60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peter Millington at Nottingham University's Centre for Research Communications has just published recent analysis of self-archiving policies of journals indexed by the Sherpa-ROMEO service.  An impressive, and myth-busting, 60% of journals allow immediate archiving of peer-reviewed articles, and after embargoes have lapsed, this rises dramatically, to 80%.  In all, taking into account special requirements by publishers and embargo periods that vary from 3 months to 5 years, 94% of journals do allow self-archiving of the peer-reviewed article.  All good news for those of us hitting the advocacy trail at the moment.

The full article can be found here on the Sherpa Services Blog.

Measuring uptake of Open Access - addendum

So, having completed searching for OA journals in DOAJ, I have been trying to decide on the best way to work through the remaining 2600 journal articles in my spreadsheet.  I have started by working through the known publishers and identifying which have an OA (Open Choice, or similar) option on their subscription journals to try and reduce the number of articles I have to check.  So having added a step to my initial workflow, I am back at it, trying to get to the end data.

Correction - my original starting number of articles is 2771, of which so far I have identified 131 as Open Access, so my original post stating 1700 items to check was somewhat optimistic.  Still, it's good that our researchers are producing so much, and I now have a list of 131 items to target for Queen Mary Research Online.  Silver linings anyone?

Defining and describing a research collection - part 1

I have been working with Corporate Affairs here at Queen Mary to integrate Research Publications into the College's stylesheet and template for the Research website.  It's been an interesting experience!  As part of a broader aim to provide a better range of information for researchers, both internally and externally, I've been asked to provide details of research collections and services for researchers within Library Services.  On the surface, this seems simple enough, think about each discipline, identify where there are particular 'strengths' for researchers and how this reflects current research, and bob's your uncle.  Right?

Wrong.

OK.  Let's break this down a bit...

How do you describe a 'research collection' as distinct from a 'teaching collection'?
What makes a research collection 'strong' or denotes 'quality'?
Is there a shopping list of texts, and other content, that constitute the basis of a good quality research collection in a given discipline?
Would this shopping list, if it existed, provide the minimum that would be required, across the whole discipline, and if so, what else would be needed to provide a truly quality collection?

Where do you begin to review a collection that you already own, to identify what is research relevant?
How do you decide between what is research relevant to your own researchers, and what is research relevant externally?
What happens to the parts of your collection that are not currently research relevant to your institution, but might be relevant externally, or might be relevant in the future?  Is this a good enough reason to keep this content, and if so, what opportunities are there for promoting this content to the outside world?

Perhaps the term 'collection' is the problem.  A collection is a group of materials.  That's it.  Just a group of materials.  As librarians, we assign all sorts of other criteria to these collections by tacking on other words to describe their content and how they behave.  This then changes the definition to meet our needs.  Add the terms, 'development' or 'management' to 'collection' and things can get really complicated.

Should a research collection be subject to the same development and management strategies that teaching collections are subject to?
Should a research collection grow over time, because somebody somewhere will need to access something at sometime?  Or should the research collection evolve, as teaching collections do, to reflect a change in need, discarding content no longer useful to the institution?  Would this still constitute collection development?

Who decides?

Lots of things to consider over the coming months, starting with that shopping list!

Measuring uptake of Open Access at QM

I am currently trying to put together all the relevant bits of data, and there are plenty, that will allow me to calculate what proportion of Queen Mary publications are Open Access (OA).  So far, the process has been time-consuming and not a lot of fun, but I feel like I am starting to make some progress.  Please someone out there doing a similar job to me, is there a better way?

The plan:

• Extract a report from PubLists, the publications management system at QM - this gives me a recently updated and reasonably complete set of data (thank you REF dry-run!)
• Identify OA publishers where all journals are OA and flag all the records in my spreadsheet
• Identify OA journals by publishers whose other titles are subscription - judicious use of DOAJ very important here - flag more records
• Filter my spreadsheet to show only those records where I haven't identified them as OA and then start working through the remaining records to find out if they are OA papers in a hybrid journal
• Calculate the number of paid OA/OA published papers in 2010
• Check through the remaining records for self-archived copies in QMRO
• Start calculating how many of the 1700 records are available OA somewhere

I am still identifying OA journals at the moment and have spent 2 days working on it so far.  I was hopnig to have it finished by the end of the week, but this seems to be less and less likely.  The sheer size of the task is quite daunting, and I am only concentrating on 2010 for now, as the most recent full calendar year, but I'd like to be able to do this in a more systematic and timely way...

