UK PubMed Central to become Europe PubMed Central - what you need to know

Day 5 of International Open Access Week 2012 is upon us, where has the week gone?  In the final of my blog posts about more general areas of the Open Access landscape in 2012, a little update on the changes to UKPMC coming soon.

For those in the Medical or Life Sciences, and those in the Humanities with a foot in one of these camps, PubMed Central (PMC), and in recent years UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), have become familiar entities.

Initially set up as a place where National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded researchers in the USA would be required to deposit research outputs.  It has expanded in recent times, with the advent of UKPMC for UK researchers with Wellcome Trust funding, to take in research outputs from a much broader cross-section of the research landscape; this is partly as a result of the emphasis on inter-displinary research, meaning that there are lots of research outputs out there with a relevance to a much wider community as a whole.

This is set to change again from 1st November 2012, with the re-naming of UKPMC to Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC).  This change comes in response to updated open access policies by the European Research Council, and its decision to use Europe PMC and ArXiv are its recommended repositories for the resultant research outputs.

So, newly funded projects from ERC, and I guess those already underway, now have a slightly second-hand, dusted off and renamed, Europe PubMed Central repository into which to deposit these outputs.  Most researchers already depositing, or having deposited on their behalf, outputs from their funding to UKPMC, won't notice much difference in the way that they interact with EPMC.  UKPMC+ accounts for depositing papers remain the same, but the relevant URLs to which you'll need to go will change from 1st November.

Europe PMC becomes http://europepmc.org
Europe PMC Plus (for depositing content) becomes http://plus.europepmc.org

QM Researchers - did you know that not all publishers deposit your output into UKPMC for you unless you have paid the OA article processing charge?  Some publishers deposit on your behalf, the accepted version of the paper, and others the published version.  But in a few cases, you have to do this yourself, and it's not always obvious that this is the case.  So, if you are funded by Wellcome Trust or ERC, and want to be absolutely sure you are compliant with your funding, drop us an email and we'll be happy to help.

Queen Mary Research Online staff can help with compliance questions, as well as any Liaison Librarian (or me of course):

qmro@qmul.ac.uk

or check out other contacts via the Library website

www.library.qmul.ac.uk/subject
www.library.qmul.ac.uk/openaccess

Open Access & the RCUK

Day 2 of International Open Access Week, and today is a focus on new RCUK policy being introduced from April 2013.

I attended an event at Birkbeck, University of London yesterday, at which Ben Ryan from EPSRC spoke about the new RCUK Open Access Policy, and how this will work from April 2013.  Below is my interpretation of what he said, my understanding of the policy and my personal response to these changes.

Background
RCUK announced its new Open Access policy in July 2012, with some headline changes that affect every RCUK-funded researcher.  The main changes/additions were:

• Migration of funding for open access publishing from individual grants to PIs to a block grant awarded to institutions to be held in a central Publications Fund 
• Requirement that all research papers published via the paid model (Gold), be licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY (thereby allowing re-use, including for commercial purposes, text mining, etc.)
• Requirement that all research papers self-archived under the green route, be licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC at the very least and be openly accessible no later than 6 months after publication (12 months for AHRC and ESRC-funded research papers in the short-term)
• Open access policy now applies to doctoral students funded through RCUK programmes
• A requirement that research data, generated as part of the project, be registered and accessible wherever possible

RCUK have had an open access policy, with variations on requirements between each council, for a number of years.  These changes are intended to streamline the policy across all councils thereby achieving a better and broader uptake of open access initiatives within the UK.  Much of the policy was written in tandem with the Finch report recommendations, and therefore expresses a preference for paid rather than self-archived open access routes.  Regardless of the response to Finch (don't get me started), and the focus on Gold (again, don't go there), the intention is still that a greater number of papers are openly accessible to all.  For RCUK, even taking into account their preference for gold, either route is acceptable, with the onus placed on authors and their institutions to make decisions as appropriate on a paper by paper basis.  Good luck managing all that workload (oh yes, that'll be my job...).

What does this mean for QM Library and Researchers, and other UK institutions?

