Monitoring a national open access funder mandate

Comunicação apresentada na "11th International Conference on Open Repositories" (OR 2016), Dublin, Irlanda, 13 - 16 de junho de 2016.The definition of an Open Access funder mandate involves usually in a long process of advocacy but it’s only the first step of a broader process. This presentation focus on the implementation of the monitoring process of a funder open access policy with implication at national level. The practical implementation is based on some assumptions: using existing infrastructure and defined guidelines. This work presents the options taken to simplify the process of reporting to the researchers and the role of the existing infrastructure to support new challenges.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT

Worldwide open access: UK leadership?

The web is destined to become humankind's cognitive commons, where digital knowledge is jointly created and freely shared. The UK has been a leader in the global movement toward open access (OA) to research but recently its leadership has been derailed by the joint influence of the publishing industry lobby from without and well-intentioned but premature and unhelpful over-reaching from within the OA movement itself. The result has been the extremely counterproductive ‘Finch Report’ followed by a new draft of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) OA mandate, downgrading the role of cost-free OA self-archiving of research publications (‘green OA’) in favor of paying subscription publishers over and above subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, in exchange for making single articles OA (‘hybrid gold OA’). The motivation of the new policy is to reform publication and to gain certain re-use rights (CC-BY), but the likely effect would be researcher resistance, very little OA and a waste of research funds. There is still time to fix the RCUK mandate and restore the UK's leadership by taking a few very specific steps to clarify and strengthen the green component by adding a mechanism for monitoring and verifying compliance, with consequences for non-compliance, along lines also being adopted in the EC and the US

Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness

The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions' repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy. Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention; (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA.Comment: 49 pages, 21 figures, 15 tables. Pasteur4OA Work Package 3 report: Open Access policies 201

Implementing Open Access Policy: First case studies

When implementing open access, policy pioneers and flagship institutions alike have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving a recognized success. Legitimate authority, sufficient resources and the right timing are crucial, but the professionals charged with implementing policy still need several years to accomplish significant progress. This study defines a methodological standard for evaluating the first generation of open access policies. Evaluating implementation establishes evidence, enables reflection, and may foster the emergence of a second generation of open access policies. While the study is based on a small number of cases, these case studies cover most of the pioneer institutions, present the most significant issues and offer an international overview. Each case is reconstructed individually on the basis of public documents and background information, and supported by interviews with professionals responsible for open access implementation. This article presents the highlights from each case study. The results are utilized to indicate how a second generation of policies might define open access as a key component of digital research infrastructures that provide inputs and outputs for research, teaching and learning in real time.</p

Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button

We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 32 references. To appear in "Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online" (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.

Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button

We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access

JISC Final Report: IncReASe (Increasing Repository Content through Automation and Services)

The IncReASe (Increasing Repository Content through Automation and Services) was an eighteen month project (subsequently extended to twenty months) to enhance White Rose Research Online (WRRO)1. WRRO is a shared repository of research outputs (primarily publications) from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York; it runs on the EPrints open source repository platform. The repository was created in 2004 and had steady growth but, in common with many other similar repositories, had difficulty in achieving a “critical mass” of content and in becoming truly embedded within researchers’ workflows. The main aim of the IncReASe project was to assess ingestion routes into WRRO with a view to lowering barriers to deposit. We reviewed the feasibility of bulk import of pre-existing metadata and/or full-text research outputs, hoping this activity would have a positive knock-on effect on repository growth and embedding. Prior to the project, we had identified researchers’ reluctance to duplicate effort in metadata creation as a significant barrier to WRRO uptake; we investigated how WRRO might share data with internal and external IT systems. This work included a review of how WRRO, as an institutional based repository, might interact with the subject repository of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project addressed four main areas: (i) researcher behaviour: we investigated researcher awareness, motivation and workflow through a survey of archiving activity on the university web sites, a questionnaire and discussions with researchers (ii) bulk import: we imported data from local systems, including York’s submission data for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and developed an import plug-in for use with the arXiv2 repository (iii) interoperability: we looked at how WRRO might interact with university and departmental publication databases and ESRC’s repository. (iv) metadata: we assessed metadata issues raised by importing publication data from a variety of sources. A number of outputs from the project have been made available from the IncReASe project web site http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/increase/. The project highlighted the low levels of researcher awareness of WRRO - and of broader open access issues, including research funders’ deposit requirements. We designed some new publicity materials to start to address this. Departmental publication databases provided a useful jumping off point for advocacy and liaison; this activity was helpful in promoting awareness of WRRO. Bulk import proved time consuming – both in terms of adjusting EPrints plug-ins to incorporate different datasets and in the staff time required to improve publication metadata. A number of deposit scenarios were developed in the context of our work with ESRC; we concentrated on investigating how a local deposit of a research paper and attendant metadata in WRRO might be used to populate ESRC’s repository. This work improved our understanding of researcher workflows and of the SWORD protocol as a potential (if partial) solution to the single deposit, multiple destination model we wish to develop; we think the prospect of institutional repository / ESRC data sharing is now a step closer. IncReASe experienced some staff recruitment difficulties. It was also necessary to adapt the project to the changing IT landscape at the three partner institutions – in particular, the introduction of a centralised publication management system at the University of Leeds. Although these factors had some impact on deliverables, the aims and objectives of the project were largely achieved

What Is To Be Done About Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research? (Response to US OSTP RFI)

The minimum should be to mandate that: (i) the fundee’s revised, accepted refereed final draft (ii) of all refereed journal articles (including refereed conference articles) resulting from the funded research must be (iii) deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (iv) in the fundee’s institutional repository. (v) Access to the deposit must be made gratis OA (online access free for all) immediately (no OA embargo) wherever possible (over 60 % of journals already endorse immediate gratis OA self-archiving)

Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS

More than 60 delegates convened at the Rose Bowl in Leeds on 7 May 2010 for this event to explore the developing relationship and overlap between Open Access research repositories and so called 'CRISs' – Current Research Information Systems – that are increasingly being implemented at universities. The Welsh Repository Network (WRN) [1], a collaborative venture between the Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in Wales, funded by JISC, had clearly hit upon an engaging topic du jour. The event, jointly supported by JISC [2] and ARMA (Association of Research Managers and Administrators)[3], was fully booked within just five days of being announced. In the main, delegates were either research managers and administrators, or repository managers, and one of the themes that came up throughout the day was the need for greater communication between research offices and libraries (where repository services are often managed.) As well as JISC and ARMA, euroCRIS [4], a not-for- profit organisation that aims to be an internationally recognised point of reference for CRISs, was represented at the event. Delegates could also visit the software exhibition and speak with representatives of Atira, Symplectic Ltd and Thomson Reuters, among others

Monitoring Compliance with Open Access policies

In the last few years, academic communities have seen an increase in the number of Open Access (OA) policies being adopted at the institutional and funder levels. In parallel to policy implementation, institutions and funders have also been engaged in developing mechanisms to monitor academics and researchers compliance with the existing OA policies. This study highlights a few of the cases where compliance is being effectively monitored by institutions and funders. In the first section, Open Access is briefly overviewed and the rationale for monitoring OA policy compliance is explained. The second section looks at best practices in monitoring policy compliance with OA policies by funders and institutions. The case studies reflect on compliance with the UK Funding Councils and the USA National Institutes of Health OA policies. The third section makes recommendations on what processes and procedures universities and funders should adopt to monitor compliance with their OA policies. The final section recapitulates some of the key ideas related to monitoring policy compliance