Usability and user feedback
The prototype we built for getting users to send their publications via SWORD has reduced the user effort to deposit to a couple of extra clicks for all their publications - but we still wanted to try out the prototype user interface on a few existing users of publicationslist.org to get their feedback to see if there was scope for improvement.
We approached a small number of publicationslist.org users via email to see if they would be willing to try it out:
Message requesting user feedback on EM-Loader (sent to 6 users)
We've been developing an experimental new feature for using publicationslist.org to deposit copies of papers (or just the bibliographic details) into a university institutional repository - with the aim of making it easier for people to access research. There's some info on the project, with some screencast demos of the extensions to the publicationslist interface on the EM Loader website
I'm looking to get some feedback from a few of our publicationslist.org users to see what they think of the idea, and whether they would be likely to use such a feature we added it to our main site.
Would you be willing to give it a go & let me know any comments / suggestions? It should just take a few minutes - you can log in to a test version of your page using the same email/password as you use for your real publicationslist.org account on: http://test.publicationslist.org/
Having logged in, you can press a new 'Deposit' button to try sending items to a test repository installation - then the publicationslist entries ought to get updated with a link to the repository copy.
I'd be very grateful if you have time to give it a go and let me know what you think - negative comments just as useful as positive ones -
User feedback
User 1: "The facility was very straightforward to use and I would use it. "
User 2: "I think this is a great idea, and I would gladly put all my publications in the depot. The tool to do this from PublicationList looks good. One thing though is that I'm not sure about all the copyright issues surrounding extra copes of papers in repositories. There are different rules from different publishers of course. I couldn't see a way to just upload reference details from the tool: I wasn't sure if it would try to upload PDFs. What would happen if more than one scientist tried to add the same paper? Is it indexed on Pubmed ID so the same one doesn't go in twice? "
User 3: "The submission process seems to have worked fine, The links are certainly big enough... A few miscellaneous thoughts:
- - perhaps it could do with a bit more feedback to say what is going to happen or has just happened. You could accumulate the messages with an "OK" after them, rather than replacing the text in the same space.
- - The column that gets the submission IDs could do with a heading so you know what they are
- - You kind of expect a link to your repository account on the submission page so you can see all the stuff as soon as it has been deposited (though I guess the repository won't provide one, so it could have a message). It wasn't obvious that the number + "accepted" links go to the repository. - could just be a column heading thing.
- - the "Repository" links on the publications list aren't aligned if some have PDFs and some don't.
- - its not clear what happens for publications that do or don't have full text. Again, could have more feedback to say it is either sending reference metadata, or sending the pdf(?)
- - the "Repository" text could instead be name of the repository it is in.
But basically, it all seems to work fine!"
Usability summary
All the publicationslist.org users who tried the em-loader prototype managed to get all their publications into the test repository with minimal effort. The main concerns raised were:
1. Unsure of copyright permission to post papers.
The publicationslist page does include links to the Sherpa/Romeo database of publisher policies, but the copyright situation is still a worry for many researchers. In practice, most publishers permit uploading the author's final manuscript to a repository, but the uncertainty is likely to lead to a reluctance to upload full text 'just in case...'.-
2. Whether co-authors might upload multiple copies of the same paper to the repository.
This would be fixable by adding an author search feature to the repository, so publicationslist users could search and link to existing items and not attempt to re-upload. It is possible the repository software could detect duplicate bibliographic metadata too, and cross link the entries (as ePrints currently deals with multiple versions). PublicationsList.org can already detect duplicate entries in its index (using identifiers like DOIs / PUBMED IDs and similarity of metadata). 3. Make it clearer whether full text (pdf) or just metadata was being uploaded
This could be easily fixed by minor changes to the user interface.