Initial thoughts about how to make this simpler:

1. Please, please, please could I have an extract from DOAJ that would make the process of identifying OA journals much easier
2. Please, please, please hybrid journal publishers, provide me with a report of my OA content, download and other usage statistics would be lovely, but at the very least I need to know what there is!

QMRO reaches 1000 items!

Some milestones come around much quicker than you expect!  Since April 2010, 1122 items have been approved and are now available in the repository to view and use.  The majority of this content at the moment is etheses, but we'll be working to get more content from academic staff submitted in the future.

Major thanks for the Electronic Services team in Library Services for all their hard work adding and uploading, and performing the essential QA on all these items.

Queen Mary Research Online - live at last

I am very pleased to announce that Queen Mary Research Online (QMRO), the open access institutional repository of research outputs, is now fully live and publicly accessible.  

This first public release is the initial fully working version and will require further development; but all the basic functionality (search, browse; by date, author, title) should be there.  We'll also be developing a strategy for ways to reuse the deposited content in our research publications systems (providing links to content with bundled bibliographic data to departments for example) and trying to tie these in more closely with broader research information around the College.  Watch this space.

For anyone not aware of the survey currently running on use of the repository and PubLists; we are asking for feedback on methods of deposit to QMRO from members of academic and research staff, and research administrators/managers.  If you haven't completed the survey yet, please do, we would really like to hear your views:

https://surveys.qmul.ac.uk/qmro

REF 2014 Research Impact Weighting announced

The Research funding councils have today announced the weightings that published research will have on the overall 'quality profile' for REF 2014.

The weightings are as follows:

• research outputs - 65 per cent
• impact - 20 per cent (increasing in subsequent REFs)
• environment - 15 per cent

This is the first time that the positive impact of a piece of research will be assessed.  The elements and their weightings will apply to all units of assessment.  The formal announcement is here (HEFCE)

An update on progress

So, it's been a while since I posted to this blog.  In that time we must have made some progress on the Publications System and QMRO right?

Well, yes and no.

Here's a little update

Publications:
PubLists has been upgraded to version 3.6 of Symplectic Elements.  This has been scheduled for a while and seems to have gone pretty smoothly.  Thanks to my ever diligent colleague in IT Services for making it happen.  New features in version 3.6 should make the battle with verification a little easier, as well as helping us get at the information we really want.

The Publications website, now re-christened (again) as Research Publications has finally been approved and is now awaiting launch.  Launch of the website is tied very closely to developments and fixes still required for the repository, more on this below.  It's looking really good, and fits in very nicely with the College's apparent move to streamline and link information held in various places to central systems.  Get us!

Repository:
QMRO content is growing apace and we are really pleased with uptake.  There are currently nearly 850 items somewhere in the repository (no, we haven't lost them!), mostly either live in the archive or waiting for attention by repository staff in the workflow.  We're also concentrating some effort on the eThesis collection, getting up-to-date with this for 2009-10 in a bid to catch up with ourselves.

And so, the difficult bit... when will QMRO finally go public?  Well, the same bugs that have been causing the delay to launch up to now are still plaguing us.  With some time allocated to fixing this both by IT and Symplectic people we hope to have to finally sorted out by the end of February, but as with all previous 'forecasts' this comes with the proviso that we're able to get some resource to identify and fix the problem.

In other news, we've just taken out a consultancy contract with @Mire, who are specialists in DSpace and will therefore be helping us to turn it into the all-singing all-dancing repository that I had envisaged!  More on this when we get the development under way.

Lastly, an upgrade of the DSpace software to version 1.6.2 is scheduled for completion by end of February, so it's going to be a busy month on the repository.  Again, more on this when the dates are finalised...

Keep watching