The case study used is the development of an IR at CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), South Africa. The CSIR was constituted by parliament in 1945.
It developed into a leading SET research and development organization on the African continent. Its mandate, as specified in the Scientific Research Council Act (Act 46 of 1988 as amended by Act 71 of 1990) (Republic of South Africa, 1988), states that: ‘The objects of the CSIR are, through directed and particularly multi- disciplinary research and technological innovation, to foster, in the national interest and in fields which in its opinion should receive preference, industrial and scientific development, either by itself or in co-operation with principals from the private or public sectors, and thereby to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of the people of the Republic, and to perform any other functions that may be assigned to the CSIR by or under this Act.’
About 40% of the annual income of the CSIR is in the form of a parliamentary grant and the balance is generated by research contracts with national, provincial and municipal governments, the private sector and national and international research funding organizations. The core domains within which the researchers operate are biosciences, built environment, defence, peace, safety and security, materials science and manufacturing and natural resources and the environment. The CSIR also explores new areas of research, for example nanotechnology, synthetic biology and mobile autonomous intelligent systems. There are also three national research centres that focus on ICT, laser technology and space-related technology. The researchers are supported by a R&D outcomes portfolio that manages the intellectual property of the CSIR, technology transfer and knowledge dissemination (CSIR, 2007a). The CSIR’s Information Services (CSIRIS) forms part of the R&D Core group and assumed responsibility for the development of the CSIR’s institutional repository after restructuring of the organization in 2005. The conceptualization and project-planning phase of the IR started during the second half of 2006 and its actual development started in January 2007.
Known as Research Space, the CSIR’s institutional repository was launched on 1st August 2007. A copy of the CSIR’s home page is shown in Figure 5. Access is provided via the CSIR’s homepage, which is shown in Figure 6. The motivating factor for the development of the IR was to increase the awareness of the work done
by the researchers in the organization. In addition, the IR is intended to serve as a custodian tool for the data, information and the explicit knowledge of the CSIR.
Because of contractual work and client confidentiality, it was not feasible to open-up existing databases to the international research and scientific community. Because of this additional legal complexity, it was decided to develop an IR that would contain – and be limited to – all the publicly available publications of the CSIR and thereby therefore form a subset of the restricted database.
Figure 5: Research Space homepage (CSIR, 2007b)
Figure 6: CSIR Homepage (CSIR, 2007a)
This decision resulted in a concerted effort by different departments to develop and populate the CSIR Research Space repository on a sound platform with quality data.
The project team consisted of representatives from CSIRIS, the CSIR’s Computing Services (ICT), Communications, R&D Outcomes and EBAS (Enterprise Based Applications and Systems) groups. During the project planning phase it was decided that DSpace would be the most suitable tool, as this would be able to interact with existing systems, as well as with systems to be planned later, especially in terms of document management and archiving. In addition, the ICT group had already tested DSpace and had started with a trial document-archiving project. Preconceived and negative perceptions were avoided, as most of the people concerned were not acquainted with the product. Knowledge and ideas were shared freely during the design and development of the IR. The use of DSpace is also in line with the move of the organization towards an OSS environment. The CSIR is driving the OSS initiative in South Africa and formally adopted OA in October 2006 as part of its refocused vision.
Hardware issues were also resolved and a dedicated file server was purchased. The University of Pretoria’s Academic Information Services (UP/AIS), having already developed and implemented an IR (Smith, 2007c), supported the team with advice and constructive criticism. UP/AIS also hosted the CSIR’s trial repository on their file server from January 2007 until July 2007. Their assistance, in the true spirit of OSS, is highly appreciated and it accelerated the whole development process.
With the software and hardware issues having been resolved, it took approximately five months of dedicated teamwork to add some thousand full text items to the repository. These items consisted mainly of peer-reviewed publications published since 1999 for which copyright clearance was available. Although the information was harvested from other sources, it was decided to capture the data manually, the logic being that a) quality needed to be monitored and verified; b) copyright issues had to be resolved; and c) to ensure that the data were also reflected in the ‘mother’
database (TOdB). In the spirit of the IR principles, free and open access to the content of the IR to all interested parties, nationally and internationally, is provided.
Currently, the contents of the IR cover all articles, peer-reviewed, non-peer reviewed articles, conference papers and conference presentations. Also included are other publications of the CSIR, e.g. annual reports, CSIR E-news, as well as the journal, CSIR ScienceScope. A collection of mining related reports has also been added to
the repository. Investigations are currently underway to include multi-media materials such as videos and audio files, although the size of video files is a concern in terms of over-loading the existing bandwidth. Compression technology is being investigated. Alternatives are being sought to solve this problem and to prevent overloading of the existing bandwidth. The team is currently investigating how the different supporting datasets will be managed. This investigation includes identification of the most effective manner to link supporting datasets with specific publications.