So far agreement has been reached at QM that the Library will 'look after' the block grant, as well as the  Wellcome OA grant (more on this tomorrow), in addition to our allocation of OA credit with Royal Society of Chemistry, institutional memberships (PLoS) and those under consideration.  With this, and the need to communicate not only the changes coming into effect, but how this applies to researchers, and what services are available to support this, investment of time and staffing resource by the Library and Research Office will be required to engage with PIs and research project groups to find out what needs to be done.  To achieve this:

• Efforts to engage with PIs to raise awareness of the changes will need to be stepped up
• The setting up of a Publications Fund will need to be dealt with - a new thing for us - and communication to PIs about how to access it and when (see next point) arranged
• Correspondence between PIs and the Library will need to be set up to ensure that papers are known about at the point when they are being prepared for submission
• Better communication between the Library and PIs will be required to ensure authors know which titles in their discipline are compliant and they know who to ask if they are not sure
• We will need to consider how best to apportion block grants to funded projects (if apportioned at all)
• We will need to work with PIs and the Research Office during the grant application process to enable researchers to be data and OA compliant - and where to get help
• We will need to provide training and guidance for new researchers
• We will need to provide training for doctoral students  
• Better monitoring of uptake and compliance within institutions and by RCUK will need to be put in place, follow up where there is consistent failure to comply be scaled up, and mechanisms for managing monitoring be extended

Do the benefits really outweigh the effort and the complexities that this will introduce?

Yes.

Setting aside the above; the need for more transparency in the way that OA charges are calculated; the willingness of researchers to make time and invest effort to get on board and understand what is being asked of them; the need for publishers to accept that they are going to take a hit to their business models and profits; the fact that learned societies haven't been considered carefully enough; that this only applies to journal articles in peer reviewed titles (and there is a whole other publishing world out there to consider); and the serious risk of failing to comply on some level at some stage - even inadvertently, the ultimate aim of these and other changes is that more publicly-funded research output be free at the point of use.

OA advocates always knew that the path to full Libre Open Access would be a difficult one, and that there were an awful lot of people to be convinced.  However, open access is now on some of the most influential agendas, not just in the UK but globally, and whilst we might not fully agree with the methods being introduced, the pace at which change is occurring, or the way that this change is manifested in policy and governance, as long as we remain engaged with these authorities and identify, lobby and are vocal about where these failings arise, we still are in a better position than a decade ago, we just have more work to do.

Why holding Open Access Week during REF dry-run is a good thing

This week is International Open Access Week, a time when OA advocates focus their efforts on the open access initiative and raising awareness of the benefits to a global audience.  This month is also REF dry-run for many UK institutions, it certainly is at QM.  In the last couple of years, the two have been almost impossible to reconcile, with the result that OA Week activities have floundered in the face of 'I'm too busy with REF dry-run to worry about it' rebuffs.

But, this is something that vexes me considerably.  REF dry-run is the time when researchers are asked to focus on the outputs and outcomes from their research, a time when they are actively encouraged to take stock of what they have produced, to 'take a breather' as it were from the job of actually doing the research to review the work that has gone before.  To select the best examples of their work to be submitted for assessment, on which their, and the institutions, future funding might rest.  In this sense, dry-run is the perfect time to be talking about Open Access, and working with (not providing more work for) researchers to enable them to get their OA compliance in order; do a little housekeeping to make sure that as much of their output is freely accessible as possible; reinforce and remind researchers of how different the landscape can and will be in the future; and perhaps provide some of those statistics on downloads we sometimes hold hostage.

This year's OA Week theme for me is compliance, and is pretty high on a lot of agendas.  So, with a rolling programme of blogposts on all sorts of OA-related things, I am also going to be doing some hard hitting feedback to academics.  Your compliance is the key to your future funding, that kind of thing.

Tomorrow sees the start of my Top of the QMRO Pops countdown.  Tune in tomorrow and the rest of the week to find out who has:
The most papers OA
The most downloads
Top 10 downloaded papers
School with the most downloaded papers
School with the most archived papers.

Hopefully, a few more researchers will become 'switched on' to the requirements placed on them, the help that's available, and that, with a little investment of time at the start, OA can pay huge dividends later on.

