Conference Agenda

The financial dimension of the Open Access (OA) transformation is becoming increasingly significant. The diversity of business models makes it difficult for institutions to gain a comprehensive overview of cost flows and trends. To make informed decisions, transparent and comparable data on payments across institutions is essential.

OpenAPC, located at Bielefeld University, functions as an aggregator that collects and disseminates cost data on OA publishing under an Open Database License. This presentation will highlight the pivotal role of repositories in managing publication costs sustainably and making this data freely accessible.

Via the OAI-PMH interface, OpenAPC can harvest publication costs from participating repositories employing a standardized XML metadata schema developed by the openCost project.

The demonstration will illustrate the OpenAPC harvesting routines using real-world use cases, showcasing the workflows for institutions that have already implemented the openCost schema. It will cover a variety of repository systems, including DSpace, E-Print, Invenio, and LibreCat.

The presentation will concentrate on the benefits of storing cost data in repositories for institutions, as well as on the advantages this approach offers to aggregators such as OpenAPC, with the aim of showing how this strategy can reinforce the importance of repositories in the ongoing transformation.

The International Repositories Directory (IRD) will be launched at Open Repositories 2025. The

IRD will address concerns about repository metadata quality, including harvesting, de-

duplication, responsiveness checks, and platform identification.

This session will demonstrate the more technical aspects of this system, focussing on how the

metadata quality is maintained with a set of automated curation functions.

The session will conclude with a brief presentation of the improved dataset from the IRD,

showing a more positive picture of repository functionality worldwide - notably that OAI-OPMH

support is actually 67% rather than 50%.

The Merritt Digital Preservation Repository consists of 6 java microservices and 1 ruby microservice. Each service operates as a high-availability service running on load-balanced instances. In 2023, the Merritt team adopted OpenSearch for consolidated logging across each of these instances. The migration to a consolidated logging solution produced benefits beyond the team's expectations.

This presentation will describe the Merritt team’s need for consolidated logging. Because the university has adopted AWS technologies, OpenSearch was a logical solution. The presentation will provide a brief overview of OpenSearch and an explanation of the distinction between OpenSearch and ElasticSearch. Once the team had published log records to OpenSearch, the team began to explore the data visualization capabilities of OpenSearch.

The creation of data visualizations enabled the team to proactively identify problems before users had reported them. Additionally, the visualization capabilities of OpenSearch were so attractive that the team has begun publishing aggregated data records to OpenSearch for visualization purposes.

Learning Management Systems have become ubiquitous in Higher Education and K-12, especially post-pandemic with the rise of remote and hybrid learning. This talk discusses the implementation and deployment of the new EduLink plugin for the Metavus digital collections platform, which leverages the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Deep Linking protocol to integrate digital repository materials seamlessly into LMSes. Metavus underpins ATE Central, the official information hub and archive for the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program, and the new EduLink plugin is being used to power STEMLink, a service institutions can use to incorporate ATE-developed STEM curriculum into their LMS courses. In addition to looking at the overarching issues posed by repository/LMS integration, specific techniques used to overcome challenges using LTI in the face of tracking prevention in modern browsers are discussed, and a demo of using STEMLink to add a lab activity to a Canvas course is provided.

Following the increasingly complexities of problem, data-driven interventions become vital solutions, with repositories being serving as the cornerstone. This paper presents innovative approaches used in the design and implementation of three key projects in Ethiopia: the Agri-Datahub, Research Data Repository (RDR) at Addis Ababa University, and National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE) by the Ministry of Education.

While open-source tools provide significant opportunities, we found that they often cannot be deployed "as-is" to address the intricate problem we faced. Each project required novel strategies to orchestrate existing technologies in some way for specific workflows. The Agri-Datahub exemplifies this innovation, serving as a one-stop data service for value chain actors in Ethiopian agriculture. We integrates state-of-the-art data science and big data technologies, and offer robust features like data acquisition, curation, scalable multimodal storage, and comprehensive access options, dashboards and APIs.

Complementing Agri-Datahub are RDR at AAU, tailored to address research data management needs using the Dataverse platform, and NADRE, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic is to centralize resources for higher education. In general, the projects address data fragmentation, governance challenges, and technical constraints, demonstrating the power of stakeholder collaboration and innovation to transform Ethiopian agriculture and academia through data-driven solutions.