News from 2019



New Governance Group and plans for revision to the profile

The RIOXX metadata application profile was developed for repositories to share metadata about the scholarly resources they contain. It has been deployed as a metadata application profile in approximately 70 institutional repositories in the UK, and (with support from Jisc) has software implementations in DSpace and ePrints.

The need for revision

While originally designed to meet the reporting requirements of Research Councils UK (RCUK), RIOXX has also proven to be generally useful as a standard for sharing metadata between repositories and network services such as large-scale metadata aggregators (e.g. Core). Feedback from such service providers has resulted in a short list of proposed changes and improvements to the RIOXX profile.

Governance

RIOXX (the profile, sources in the Github repository and documentation - including this website) have been maintained by Paul Walk at Antleaf for the last few years. Before developing the profile further, Antleaf has been keen to find a suitable and representative organisation to provide a governance role and to take oversight of any future revisions. Recently, the United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCORR) has formed a Governance Group to take responsibility for oversight of revisions to the RIOXX profile. UKCORR is perfectly placed to provide such governance because RIOXX is used predominately in the UK. The Governance Group has the following membership:

  • George Macgregor, University of Strathclyde (Chair)
  • Nicola Dowson, The Open University
  • Michael Eadie, University of Glasgow
  • Petr Knoth, Knowledge Media institute, The Open University (representing CORE)
  • Kate O'Neill, University of Sheffield
  • Paul Walk, Antleaf

Proposed process for revision

Antleaf proposes to manage a public consultation, open to any interested contributors, to invite suggestions for revisions to the RIOXX application profile, as well as any other relevant suggestions and comments. This will be conducted via the "Issues" feature on the RIOXX Github repository. There are already some suggestions for changes there, and we welcome more.

The process will be, roughly speaking:

  • collect suggestions as Github issues
  • encourage discussion on these issues and attempt to reach some consensus
  • make a series of clear recommendations, based on the outcomes of these discussions, and invite the wider community to comment
  • revise (as necessary) the recommendations, and offer the results to the RIOXX Governance Group for a decision

All of the above will be conducted with "radical openness": all discussion will take place in Github issues, and the minutes of the RIOXX Governance Group meetings are and will be publicly available.

If you have any interest in supporting open access, especially where this is facilitated by services such as Core which harvest and aggregate metadata and content from repositories, then please take a moment to consider how RIOXX might help, and feel free to join one or more of the discussions that have already started on Github.

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