Happy Open Access Week, one and all!

Open Access - Keeping the Big Picture in View

I've been thinking a lot of late about the Open Access movement, as I imagine many of my repository manager colleagues, researchers and research managers have.  The movement seems to have been hijacked recently by the triumvirate of Finch, RCUK and Wellcome.  So much of what these groups are trying to do is valid and valuable, but consistently only covers the very specific area of academic publishing that is journal publishing, and is therefore myopic when it comes to the true meaning of open research.

It would be too easy here to get lost down the rabbit-hole that is academic journal publishing and open access, but I actually want to think for a while about non-journal publishing.

Whilst it's true that most researchers publish some of their research output, to a greater or lesser extent, in academic journals, there is a wealth of scholarly knowledge out there that will never see the journal editor's desk.

Data (yes there is a lot of work in this area at the moment), software,  video recordings, audio recordings, images, webpages, blog posts, media interviews, collaborations, areas of expertise, and not forgetting the books, chapters, monographs, reports, working papers, etc. that make up the breadth of scholarly output generated by researchers.  Research funding bodies only talk in terms of the journal articles that may constitute part of the researchers complement of materials from any research project, perhaps with a bit of research data curation thrown in for good measure.  To lose sight of the full complement of scholarly output and the work of researchers does us no favours in advocating for a more open research environment, fixation with peer-reviewed output and metrics is not good research.  Perhaps what is really needed here is that institutionally we take a broader approach to supporting open scholarship, by providing support and mechanisms to perform, manage and disseminate that research, not just through provision of institutional repositories and research information systems but also through hosting of blogs and services to enable dissemination, hosting webpages that have the proper mechanisms for preservation through centralised provision, and endeavouring to provide that 'connectedness' that will enable researchers to point to projects to point to output to point to public engagement to point to impact...

Yet, even this does not go far enough in my mind.  What we really need, and what chimed so much in Cameron Neylon's keynote address at the recent OR2012 conference, was that connectedness taken further to engage not just researchers and research systems, but private individuals alike; that harnessing the power of the collective mind can fully realise the open research agenda and increase the rate of discovery.  But where to begin...

So, whilst we get bogged down attempting to understand that latest round of policy statements and changes, and how this impacts on our day-to-day tasks of engaging researchers with open access, I try keep in mind that it isn't just the selected best samples of that research that we are trying to gain greater access to, but the full, untidy, unedited, mass of the research in all its forms that we are aiming to share more widely, and for that we need more than OA policies from funding bodies, we need hearts and minds of researchers.

Open Repositories 2012 - highlights and take aways

One of the many things I always find when attending repository community events is the repository envy that usually accompanies it.  OR2012 was no exception.  My lovely, still pretty new, DSpace repository is as close to out-of-the-box as it's possible to be, with only a few minor tweaks.  This was partially intentional, with IT colleagues stretched and managing big systems needing time and resource, an open source repository (and its slightly unflattering interface in particular) is more than they can handle at the moment.  This is something I try to accept with the knowledge that most people find their way to content in the repository via Google or some other search engine, or via a harvester, so they're unlikely to see the homepage or care what the stylesheet looks like, ever.

What I did find this time though was my content envy kicking in (too many in this rather long post, but more to follow in due course).  Not just in terms of the quantity of content, but the types and diversity of content that some repositories (or digital libraries/commons') contained.  There is scope here for QM, with rare collections and Archives still only partially digitised, we have lots of potential to expand the type and quantity of our digital collections if we can find the time and resource for digitisation... but before I get lost down the 'if-only' rabbit hole, a quick look at some of the technological things that really stuck with me and some musings on how they might be useful.

Page turner plug-in

Embedded players for audio and video content have always been high on my agenda for our repository (should we ever be presented with with audio or video content I want to be prepared), but the page turner plug-in which made a fleeting appearance in Eric Robert James' (Yale University) presentation at RF6 - Lessons Learned, was really interesting and posed an opportunity for those with technical brains.  Is there potential not just to allow page turning within the repository interface, but also to embed this as a viewer within other webpages (such as publications lists) to enable viewers to go straight into reading the paper rather than having to follow the link to the repository and then download the file.  What impact would this have on viewing/download stats?  Does this also fit into the idea of the invisible repository that I have heard mention of during the course of the conference and attributed to William Nixon?

