Research Asset Approval
Relevant Ex Libris Documentation
Approving Authors and Assets
Seth Thompson 1/7/2025
There are three main ways individual assets can be added to Verso:
Manual Deposit
Researcher Deposit
Smart Harvest
Manual Deposit will be covered first, as it requires the most knowledge of Esploro / asset editing.
Manual Deposit
This form of deposit assumes that you have been given the author and publication info for a desired asset deposit – e.g. you are helping a new faculty member set up their profile and are reading from their CV.
To begin, select ‘Repository’ in the side bar – under “Asset Deposits,” select ‘Deposit Asset’
You should now be on the ‘Deposit Research Asset’ page. Enter the name of the desired researcher.
Affiliated researchers will appear in the drop-down menu as you type; selecting one will auto-populate the Academic Unit field. If your researcher is new / isn’t in the system yet, you will be able to add their information while editing the asset, however, you will have to manually enter the academic unit that is associated with the research / researcher.
Select the asset type that best represents the asset type you are depositing.
Depending on the selected asset type, you can optionally enter the DOI to autofill some of the metadata.
Click Next
Enter the Researcher and unit affiliations if you did not already do so on the previous page.
Enter the title
Note that not every asset type contains the same metadata fields. The following are the most common.
Files:
Drag any files you have into the file field.
By clicking the three dots on the far right of your file, you can edit information like the display name and the access rights. If you want to ensure that your asset appears as ‘open access,’ you must edit the access rights for each included file.
Links for Remote Access:
Click ‘Add a Link.’ You can enter web URLs – GitHub links, etc.
I do not recommend linking out to anything that already has a DOI – assets with DOI’s will automatically generate a link for users to follow when the asset is viewed in Verso.
Creators and Contributors:
The researcher you entered when creating the asset deposit should auto-fill in this field.
Use ‘Add group author’ or ‘Add creator’ for any remaining authors you have.
Use group author for organizations, i.e. ‘Idaho EPSCoR.’ For individuals, use add creator.
It is best practice to first use the ‘search existing’ tab – any researcher who is already in the system will appear along with their institutional affiliation. If the researcher is not in the system, you can use the ‘Create non-affiliated’ tab. The affiliation field will search for institutions as you type. If their affiliation does not match anything in the system, a new external affiliation will have to be added to Esploro.
Statuses and Dates:
Select the date type and date from the ‘add date’ menu.
You can add multiple dates to one asset – for example, you can enter the submission date as well as the publication date. When viewing a researchers output in Verso, their assets will
be organized by date.
Esploro uses a date hierarchy (see linked documentation) – for example, if your asset has ‘edited 2023’ and ‘published 2019’, it will use the 2019 publication date when ordering the researchers assets.
Asset Details:
Enter the asset publication metadata.
Note on using the ‘Asset Subtitle’ field: If you use this field, the asset will appear with this format – Title: Subtitle. If you don’t want the colon separator (i.e. Title – Subtitle), you will have to type the full title/subtitle combination at the very top of the page in the ‘article title’ field. If you already have the subtitle written out in the ‘article title’ field, do not enter it again in the ‘asset subtitle’ field.
Publication Details:
Enter the journal name / book name, ISSN, ISBN, etc.
Article Information:
Peer reviewed – selecting yes will apply a ‘peer reviewed’ icon to the asset in Verso.
Open access article / open access status – select the applicable status information.
If your asset is open access and you specifically want the ‘open access’ icon to be displayed in Verso, select the appropriate fields in this section, then go back to the ‘files’ section and double check that any attached files were marked the same way. Getting the ‘open access’ badge to appear can be finnicky, but selecting open access in all available fields will ensure that it does.
Description and Research Topics
Enter the full abstract. If you want / if applicable, you can use html text modifiers
Enter research topics (tags).
All fields below this point are very seldom used.
You can now click ‘Approve’
While in progress, you can save the deposit as a draft and come back to it later. This will save all your metadata but will not be visible in Verso.
While it is best to be as thorough as possible, the only fields that are truly required by Esploro before depositing are unit affiliation, title, and date.
Researcher Deposits:
Researchers have the ability to deposit their own assets, but the assets still need to be approved before appearing in Verso. The amount of metadata that researchers provide varies greatly.
Some deposits are very thorough. Simply do your due diligence by finding the publication and double checking that everything is correct before hitting ‘approve.’
In many cases, they will be depositing entries from their CV and will include little more than a title and a date. If you are able to find the metadata through online sources, go ahead and fill out the remaining fields of the deposit. If you can’t find the publication and there is too little information (just a title and date), use your own discretion. There is nothing wrong with waiting to approve until finding the publication or further discussion is had.
Smart Harvest:
Esploro runs a smart harvest every day that pulls in publications from the Central Discovery Index. This index is owned by Ex Libris and pulls from thousands of publishers and repositories. Typically, it will pull in 10-20 assets per day.
With manual and researcher deposits you know for certain that a U of I researcher is associated with the asset. This is not always the case with smart harvests.
The harvester essentially finds matches by comparing publication authors to our list of affiliated researchers. The harvester will place assets into 1 of 4 categories, based on how confident it is in the author match (my accuracy estimate in parenthesis):
- Smart Harvesting – Asset Approval
Pending Approval (99%) - Smart Harvesting – Author Matching
Very Strong (95%)
Strong (85%)
Uncertain(15%)
The pending approval category will appear in a separate tab on your homepage. These are cases where Esploro is so confident that it found a match that it will automatically approve the author for you.
Very Strong and Strong are proper matches the vast majority of the time.
The uncertain category is typically full of researchers who have very common names (Jones, James, Garcia, Williams, Chen). It often contains assets where the authors are listed with initials rather than full names.
Regardless of the strength of the match, the approval process is the same for all categories.
The first thing to check is if the authors are a true match. It is necessary to do this for all strength categories – I do not recommend automatically approving any assets, even if they are Very Strong or auto-matched. If they don’t match, you can simply click ‘Delete asset and reject all matches.’
If the authors do match, there is a switch you can flip next to their name, in a column titled ‘Approve or Review.’ You must flip the switch for every matched author, otherwise the asset will not appear on their Verso page after approval.
The smart harvest is usually very good at filling out the rest of the metadata. Once the authors have been matched, simply check that the metadata is as thorough as possible before approving. Fill in any missing data that you can find.
One benefit of the smart harvester is that most of the assets it finds include DOI’s, which makes finding the assets very simple.
The most common errors the harvester makes are:
- Placing the article number in one of the page number fields.
- Not including the publisher.
- Not capitalizing journal titles.
- Adding unwanted text to the abstract.
- Abstract formatting.
If the authors match, you’ve flipped all the author switches, and the metadata looks good, go ahead and click ‘Approve Asset.’