms of name, then each variation will appear in the Hub's author name index. Browsing the author name index may be more effective than a Quick Search where the exact form of name is not known.
Search Scripts on Author Names
The following example of a URL script provides a quick and easy alternative method to the Quick Search form:
http://hub.hku.hk/search/hub-author.jsp?cai+zx
In the above example, cai is the author's surname and ZX are the author's initials.
The following example illustrates the script for an author with more than one first name:
http://hub.hku.hk/search/hub-author.jsp?addul+ali+khan+subran
Quick Searches with Multiple Words
If two or more words are entered as a Quick Search, but are not enclosed within quotes to indicate a phrase, the "OR" search operator is automatically applied, for example:
climate OR change
TSE OR TH
The results from these Quick Searches based on the OR operator will be very broad and non-specific.
Stop words
The Hub search engine ignores certain words that occur frequently in English. The Hub's stop words are:
a, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, or, the, to, was
This means it is not necessary to include any of these words in a phrase search such as "justice of the peace" or "justice and peace" or "teaching and learning" as they are ignored.
Stemming
This feature is automatically applied to Quick Searches. Stemming means that any word is expanded to automatically include plurals and past tense and other extensions. This means that a search for the word age automatically retrieves, records with ages, aged, aging.
Truncation
Truncation is an optional search feature that can be applied by end users. A truncated search requires the symbol * to be added near to the end of a search term. For example a search for inf* retrieves records with influenza, inference, infection, etc.
Exact word search
A plus sign + before a word means this word must appear in the results, e.g. +English language, the word English must appear in the results but language is optional.
A minus sign - before a word will eliminate this particular word from the result. (Upper case NOT will also produce the same as the minus sign) e.g. English -language
Advanced Searches
An Advanced Search provides more specific retrieval than a Quick Search. Phrase, stemming, and truncation are also available for Advanced Searches, but an Advanced Search can also:
- limit a search to one or more selected fields, or to a selected Hub community;
- combine search elements using one or more of the search operators And, Or, Not.
The illustration below shows a search of all the Hub's Communities (that is everything in the Hub) for the phrase "higher education" in the Title field only, but excluding any records that contain the words Hong Kong in any field.
Please Note: An Advanced Search will not work unless the boxes in the 'fill-in' search form are completed in order. For example, if the first input box is left blank the search will not work.
Handle Numbers
It is also possible to search for a Hub record by a "persistent identifier" or "Handle Number".
Dspace provides a stable point of reference for any resource in the repository by allocating a unique Handle Number. Because web sites can disappear, or be reconfigured without notice, references (links) to research results can disappear without trace. A core feature of Dspace is the creation of "persistent identifiers" for every item, collection and community stored in DSpace.
A "persistent identifier" is the name for a resource which will remain the same, regardless of where the resource is located. Therefore links to the resource will continue to work even if it is moved.
Dspace Handles were chosen in preference to persistent URLs because of the desire to support citations to items in DSpace over very long time spans. Handles in DSpace are currently implemented as URLs, but can also be modified to work with future protocols. For more information: General Dspace FAQ at MIT Libraries and also about CNRI Handle System for creating these identifiers.
Browsing
The Hub supports Browsing by author, title or community.
The Browse list uses letter-by-letter sorting. This means that the order of the entries is based on each character in a word, without regard for spaces or punctuation. For example, the following author list shows that MaCallum sorts after Ma, C. but before Ma, CH
Example of the Author Browse sorting order
Full Text Searches using SCIRUS
Elsevier have a proprietary repository search program SCIRUS, aimed at encouraging universities and research institutions to make the full content of repositories available via this search spider. The algorithm calculates search results by relevance ranking determined by two values:
(1) words - the location and frequency of a search term within a result, and
(2) links - the number of links to a page - the more often a page is referred to by others.
Within the Hub the full text SCIRUS search can be limited to:
A Hub only SCIRUS search is based upon an index of the complete Hub repository (that is, the full text of the articles, preprints, presentations, technical reports and theses held in pdf formats). SCIRUS allows users to not only search on bibliographical information such as an article's author or title but also the abstract, keyword and within the main body of the content. The SCIRUS hit lists brands the search results so that Hub content is easily identified.
A link to the SCIRUS fulltext view can be found at the end of the meta data record, and activated by selecting the View button.
