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Czech Grey Literature and Research Outputs – Transformation of the NUŠL Service

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Czech Grey Literature and Research Outputs – Transformation of the NUŠL Service
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The Czech National Repository of Grey Literature (NUSL) has been bringing GL to science and society over 10 years. It is based on Lisbon definition from 1997, updated in 2004, and on its own document typology that was created in 2008 as one of the outputs of the same name project. Since then there have been several papers and articles calling for new definition and new typology, asking what should be still considered GL and what not anymore. (Savić, 2017; Baxter and Hilbrecht, 2020) Savic (2019) pointed out that if everything can be marked as GL then probably nothing is GL. The NUSL already had to change its typology few times to provide still good service and to reflect research institutions' needs. However, it is not only the document typology that influences the repository and the service, there are other circumstances which affect further development of the NUSL such as partner institutions' needs, the National Research, Development and Innovation Policy, European Commission's guidelines on research outputs, current quantity and quality of other repositories and systems for grey literature and research results in the Czech Republic etc. The contribution/paper will bring a brief overview on NUSL's experience over 10 years of providing the service. Then it will be focused on a current situation in research area of the Czech Republic in detail. Finally, out of these points will conclude to the necessary changes that has to be taken by NUSL and his provider – National Library of Technology in Prague, in order to keep the service meaningful.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
So, hello, everyone. We prepare for you a contribution on the Czech literature and research outputs that are the background for the Nušo service transformation. We will start with an overview of the Nušo, followed by our experiences.
Then the context of research and development in the Czech Republic needs to be mentioned as it shapes the service and leads us to the transformation of it. Nušo is the Czech national repository of Czech literature that started as a project in 2008, and to this day managed to collect nearly 600,000 records,
thanks to its partnership network. The participation is voluntary, expected for the certified methodologies funded by the Ministry of Culture, and it's free of charge. Either the institutions can let us harvest their system
or they can use our repository for manual submissions. An important fact is that Nušo has two landing pages due to technical possibilities back then. The main landing page is the central search interface that forwards you either to partners repository or to ours.
This is our repository used for the manual submissions. This technical solution is unfortunate and confuses the end users,
just as the outdated version of Inven.io 1 costs technical troubles. Nevertheless, there is version 3 that brings a lot of challenges, but also challenges. The significant one is the internal format that shifts from a Mark 21 to JSON, that is web native and gives flexibility in metadata schema.
For these reasons, we decided to revise the current Nušo metadata standard. Furthermore, the current solution doesn't have almost any automatic validations, which gives freedom, but also an enormous mess that is more difficult to control. Therefore, it's up to consider the addition of some to help a curator out.
We are aware of repetitive submissions of the same results to several systems, and that's something we would like to reduce. Thus, we find out interoperability with the legislatively-based Czech research and development information system key.
These are findings of Czech literature in context of Nušo and the Czech Republic we earned. Czech literature lives in the shadow of classical research outputs, such as it's not usually systematically registered because higher priority gets documents listed in Scopus or Web of Science
that influence future funding of research institutions. Otherwise, solved copyright issues to make great literature available is often easier. We found out great literature has specific needs regarding metadata and cataloging rules. A significant limitation is lasting a lack of awareness on this topic among the public.
Sometimes people even tend to confuse it with other grey terms as grey animanence or grey economy. There's also a lack of professionals in this area. Grey literature is warite, which means it can be difficult to tell who exactly the target group is, or if it can be so diverse as the grey literature is.
Nušo collects only grey literature. That limits the small institutions to use the service as their own institutional repository. This is current document typology that was already changed a few times to follow the partners' needs.
However, it's time to revise it again. In addition to a broader context, we cannot ignore those several papers and articles calling for a new definition of grey literature and questions what can be still considered grey. Is grey literature available through a repository still grey?
And what about research data? Data used to be definitely grey, but now with the EU, it brings them to the light. Are they still grey, though? The vis-a-vis class mentioned well that if everything can be marked as grey literature, then probably nothing is.
Keeping this in mind, and the rich ability of grey literature to store in Nušo NTK started to search for its possibilities, options and its place in the Czech research and development area. That brings us to the broader context of Nušo.
The Czech research and development information system mentioned before collects only bibliographic records and submissions are annually mandatory thanks to legislative support. Strong legislative support is something Nušo is missing. It would help increase the content availability and awareness of the service.
The technical state of Czech repositories affects Nušo possibilities for automatic acquisition. So far, there are 22 repositories registered in open door. Even though that's not a low number, the interoperability can get very challenging and requires a lot of manual work. Two factors limit their development,
budget in public institutions and the lack of qualified people on the market. The critical condition for repositories is a governmental approach to open access and open science and the willingness of authors, institutions and founders to make research output space from public money available.
Being aware of all these facts and gaps in these areas in the Czech Republic, last month the government approved a seven-year-long project entitled National Centre for Information Support of Research, Development and Innovations. The project covers several areas
and the Nušo transformation is part of it. Thus, the transformation respects its demands. The NTK is going to cooperate with Cessna and its technical infrastructure, the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague on the development of a repository and the Research, Development and Innovation Council
that is in charge of the Czech research and development information system. The new repository's main aim is to provide service to small research institutions without their own and allow them to scale access to their files.
We have started with a survey among stakeholders. Then, based on its results, we've continued with the revision of the typology and metadata schema regarding the Nušo experience, open-air guidelines, Koar, CERIF and the Czech research and development information system. We also started with the technical upgrade of the software itself
that enables only one and hopefully modern landing page and new functions. The survey purpose was to collect feedback from our main stakeholders on typology, accessibility, file formats and participation limits.
The return of the questionnaire was 22.6%. The weakness of the survey is that some respondents remained with the idea that Nušo could keep collecting only grey literature.
Multiple options were possible on the question regarding participation limits. We were pleased that 43% did not know of any. The second and third stock answers confirmed work capacity issues. We expected the option of multiple submissions higher
as the submissions to the Czech research and development information system are obligatory, but there is no interoperability with Nušo so far. Then grey literature is also evidenced in library catalogues that often don't have the OAI PMH protocol for interoperability.
Therefore, it's possible that in some cases, there are different people in charge of different systems and respondents didn't realise that whilst filling the surveying. Multiple options were also possible on the question regarding the human types. The graph shows that the main interest remained in grey literature.
That's great. The first mention of white literature comes on the shared fifth position and its books and their chapters, followed by conference proceedings that can be wiped or grayed. Articles in different versions lie in the lower half.
However, also other factors had to be considered for the new typology. Thus, we met all the requirements, projects, survey, other Czech repositories and open air, and this is the outcome, a new typology. So what are the changes in the typology?
It contains 11 new types of white and grey literature to give more possibilities to small research institutions. On the other hand, 12 types became a part of a broader category. For example, flyers and gazettes will become a part of trade literature.
Besides, the NTK decided on a new approach to grey literature inspired by the Canadian experience in the gambling research exchange. For the users, we will also use the term specialised resources instead of grey literature, which we will keep using only among professionals.
And it's the typology that makes the repository and as it won't collect only grey literature anymore, we have to change also the name of the service and the new name is going to be Czech National Repository.
So, now you know where we are today. We are at the beginning and there is a lot in front of us. So let's see what tomorrow will bring. Any questions?