Durham Research Online’s new home: Worktribe Outputs

In early August, after seemingly never-ending preparations, meetings, and putting together of guidance and process reviews, the Open Research team were able to go live with our brand new services on Worktribe. The Outputs module and the new repository platform for Durham Research Online will allow us to support our academic colleagues right through their research process – from ensuring researchers are compliant with requirements from the University and their funding bodies when they have research accepted for publication, to making that research as widely accessible as possible, often to people who may not be able to access it otherwise.

Repository records in Worktribe allow users to do much more than was previously possible in our previous eprints repository. As well as providing a thumbnail preview of any files attached to the record, it is also possible to preview files in browser prior to downloading a copy. Additionally, as well as providing full citation information about a publication and a link to the relevant published version of record, it is now possible to quickly click through to publications linked to the same departments, research centres or institutes, as well as the author’s other publications, and suggestions of similar articles.

In launching Worktribe, Durham joins a growing list of UK institutions who use Worktribe as their repository, including Nottingham, Hull, Robert Gordon, UWE, and Edinburgh Napier (and we should add that we really appreciate the advice and support we’ve been given from library colleagues at these universities while we’ve been working to launch Worktribe). Where we distinguish ourselves, however, is by the sheer volume of publications we needed to migrate from our two existing systems; in total, 76,672 publications were migrated over to Worktribe, with 47,147 of these being made visible through DRO. By comparison, the next largest migration of publications into Worktribe had been fewer that 36,000. In short, this was a huge undertaking, and – barring a small number of records that we have needed to update ourselves after migration – a successful one.

At the time of writing, we have over 77,000 publications in Worktribe, with 74,477 of those visible in DRO, and almost 30,000 of those providing immediate open access to the full text of the publication. A place in DRO history and the significant honour of having the first new publication added to the Worktribe repository went to Dr Rachael Harkes of the Department of History, whose forthcoming article ‘Remembering the Dead: post-mortem guild membership in late medieval England’ we were able to make available right after it had been accepted for publication.

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That being said, we are certainly not resting on our laurels, and in some senses going live means that the work has only just begun. One of our main challenges now is to get the message out as widely as possible to our academic and professional support colleagues across the university – and though we’ve made a good start on this, we’re looking forward to going out and talking to Departments throughout next term, as well as beginning to offer drop-in and one-on-one training sessions to all staff members.

Additionally, we’ll be exploring the various features available to us in Worktribe that previously we could only dream of. These include linking the repository to a staff member’s ORCID, ensuring that we won’t miss any of their publications, and making use of harvesters from databases such as Crossref and Jisc, which will allow us to keep all of our metadata as accurate and up to date as possible.

If you would like to know more about our new services on Worktribe and what we’ve been getting up to, any member of the Open Research team will be more than happy to bend your ear about it, as we’ve all been living and breathing this for, let’s just say, a long time now.