RePol – Repository Policy Generator, an open-source web application developed in the framework of the NI4OS-Europe project, was presented at a webinar organized by EIFL on 17 February 2021. RePol has been developed by the University of Belgrade Computer Centre (RCUB) to facilitate the process of drafting repository policies.
While collecting data for the NI4OS-Europe landscape survey, it was possible to observe that a significant number of repositories from the partner countries were not registered with OpenDOAR and other registries and aggregators. The number of those lacking clear repository policies was even greater. In order to be considered trustworthy, a repository should have a transparent policy, informing users about the roles, responsibilities, rights and procedures aimed at ensuring that deposited data are preserved and disseminated in line with the FAIR principles. Policies are also required in the process of onboarding platforms and services into NI4OS-Europe, OpenAIRE and EOSC.
In RePol, policy documents are generated by filling out a web form: inputs and choices made by users trigger predefined sections of text and clauses to be added to the output document, which can be downloaded in a machine readable format and edited.
Keeping in mind that the gap bridged by RePol is not specific to the NI4OS-Europe partner countries, it was widely disseminated not only among the project partners, but also through the EIFL and CORE Ambassadors mailing lists. As a result, EIFL invited the development team to present RePol in a webinar.
The webinar took place on 17 February 2021. It was hosted by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Open Access Programme Manager, and it presented RePol and the service Shareyourpaper.org. Short presentations by the RCUB team (Branko Marović, Milica Ševkušić and Vasilije Rajović) were followed by an interesting Q&A session.
The first version of RePol was released late in 2020. Based on early testing results within the NI4OS-Europe community and feedback provided by EIFL, CORE, an updated version was prepared in February 2021. The development team is now collecting feedback from use cases from NI4OS-Europe partners.
RePol is licensed under the EUPL (European Union Public License, Version 1.2 or later, EUPL-1.2-or-later) and the source code is available on GitHub.
The recording is available online