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Academic Integrity

About this site

Client

John M. Saylor, Cornell University Library
http://www.englib.cornell.edu/jms/
email: jms1@cornell.edu
phone: 607-255-4134

Harvester for Cornell Research

Objective

eCommons@Cornell is a digital repository that is open to anyone affiliated with Cornell University. It is a place to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute materials in digital formats for educational, scholarly, research or historical purposes (http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/).

Cornell faculty and researchers often post pre and post prints of their journal articles and papers on their own or departmental servers but do not deposit them in eCommons because it is inconvenient, or they are uncomfortable about their intellectual property right agreements with publishers.

The goal of this project is to develop a system to overcome these barriers by semi-automatically harvesting, cataloging, and collecting research publications that are already posted on departmental or individual web sites in the cornell.edu domain.

Harvesting from Web sites

The system will crawl departmental and local servers looking for .pdf, .ps, and other files. It will:

• Automatically generate metadata for each file.
• Determine if it has been previously submitted to or published in a journal or conference (by searching Google, or a database such as Web of Science, Compendex, etc)
• Determine the publisher's agreement for self archiving (by looking up in the Sherpa/Romeo database, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php), or searching for the journal's information that describes the author's rights.
• Build a database of these author-publisher agreements for each journal or publisher.
  authors whose material is crawled are asked for permission to archive either
• Ask authors for permission to archive either in the open access portion of eCommons or in a restricted portion if the rights do not allow.

Wider application

eCommons is implemented with the open source DSpace software. These tools would be contributions to the DSpace community.