Metrics

One thing that many repository managers tell me is that they find researchers will be more engaged if they can get hold of use metrics, mentions, etc. of their work, once it has been made open access.  We've been making lots of efforts at QM to get our usage statistics in a row and get them out there for researchers to see, and I have also been following the discussion around Altmetric with interest and some ideas for implementation not just onto the repository but elsewhere where the content is exposed within the institution.

There was a positive and far-reaching response to Melissa Terras' recent blogging and tweeting at QM, with researchers wanting to both find out 'how she did it' and also wanting to get in on the act. If there's one thing that researchers will respond to it's another researcher demonstrating how successful a new innovation can be.  One of the many issues researchers identify as barriers to open access uptake is the loss of control over where their research is posted and downloaded from.  This isn't purely control of access to content and ideas (all tied up with concerns about copyright and plagiarism), but also about concerns over dilution of impact if the content is dispersed over a wide variety of sources.  As repository managers we have a responsibility to help researchers to find out not only where their content has been downloaded from, but also where it is being mentioned and how often.  Metrics have been on the agenda for a long time, with PIRUS and PIRUS2 looking to create article level metrics for institutional repository content, failing to get publisher buy-in (really, you do surprise me) and therefore going forward with IRUS - now part of the UK Repository Net+ initiative.  So there is still an enthusiasm for being able to deliver this information, and opportunities for repository managers and researchers to feed into these initiatives exactly what they would like them to be able to do.

eThesis submission with Sword 2.0

Managing submission of eTheses to institutional repositories was the focus of the project presented by Kristian Roberto Salcedo and Richard Jones for SWORDv2 solution for Norwegian master's thesis submission portal.  At QM we rely heavily on our colleagues in the Research Degrees Office to supply us with the finalised copies of the ethesis and then manually upload and create metadata for it.  Managing this process, allowing for the file to uploaded with minimal metadata by the student would make this much simpler but there is resistance here due to concerns over security and the need to manage embargo and sensitive data precautions.  Combined with better curation task management (see below) and bitstream embargo management (again below), this could be improved considerably.  The particular element to the Norwegian initiative that interested me was connecting the repository to the national student portal allowing students to submit their thesis in its varying iterations both prior to and post examination before finally making the thesis available when appropriate.  A fascinating piece of work both technically, and in terms of future policy making.

Curation tasks and bitstream management

Lots of us out there would like to be able to do more curation of the content that we have, deciding what is accessible, what metadata can be harvested, batch control and tidying of records...  It's a pretty lengthy list.  DSpace certainly doesn't have the full range of curation functionality that I personally would like, and implementing simple functions like management of embargoes and managing individual bitstream embargoes is difficult and bitty, in some cases it is impossible.  Batch management and tidying of metadata is already available for technical brains, but the expertise in the quality control rarely lies with technical heads and more likely rests with us repository managers (yes, many of us are Librarians and that's what we do best).  I was therefore encouraged to see a while back a tool developed by @Mire providing batch metadata management as an add-on to the user interface.    But there still seemed to be lacking the concept of managing multiple variations in embargo for file bitstreams associated with the same record, or that those multiple bitstream statuses could need to change over time.

All hail therefore two pieces of work presented at OR2012 that together could resolve these curation task issues.  The first was a presentation by Yanan Zhao, Kim Shepherd, Yin Yin Latt, S. Leonie Hayes facilitated by Elin Stangeland (University of Cambridge) from Auckland University, 'Curation Tasks for Repository Managers : Staying in the Light and have a Dark Side', demonstrating curation tools for managing the visibility and harvesting of individual bitstreams from within the admin interface to allow three statuses: Accessible, Accessible on campus only, Not accessible, and allowing these statuses to not only relate to specific bitstreams, but to be changed over time.  Some really impressive work and something I'd definitely like to look into further.

