Emory FIRST, a software tool for faculty to centrally record and manage citations for their publications, has been expanded to also be a path for depositing articles into OpenEmory through the repository connector.
OpenEmory is an open access repository of scholarly articles by faculty and a service of the Emory Libraries. By making Emory faculty scholarship freely accessible anywhere in the world through OpenEmory, we raise the visibility of this work, and we further the intellectual community here at Emory.
The FIRST in Emory FIRST stands for Faculty Information on Research, Service, and Teaching. It was developed by a software company called Symplectic (http://symplectic.co.uk/products/elements/) that specializes in integrating and implementing research information systems for universities and research institutions. Elements is the name of their product that we have customized and renamed Emory FIRST.
Future plans include expanding OpenEmory and the connector to support other content types such as books, book chapters, conference papers, and presentations. Also, links to the articles available in OpenEmory can be included in public profiles of faculty generated from Emory FIRST when this option is available, providing access not just to a citation, but also to a copy of the article.
The collaborative LITS development process was complex and challenging while also cutting-edge. Emory is the second Fedora repository in the world to have this kind of connector, and among the first in the US to have a connector from a faculty profiling system to any open access repository. The work produced by our LITS Software Engineers surpassed a similar implementation by our colleagues at Duke University. For example, in addition to developing a robust repository connector, Alex Thomas and his team also designed three necessary and additional features: 1) embargo enhancements, 2) duplicate object reporting alerts, and 3) duplicate object staff mitigation.
Many, many thanks to James Bias, Kevin Glover, Melanie Kowalski, Dana Kuebler, Lisa Macklin, Mike Mitchell, Bethany Nash, Frances Pici, Mark Prefer, Dan Ra, Kelly Resignola, Alex Thomas, Megan Turk, Mary Walters and all of our new friends at Symplectic/Elements!
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