Read More about SCIRUS
HKU ResearcherPages (RPs)
The HKU Strategic Development plan for 2009-2014 sets out three strategic themes, one of which is Knowledge Exchange (KE).
As a centre of intellectual development, creativity and informed social awareness, the University will ensure that knowledge exchange contributes to regional and global development, and increase the opportunities for staff and students to benefit from the commercialization and application of their expertise.
RPs display, enable, and measure HKU KE. They also allow industry, government and academia to find an HKU expert for contract research, consulting, and collaboration. After initial creation by Hub administrators, they allow the owning individual to further sustain and enhance their own RPs. More enhancements are currently being planned. We welcome your suggestions!
Each HKU faculty has been asked to supply a list of professorial staff currently employed at HKU. If you are currently employed, have authored items, and wish to be included, please write to hub@lib.hku.hk.
- Name, Address, etc: Department web pages, Registry, etc.
- Media Spokesmanship: the Media Contact Directory created and maintained by the HKU Communications and Public Affairs Office. Updated weekly.
- Bibliometric Details: These were extracted from Scopus and ResearcherID. An on-going project searches for errors in Scopus and reports them to Elsevier for correction. Another project created ResearcherID accounts for every current HKU researcher. This data in the RPs is updated weekly.
Please click on "Login" in the left side menu, using your HKU Portal username and password. A new additional menu will then appear on the lower left side. A user can edit the "HKU Data", and then click on "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page. The field holding the Full Name is not not editable. For those fields that are editable;
- Change data: delete existing, and write in the new value(s)
- Delete data: remove the data from the field
- Add data: click on "Add [x]" and enter the additional data
- Hide data: unclick the rightside "visibility" box
Data in Media Spokesmanship cannot be edited in the Hub, but can be edited by contacting through the HKU Communications and Public Affairs Office.
Bibliometric data cannot be edited in the RP, but must be changed in the source silos of Scopus and ResearcherID.
Scopus: HKU Libraries have an on-going project to find errors and request Elsevier to fix, which is slowly proceeding. Individuals themselves also can find errors to their personal Scopus AuthorID records, and request Elsevier to correct. To do so, please provide your existing Scopus AuthorID; example, 26634245300.
ResearcherID: With the permission of each HKU faculty, HKU Libraries created ResearcherID accounts for each current HKU researcher, and then uploaded publication lists from HKU Research & Scholarship (1994-2008). RID numbers and passwords were then given to each owner. If an incoming entry from HKU Research & Scholarship matched upon an entry in Web of Knowledge, then the ResearcherID will show citation counts on that entry. There are errors in HKU R&S, and errors in WoK preventing some matches. Individual RID owners can log into ResearcherID to change, add or delete. ResearcherID.com has an FAQ. You may wish to discuss editing options with Hub administrators.
There are three ways to do so.
- If you have the fulltext of the item, and you know that the publisher allows us to re-post (cf. "Publisher Policies" and "Open Access" above), then please send this to hub@lib.hku.hk, with a short note saying you allow it to re-appear in the Hub.
- At the end of each academic year, HKU researchers are requested to enter details of their research output in the HKU Research Output System (ROS). This later becomes the HKU Research & Scholarship. In the input screens for ROS, there is a tick box giving the Hub permission to include, and a box for attaching files. Files attached here will come to us for upload to the Hub. Please note, we can get the published version from the Libraries' subscriptions. However few publishers allow this version. However many publishers will allow an "author's manuscript" (or, postscript [hyperlink to above]). Therefore, do not attach the published version, but rather, the author's manuscript, which we can get only from you.
- Up to now, the Hub has only included entries for items that could be displayed in open access. But with it's greater role in HKU Knowledge Exchange, the Hub will begin to import and display all items from HKU Research & Scholarship (otherwise known as HKU Research Output System [ROS]). This will happen before the end of 2010.
- An owner of an HKU RP may login, and in the lower left menu, choose, "Add record to this RP", and fill in the blanks. This item will then appear on the RP. However a bug now prevents this item from being retrieved from the Title Index.
Thank you for asking! We have a very creative and enthusiastic team, who are all overworked with many other projects to complete besides their work on the Hub; Allen Lam, Eliot Zhu, Kaye Nolan, Kitty Mo, Judy Tsou, Francis Poon, Elise Tam, and David Palmer. Besides which, we have the very supportive Library staff, and ever appreciative HKU professorial staff.
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