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This is the final study in a series of six emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (rights metadata for open‐archiving), which investigated the intellectual property rights issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It reports the results of a survey of 542 academic authors, showing the level of protection required for their open access research papers. It then describes the selection of an appropriate means of expressing those rights through metadata and the resulting choice of Creative Commons licences. Finally, it outlines proposals for communicating rights metadata via the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH).

Preserving the vast amount of digitally published data is of paramount importance to maintaining the intellectual heritage. In order that resources can be deposited, managed and retrieved, it will be necessary to accurately describe what has been preserved and how it has been preserved. This paper looks at the problems of producing accurate and effective metadata that describe preserved resources without incurring a prohibitive cost overhead. It investigates the extent to which existing metadata standards may be able to address this problem and specifically analyses whether ONIX metadata could be integrated into the preservation process.

The purpose of this research is to show how the self‐archiving of journal papers is a major step towards providing open access to research. However, copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that are signed by an author prior to publication often indicate whether, and in what form, self‐archiving is allowed. The SHERPA/RoMEO database enables easy access to publishers' policies in this area and uses a colour‐coding scheme to classify publishers according to their self‐archiving status. The database is currently being redeveloped and renamed the Copyright Knowledge Bank. However, it will still assign a colour to individual publishers indicating whether pre‐prints can be self‐archived (yellow), post‐prints can be self‐archived (blue), both pre‐print and post‐print can be archived (green) or neither (white). The nature of CTAs means that these decisions are rarely as straightforward as they may seem, and this paper describes the thinking and considerations that were used in assigning these colours in the light of the underlying principles and definitions of open access.

Detailed analysis of a large number of CTAs led to the development of controlled vocabulary of terms which was carefully analysed to determine how these terms equate to the definition and “spirit” of open access.

The paper reports on how conditions outlined by publishers in their CTAs, such as how or where a paper can be self‐archived, affect the assignment of a self‐archiving colour to the publisher.

The colour assignment is widely used by authors and repository administrators in determining whether academic papers can be self‐archived. This paper provides a starting‐point for further discussion and development of publisher classification in the open access environment.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodological usability evaluation approach for e‐commerce websites in developing countries.

A multi‐faceted usability evaluation of three Jordanian e‐commerce websites was used, where three usability methods (user testing, heuristic evaluation and web analytics) were applied to the sites.

A four‐step approach was developed to facilitate the evaluation of e‐commerce sites, mindful of the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in identifying specific usability problems.

The approach was developed and tested using Jordanian users, experts and e‐commerce sites. The study compared the ability of the methods to detect problems that were present, however, usability issues not present on any of the sites could not be considered when creating the approach.

The approach helps e‐commerce retailers evaluate the usability of their websites and understand which usability method(s) best matches their need.

This research proposes a new approach for evaluating the usability of e‐commerce sites. A novel aspect is the use of web analytics (Google Analytics software) as a component in the usability evaluation in conjunction with heuristics and user testing.

This paper aims to report on the findings of the second phase of the Behavioural strand of the EC‐funded PEER project (http://www.peerproject.eu/). The paper seeks to explore authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to authors' peer‐reviewed accepted manuscripts in open access repositories.

The research was undertaken using a mixed‐method approach, involving the distribution of a survey by the 12 participating publishers to their authors in selected journal titles and a participatory workshop with European researchers from selected disciplinary areas.

Researchers' attitudes towards versions of published journal articles made open access via open access repositories may vary depending on whether researchers report behaviours from the perspective of an author or a reader. The research found that disciplinary cultures, norms and traditions shape authors' self‐archiving behaviour and readers' use of those versions of journal articles held in repositories.

One of the limitations of the research is that it was impossible for the research team to gauge the representativeness of the survey compared to the actual disciplinary distribution of the population of EU researchers, as such population information is not available in an aggregated and consistent format.

The PEER Observatory is an unprecedented large‐scale collaboration between publishers, researchers and repositories to investigate the effects of self‐archiving at European level. The paper provides a disciplinary reading of the findings and augments the understanding of how disciplinary culture and norms shape authors' and readers' behaviours in relation to self‐archiving.

This paper is the fifth in a series of studies emanating from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)‐funded RoMEO Project (rights metadata for open‐archiving). The paper reports the results of two surveys of OAI data providers (DPs) and service providers (SPs) with regards to the rights issues they face. It finds that very few DPs have rights agreements with depositing authors and that there is no standard approach to the creation of rights metadata. The paper considers the rights protection afforded individual and collections of metadata records under UK law and contrasts this with DPs' and SPs' views on the rights status of metadata and how they wish to protect it. The majority of DPs and SPs believe that a standard way of describing both the rights status of documents and of metadata would be useful.

This is the first of a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open‐archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. The paper concludes that self‐archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retain rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing.

The paper aims to develop a prototype middleware framework between different terminology resources in order to provide a subject cross‐browsing service for library portal systems.

Nine terminology experts were interviewed to collect appropriate knowledge to support the development of a theoretical framework for the research. Based on this, a simplified software‐based prototype system was constructed incorporating the knowledge acquired. The prototype involved mappings between the computer science schedule of the Dewey Decimal Classification (which acted as a spine) and two controlled vocabularies, UKAT and ACM Computing Classification. Subsequently, six further experts in the field were invited to evaluate the prototype system and provide feedback to improve the framework.

The major findings showed that, given the large variety of terminology resources distributed throughout the web, the proposed middleware service is essential to integrate technically and semantically the different terminology resources in order to facilitate subject cross‐browsing. A set of recommendations are also made, outlining the important approaches and features that support such a cross‐browsing middleware service.

Cross‐browsing features are lacking in current library portal meta‐search systems. Users are therefore deprived of this valuable retrieval provision. This research investigated the case for such a system and developed a prototype to fill this gap.