The second piece of work actually formed a much larger piece that was very impressive and has many features that would be of real interest down the line, but it was this specific part that interested me.    Marc Goovaerts presented on the 'AgriOcean DSpace' a 'Customized version of DSpace for agricultural and aquatic networks in parallel with developments at Hasselt University'.  This customised version allowed bitstream level setting of embargoes, something that would seriously improve the curation and management of content.  Unfortunately, in order to develop many of the functions now available within their AgriOcean DSpace (AOD) they can to hard code a lot of the these changes, meaning that they are not easily made shareable (drat!).  

What was really reassuring with all of these technical enhancements was that, DSpace is truly alive and kicking out there and people are doing some really exciting things with it, we just need to find ways for those things to become usable by others in the community (a topic for another post I think).

Open Repositories 2012 - Crowdvine, serial tweeting and the app deluge

So, still wrangling the notes from the various sessions I attended, and some of the ideas and projects I saw demonstrated, I thought I'd start with the technology.

OR2012 introduced Crowdvine and live blogging into the mix for this OR Conference, both of which are new to me, with no time beforehand to investigate the technology and familiarise myself with the interface I didn't really come to these until late in the conference - Thursday I think.  Luckily, Crowdvine turned out to be really easy to use, really easy to navigate, perhaps too easy... since I immediately posted a new discussion thread  - Highlights and things you're going to take home

Throughout the event, social media has played a significant role in allowing delegates, both physical and virtual, to keep track of the interesting things going on in parallel sessions, point to innovations of interest or things to highlight (oh and poke fun at each other but that's another post altogether).  A little competition is really healthy, and no more so than when some bright spark (@WilliamJNixon I believe) starts a Tweetpository and starts tracking the output of conference tweeters!  Finding out who had the most tweets for the event was no great surprise (@MrNick) but it was fun to find out how many serial tweeters are out there, and interesting to discover just how ubiquitous social media has become, oh and that I am not so serial a tweeter as I first thought having not made it onto the OR2012 Wordle.

The liveblogging was perhaps one innovation too far for me on this occasion, but it is something I'm open to and it was very entertaining to read the live blogs by colleagues in parallel sessions and find out what you've been missing.  Managing my tweeting and note-taking whilst still remembering to listen to the sessions was hard enough without the added stress of trying to live blog my random ramblings.  This is something to consider for next time though as it was a dynamic, if somewhat stream of consciousness style of note-taking.  Well done to those that did it, great effort.

This all reminds me that I am seriously behind in learning about new web-based technologies.  With so many developments and so much to learn it's hard to stay an 'early adopter', something I have always been proud to consider myself.  Unfortunately, with so many technologies and the plethora of apps and services out there now, we're not so much at risk of a data deluge as an app deluge...

But, the things I did successfully take up?  Taking my notes using Evernote.  This was actually a really good experience, with my notes syncing between laptop and iPad to make keeping everything together really easy; the ability to group notes together into a notebook, already organised by date, is making the process of pulling together notes, links and other 'stuff' from my week in Edinburgh really simple - though nothing has made it easy to digest all the things I heard about and thought about into things to talk about with my colleagues!  Formatting, bulletpoint-making and numbering your notes on the fly might not get many people excited, but I was one very happy lady on Monday morning when everything was ready and waiting to be exported.

I think I only scribbled down 1 page of handwritten notes the whole week - on the first day when coordinating my technology with my suitcase and other baggage was one step too far!!!  I'd had a 4am start - that's my excuse.

Open Repositories 2012

So, it's Open Repositories conference time again, and this year I actually managed to get here!  In previous years I have either been too late to apply, on maternity leave, or just unable to fit it into the mad schedule.

This year's conference is being held at University of Edinburgh, a favourite city for me, and with a packed programme looks to be a really good event.  I'll be tweeting from my attendance at various workshops, follow me @moragm23

First up today is an afternoon of Research Data Management with the DCC.

Research Data Management

Queen Mary IT Services, in partnership with colleagues from the Library (me), Records Management Office, academic representatives and senior management have been working together to draft a new, improved, centralised policy on research data collection, management and curation.  The big buzz-phrase of the moment for any research institution funded by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), and indeed any research institution with RCUK (Research Councils UK) or charitable funding that includes a policy on research data is of course... 'Research Data Management'.

