The following update has been sent to potential funders to keep them abreast of developments:

i)  CITATION SERVICES

This plan is furthest along and I am including with this document an overview proposal for the work describing the need for the work, showing the main work packages and with a high-level estimate of the resources and funding that will be required. It also details the players who would input into the work programme. Some preliminary discussions and meetings have already taken place for this action plan.

Funding is now being sought for this work: please see the attached proposal document for further information. The draft action plan is here.

ii)  INTEROPERABLE IDENTIFIERS

This action plan is the most wide-ranging, covering as it does identifiers at individual, item and possibly institutional level. The work will need to be phased and the action plan team favour focusing initially on identifiers for people and following this with work on object (item) identification.

Some refining has taken place of the draft action plan developed at the Amsterdam workshop in March and the current version of the plan can be found here.

The proposed approach is to vest project lead responsibility with the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) which looks likely to fund some of the software development work involved in the project. It is anticipated that collaborators in Europe, the US and other parts of Asia will be involved in the work, involvement being in both data provision and software development.

It is thought desirable for day-to-day project management to be carried out by an entity (individual or organisation) in the northern hemisphere simply to optimise communication within the consortium since most partners will be sited there, within time zones that approximate more closely than that of ANDS.

The draft plan identified a number of activities (this is an ambitious project in its overall scope) so the first steps have been agreed as:

•    People identifier interoperability:  Authors, creators and users of scholarly content are variously identified in the digital realm. For example, different journals use different styles for naming authors and institutional repositories have varying styles for the author field(s) in their metadata. Work to enable the creation of equivalence or non-equivalence assertions (‘this Fred Jones is the same as that Frederick Jones’ or ‘this G.J. Brown is not the same as that George J. Brown’) between people’s different digital identities, and to share those equivalences

•    Object identifier interoperability: Digital objects, too, can be variously labelled or identified. The aim of this part of the work is to provide a simple, queryable, object equivalence service using the international FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The planned work is in itself phased, moving from a first, basic level of equivalence to a more complex one later. The aim for this action plan is to have concrete proposals ready for potential funders by August/September 2009.

iii) REPOSITORY HANDSHAKE

This action plan concerns the interoperability of the deposit process and whether protocols like SWORD (Simple Web service Offering Repository Deposit) can assist in the collection of maximal amounts of open access literature and ensure that the articles are in all the places that are appropriate (for example, institutional collections, funder repositories, disciplinary repositories and so forth).

The team working on this area have been using the draft action plan (http://repinf.pbworks.com/Repository-handshake) to take forward discussions on how to organise future work. The team is a collaboration of individuals from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Edinburgh University, Cambridge University and the Technical University of Denmark. They have followed two lines of activity. First, a definition of the technical issues that must be investigated and, second, the development of a set of use cases that will frame thinking and analysis. With respect to the latter, three use cases have been decided upon:

•    Funder-mandated deposit of scholarly articles (which may be in institutional or funder repositories). The lead partner for this work is EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.

•    Deposit into multiple institutionally-located systems (e.g. research information systems, research management systems, open access research repositories and virtual research environments). Partner institutions for this part of the work are Trinity College Dublin and the Danish Technical University

•    Publisher deposit into various locations. Some publishers have expressed interest in joining the project consortium as partners for this work, notably the Nature Publishing group and Springer

The proposed work has two tracks. It will begin with an analysis of the first use case here (funder-mandated deposit). The deliverable, a two-page report on development opportunities, will be available for funders in September 2009. The second track will take the form of a gap analysis on the technical aspects of repository interoperability as it currently exists, identifying the gaps and then developing the technical approaches to addressing them. By the end of 2009 the results of this will be available, along with a complete analysis of all the use cases. Future funding requirements will be detailed then, too.

iv)  REPOSITORY ORGANISATION

This strand of work is being taken forward by the DRIVER organisation. The need for an international support infrastructure for repositories, in a sense mirroring what DRIVER has provided for European repositories, has been accepted and will be developed around identified needs and activities of stakeholders.

The action plan encompassed two main areas of activity. First, the seeking of funding: the team working on this action plan propose to approach multiple agencies during the period up to October 2009 for funding and/or support-in-kind, and are seeking a minimum of €170,000 per year. The other activity concerns the development of a governance model. This work has been completed: there was no funding implication for this, nor any ongoing funding need.

An announcement of the new organisation will take place on 20 October 2009 during Open Access Week at a meeting in Ghent. Participants will include the European Commission and strategic partners involved in the new initiative.