Open Access Suite

2013 - 2017｜ UX lead and acting project manager

My role

The project utilized and optimized open source platforms, and a large portion of my contribution to Open Access Suite was on the definition, scoping, policy setting, and user understanding. 

My roles included: 

  • Project founding and definition 

  • Proposed the virtuous cycle and project milestones

  • Participated scoping discussions with the leadership 

  • Conducted foundational and tactical user research 

  • Co-authored Peking University Open Access Policy 

  • Created wireframes and hi-fi mockups for services 

  • Worked with in-house engineers on implementation

The problem

Knowledge exchange and sharing is the foundation of academia. How does it work? In short, the cost of knowledge is extremely high. Despite the library spending millions of dollars per year to purchase access to journals and databases and offer many user training sessions, still:

  • Scholars and students couldn’t find the research materials they need (accounting for 60% of helpdesk inquiries), mostly due to restricted licenses and closed access

  • Authors didn’t have a consistent and reliable way to store, track or share their own research output or have an Internet presence easily

Project goal

Explore and establish a holistic set of solutions that adheres to Open Access initiative* to store, share and exchange all academic outputs in Peking University

* Open access (OA) is a set of principles and practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers, to counter the monopoly of journal publishers and information inequity. Peking University aimed to be the pioneer in China.

My approach

  • Conduct foundational research to define user types, user needs and core values

  • Design for top user needs and organizational expectations

  • Design additional solutions to meet diverse users needs across the spectrum & add more values

Understand the problem space

Foundational research

Working closely with the leadership, I advocated a user-centered approach and conducted a series of research to align the team on a shared understanding on the problem space:

  • 5 stakeholder interviews

  • 8 contextual inquiries on data access & sharing needs

  • Competitive analysis on 20+ world’s top universities’ Open Access experience

  • Survey on data management needs

Types of users

Meeting stakeholder expectations

The library and the university leadership are the sponsors of the project. I did a few contextual inquiries to probe into their expectations

  • Reduce cost on purchases and user training

  • Secure data in long term

  • Create values for users via new library services  

  • Gain insight into operational and performance management

  • Demonstrate influence & improve public image

Core values: virtuous cycle

A great debut is not enough. It needs sustained momentum. Guided by user needs and concerns, I proposed “virtuous cycle” core value as the input for strategic decisions and milestones. 

Milestones

Design the backbone MVP

The backbone: Institutional repository (IR)

The backbone of Open Access is research paper storage & access. It’s the engine for the virtuous cycle. 

Institutional Repository is a central place to store, manage and retrieve research papers published by scholars. 

Key IR use cases

Manage with ease and get values

  • Submit & manage papers

  • Track citations & impact

  • Create a basic profile page

Find information free & easy

  • Search for research papers with advanced options

  • Understand a subject matter

  • See scholars at a glance

The IR design

#1 Manage with ease and get values

Support research paper management cycle needs. Track citations & impact & create a basic profile page

upload and publish papers

Provide different ways for authors to upload their works and related metadata

track citations & impact

Check the impact factor and citation status of the papers at any time

create a basic profile page

Help scholars create basic online presence Scholars can also view and manager their papers directly from their own profile page

#2 Find information free & easy

Find paper, subject matter & scholars

Search for papers

Search for keywords with advanced options 

See scholars at a glance

Go to the scholar’s profile page to see scholars’ basic info as well as all of their research papers in the repository as well as relevant scholars

Know more about a subject matter

View by topics/conferences or other metadata to see all related papers View popular research papers by department

Lower the adoption barrier

Too much upfront investment required from contributors.

  • User needs large amount of data to see value and truly use it

  • Uploading large amount of existing papers from past decades is a huge effort in addition to their busy work

Solution: augment their work, not create new ones

Claim your paper

Leave the heavy lifting to a special task force that acquires all existing papers and stores them in IR privately. Name-matching records in the IR, asking scholars to claim the ownership of papers and make them public

Delegated access

A new user type “Research Assistant” (usually their students) to claim, upload and manage research papers on their behalf

Impact of IR

The release of IR was met with critical acclamation from the university community and it also extended to the entire academia.

301K

Papers

301K open access paper published

20+

Repository

UX & system adopted by 20+ IRs later

Honor

Award

2016 Honorary award from University 

Create a suite

Open data platform

Open data refers to data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone. Many research teams were looking for better ways to find, use, manage and share data. 

Open data platform, as part of the Open Access initiative, provides solution for storage, management, publishing and retrieval of research data.

Additional user research

  • Manage data - safely store the data in long term

    Share data - increase visibility, citation & value of research data

  • Consumers

    Access data - find data quickly and precisely without length applications

    Reuse & re-distribute data - easily download, reuse & cite data

The open data platform design

Impact of Open data platform

Open data platform sees sustained usage from all types of users - contributors, researchers, and students. 

1.2M

Downloads

1.2M accumulated data downloads

350+

Datasets

Original datasets provided by research teams

103

Teams

103 research teams (dataverse) joined

Scholar hub

Problem

Scholars across the globe create online presences to showcase research activities, and to create connections with peers and prospective students. But the tech-savviness required poses high barriers to many scholars, especially for those in liberal arts. 

Goal

Scholars hub (Scholars @ Peking University) aims to create a tailored, easy-to-use, open, and reliable platform for scholars to create their own online presence. 

Scholar hub was based on Open Scholar, an open-source platform. My work was mostly on homepage redesign, flow optimization, and template localization.

Key use cases

  • Publish profile and bio

  • Display research & class activity

  • Link to publications and data

  • Track the influence

Impact of scholar hub

Scholar hub was widely adopted faculty members and students for aforementioned use cases, and is still being actively used as of today (11/2022). 

35%

Scholar presence

35% of faculty members have create a personal hub

36K

Pages & messages

11k files uploaded and 26k messages