No surprise that there are a number of JISC-funded RDM strand projects underway or recently completed then.  See here.

An draft policy for Queen Mary is now available on the DCC website.  With thanks to the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Glasgow and Warwick for inspiration when formulating the policy.  And a personal thanks to IT Services for inviting the Library to be a part of this very important piece of work, and recognising the skills available from Library types to help get this up and running.

But having a policy is only the first step.  Helping researchers to understand their responsibilities, and how to comply with them, indeed providing/enhancing the kind of centralised infrastructure and mechanisms to support these responsibilities is something else entirely, and the focus of further work in the coming months and years.  Just thinking about the potential size of some data makes my head hurt (how much is a terabyte again?).

However, as Kevin G Ashley (DCC) recently pointed out at the Institutional Repository Manager's Workshop at Senate House, University of London (15th June 2012); 'not all data should find a home in your institutional repository' - which is a relief not only to repository manager types like myself, but to technical types who have to provide the networking and infrastructure to support such storage in the long term.  The thing that is really getting the IT people here hot under the collar?  Not the size of the data as you might expect (though this is a significant concern) - it's the length of time that access to that data has to be accessible.  10 years from the last date it was accessed in reality could be 'perpetuity' by another name and that's no small task when your data store grows with every project.

So, to prepare myself for the inevitable talk about research data - I have started to investigate some of the services of interest to the project board, and a few of my own:

DataFlow and DataStage
DSpace - our IR and looking likely to be the institutional data repository platform
DataCite
FigShare


In fact, if it has the word 'data' somewhere in the name - I'm quite interested in it at the moment!

Half in, half out

Going slightly off the topic of Open Access and other research support related activities today and thinking about the work environment for those of us in support roles.

A while ago, I made a pact to only produce reports in electronic form, and not print them for anyone, just send them the files.  I also had a plan to try and reduce the amount of paper written notes I produce, that just get transcribed into electronic notes later on.

Why?  With one eye on the environment, and another on more easily accessing the information I need, whilst also reducing the amount of time I spend 'creating' notes from notes I have already created, it seems like the only way to go.

Weirdly, I find myself 'half in, half out' of the migration to digital.. I purchased a new set of notebooks yesterday.  There's nothing quite like paper notebooks, somehow my thoughts and ideas don't flow so easily in an electronic world.  My handwriting is certainly faster and more accurate than my typing!  It's more than this though.  With the need to move from meeting to meeting, or from training event and back to my desk, I'm not  really provided with the tools to be able to rove from one location to another and take my work life with me.  I'm not the only one, so it's not a personal thing, but it is slightly frustrating and something I am trying to change for the team I work in at present.

I have just had a peruse of my desk at work:

• Work issued computer
• Personal iPad (I wish I had a work issued one but there you go) with Mac wireless keyboard
• In-tray (overflowing with stuff I am already working on)
• 3 notebooks for the different parts of my role
• Leather bound personal/professional diary (it's posh, and I can't seem to live without it, my iPhone calendar just doesn't seem the same)
• RLUK strategic plan 2011 (passed to me by a colleague a copy of which also currently on my iPad)
• Post-its - a dead giveaway that I haven't entirely relinquished the paper world yet

File boxes, and lots of them fill my shelves, probably largely stuff that could be scanned and disposed of by now, and not replaced by new paper versions.  I do however find it difficult not to print lengthy reports for ease of transport and reading at my leisure, although I am getting better at doing this with my iPad when I am on the move.

So, back to open access.  If I find it hard to migrate to a more digital environment, how exactly do I expect my researcher colleagues to be any more successful in order to fulfill their open access obligations on research data?  Hmm, food for thought.

Implementing the Communication Strategy for PubLists and QMRO Series - part 1 - Speaking engagements

So, to start the ball rolling on this series looking at the different communication methods I will be using during this implementation project, I thought I'd talk a bit about speaking engagements.

