DASHathon | Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard: Opening Harvard Research

"On March 18, 2013, staff from the Office for Scholarly Communication gathered for a DASHathon: an all-day, office-wide event designed to both rethink our deposit workflow and to increase deposits into DASH. The day started with an overview of the workflow for making DASH deposits. Particular focus was placed on working with bulk ingests of Harvard-authored articles from the PubMed Central Open Access Subset, as these are the most straightforward in terms of making license decisions and correcting metadata. Half of the OSC’s staff had deposited articles in DASH in the past, while the other half was new to the process. Staff who were less familiar with the process were developers that work directly with the back-end of DASH, Harvard’s DSpace-based repository. This combination of experience made the day’s work that much more valuable, as staff that worked on DASH deposits regularly were able to suggest updates or changes that developers were immediately able to see, experience, and address. Meanwhile, developers were often able to suggest workflow changes that were low-tech or no-tech, and which would help to speed processing time per article. A bulk ingest from PubMed Central had already been established to bring open access articles authored by Harvard affiliates into DASH. Whereas articles submitted directly by Harvard faculty require a more intensive process of metadata entry and editing, bulk ingest articles rely on metadata provided by PubMed Central, leaving OSC staff to edit that metadata. Based on existing parameters we had set for the bulk ingest and established workflow procedures, article processing time for articles ingested from PubMed Central was between 10 and 15 minutes. The majority of that time was spent on two processes: using a search box to check author names against the Harvard directory, and changing mathematical and scientific symbols to MathJax to ensure proper display across systems and displays. Every aspect of the workflow and technical specifications for the bulk ingest process was reviewed by OSC staff as they processed and deposited articles during the DASHathon. Staff worked through the article deposit workflow, depositing articles throughout the day. As an individual staff member came up with a possible change, the group discussed the change, considered whether or not a technical solution was required, and added agreed-upon changes to our list. Below is a list of both workflow and technical changes that were implemented following the all-day DASHathon ..."