News

A previous blog post over the summer of 2022) reported that a v3.0 Release Candidate of Rioxx had been published. Publication of this candidate has stimulated additional feedback from the community and the Rioxx Governance Group (RGG) is therefore working hard to address this feedback, ahead of finalizing the publication of Rioxx v3.0. In the meantime, members of the RGG recently presented at The 3rd Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2022 (WOOC2022) about Rioxx: Enhancing discovery and enriching the scholarly graph with the Research Outputs Metadata Schema (Rioxx).

The Rioxx Governance Group (RGG) is pleased to announce the publication of the v3.0 Release Candidat 1 of Rioxx: The Research Outputs Metadata Schema -- formerly known as the RIOXX Metadata Application Profile. Since July 2021, when the beta release of v3.0 was made available, the RGG has been working towards incorporating feedback from the repository and scholarly communications communities, and making adjustments to Rioxx to improve the way in which metadata are modelled.

Those of you following the status of RIOXX will be aware that a new governance group was formed in late 2019 under the auspices of UKCORR (RIOXX Governance Group - RGG). Following a period of consultation and review, the RGG is pleased to announce the publication of a beta draft of RIOXX v 3.0 for public comment. v 3.0 delivers minor updates to refresh the profile but also includes some major changes, such as the removal of <ali:free_to_read> -- removed owing to inconsistent application across the sector and its creation of internal inconsistency in RIOXX; and the addition of a new property: <rioxxterms:record_public_release_date> to better model the deposit-exposure lifecycle of deposited digital resources.

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.

Pierre Lasou from Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval reported a 'bug' in RIOXX 2.0. While the documentation consistently refers to a property called 'rioxxterms:version_of_record', the schema XSD incorrectly includes a property called 'rioxxterms:version-of-record'. I have updated the schema XSD to use the correct form - rioxxterms:version_of_record. This for two reasons: underscores, rather than hyphens, are used consistently elsewhere in the RIOXX profile the only examples of this property I can find 'in the wild' have used this version So, for the avoidance of any doubt, the correct version to use is:

I'm pleased to announce that the number of repositories which declare support for RIOXX has reached 50 (a half-century in cricket parlance). See the full list here This number has grown steadily since January 2015 - quite an impressive rate of adoption. The repository systems which have implemented RIOXX are nearly all ePrints systems - but we expect the number of repositories to increase with support for DSpace coming soon.

I received the following query from Emma Sansby, Head of Library Services at Bishop Grosseteste University: I am currently leading a project to implement Eprints (hosted and supported by ULCC) at my institution. We have the RIOXX plugin installed and I have a question about the licence_ref attribute. I am creating a metadata-only journal article record into our repository which includes a DOI link to the publisher’s website. When I get to the RIOXX page I am forced to enter something under licence_ref as the attribute is mandatory, even though it’s a metadata-only record.

I'm pleased to report that we have seen our first RCUK-compliant RIOXX record in the wild. Well done to the University of Keele Research Repository! You can see the validation report, and the record itself.

Currently, all of those institutional repositories which have declared support for RIOXX are based on the ePrints software, using a plugin especially developed to support RIOXX. There is a little (although not much) information about this plugin here - Jisc paid for the work, but it is not clear from that page who actually did the development (although there is a useful list of potential sources of technical support). A manager of one of these repositories recently contacted me to suggest that the validation and reporting script (output here) was offering a distorted view of the adoptions and accuracy or RIOXX reporting because it was harvesting a sample of the first 10 records, rather than harvesting more recently created or updated records which had more chance of being RIOXX-compatible.

I'm very pleased to note that the number of instituional repositories declaring support for RIOXX has reached 30! This number has trebled in 6 months which is a healthy rate of adoption. This is due to the growing adoption of the Jisc-funded ePrints plugin. It would be good to see some other systems listed: there are, I believe, ongoing developments to introduce RIOXX support into other repository systems. Who will be next?