I don't think anyone has ever accused me of being short of a word or three.  When considering what to say during these all-important speaking engagements, this can be both a blessing and a curse!  Whilst the fear of speaking before large groups has long since subsided, knowing what to say, and when to keep schtum has always been a difficult one for me.  I also find it difficult to navigate the fine line between 'formally informal' and just downright 'chatty'.

I recently spoke at two different 'events', one of which was a strategy group meeting, whilst the other was a larger research centre staff meeting.

The Research Centre meeting was an invitation to 'talk about open access' in 15 minutes.  Note the 'invitation, not a begging of time slots by me, but someone actually asking me if I could come and speak (could I ever!).  The staff attending this meeting were researchers in the main, so a really good opportunity to get my message across.  I therefore limited myself to the following four topics that I knew would be high on the agenda, and kept it quite informal, whilst I did use a presentation, I mostly spoke without notes (which I prefer anyway) and kept the slides to the minimum:

Benefits of open access (wider exposure is a good thing!)
The green route (you don't have to pay lots to do it!)
Copyright compliance (we check everything before we make it available)
Method of deposit (it's quick and easy)

For a first foray into speaking about open access at a research centre meeting, it actually went really well.  It was a post-lunchtime slot (not the best time to get everyone awake) and there was one person who basically sat and smirked the whole way through - which I prefer to imagine was due to the rather delicious luncheon they had partaken of before coming rather than any personal sleight on my presence at the meeting - otherwise, the audience seemed responsive, interested by the self-archiving option, and whilst nobody leapt up and volunteered to be the first one to become 100% OA, I left hopeful of some new uploads to the repository within a few days.

OK, so how naive am I?  Zilch.

The other event was a strategy meeting for faculty and was investigating the necessary information to put together a faculty-wide policy on open access.  This was an interesting opportunity to test my understanding of OA and research funding T&Cs, and also to get some useful ideas on where information is lacking on our webpages and in the literature we produce.  I have to say, I did feel like I'd been grilled quite thoroughly when I'd finished, and there were lots of questions that I needed to go away and find the answers to, but this was all good work that has helped the policy to be drawn up and for us to have started on a pilot implementation plan.

This second meeting has actually turned into a much bigger piece of work for me; resulting in a pilot project to talk on a 1:1 basis with researchers and engage them individually as well as at the broader centre, school or institute level.  Something I hadn't planned for in my strategy and which I have now added as an option.

From these two quite different meetings has come the following:

1. People are not wholly unaware of open access and they do recognise that they need to engage at some point
2. There is willingness and a recognition of the importance and benefits of OA
3. There is a recognition that the responsibility lies with the researcher to engage
4. Whilst I haven't encountered outright resistance yet, there is perhaps reticence, or just hearing it from me is not enough to get people started - is it a technical barrier, a time barrier or a knowing where to start barrier?  Probably all three
5. There is growing awareness that not engaging with conditions on research funding concerning open access could lead to significant problems down the line - and this is leverage

No doubt there will be more meetings a long the way and more to learn in the process.

Implementing the Communication Strategy for PubLists and QMRO - part 1

Back in the heady days (January 2011) of the JISC-funded RePosit project, I drew up a Communication Strategy that I planned to use to identify routes and methods of communication and advocacy once Queen Mary Research Online was launched.  At the time, this seemed like a long way off and I set it aside as something to work with 'later'.  Well, 'later' arrived with somewhat more bang than I expected in September 2011 with the strategy being taken up by the powers that be and with my strategy turning into a full blown project.

So, here I am 'Implementing the Communications Strategy for PubLists and QMRO' with a series of blog posts about my endeavours to engage the various echelons at QM in open access and publications management.

PubLists - QM's research publications management database, running on Symplectic Elements
QMRO - Queen Mary Research Online - the institutional repository, running on DSpace

To start with, my strategy needs a project plan, something I haven't drawn up before, and which is proving a bit daunting.  However, some of the strands on my strategy are already taking shape, so there is progress even without the plan itself having been finalised.

Over the course of the next few weeks I hope to do a series of updates focusing on various elements of the strategy, the first of which will follow shortly.

The views expressed in this blog are mine and are not representative of Queen Mary, University of London.