Blog Post Roundup: Learned Societies and OA

Links about the issues surrounding open access and learned societies.

Jump, Paul.  Open access will cause problems for learned societies' journals, accepts Finch
Dame Janet Finch admits that the new regulations that have been implemented because of her report’s findings could negatively impact learned societies’ journals.

Meadows, Alice. Open Access - What’s a Learned Society To Do?
Should learned societies do more to participate in the questions around Open Access?

Wilson, Emma.  A Learned Society perspective on Open Access publishing models.
The new RCUK regulations from the point of view from a member of a learned society.

Worlock, Kate. Open Access and Learned Societies.
General rundown of issues surrounding learned societies and open access.

Open Access Transition Briefings

On December 4th and 5th, Queen Mary University held briefing sessions to help researchers explain the upcoming changes in RCUK’s Open Access policy, answer initial questions, and to provide an outline of the work being undertaken by a Task and Finish group.

 

Initial Meetings

Date: 04/12/12 Time: 12:30-14:00 Location: Mile End Library, Seminar Room

Date: 05/12/12 Time: 11:00-12:30 Location: Mile End Library, Seminar Room

Date: 16/01/13  Time: 14:00-15:30  Location: Charterhouse Sq, Rotblat G.05

Briefings are being held for the Directors of Research and Principal Investigators from various disciplines. These presentations are on:

•    Understanding the Policy

•    Frequently Asked Questions

•    Developing a procedure:  

• Task and Finish group
• Funds allocation

Upcoming Meetings

Date: 22/01/13  Time: 12:00-13:30  Location: Mile End Library, Seminar Room
Date: 25/01/13  Time: 14:00-15:30  Location: Whitechapel, Garrod 1.21
Date:  11/02/13  Time: 11:00-12:30  Location: Mile End Library, Seminar Room

Booking is not required.

OA Transition Survey Launched

Open Access Survey Launched

The Library's Open Access Transition team have been approaching a number of academic colleagues to find out how they manage their OA publications. A short survey has been launched; it will review existing procedures for managing outputs accepted for publication. This is to identify any support the Library can provide to enable researchers to comply easily with their funders’ open access publishing mandates. We are interested in the views of all researchers, not only those funded by RCUK and the Wellcome Trust, so please take a few moments to complete the survey and give us a clearer picture of how we can help. All responses will be confidential.

At the end of the survey there is an opportunity to share comments or ask questions concerning Open Access and Queen Mary's intended response to RCUK and the Wellcome Trust's new requirements.

RCUK (the seven Research Councils) have recently announced changes to their Open Access policy starting on 1 April 2013; an outline of which can be viewed here.

The Wellcome Trust has already been supporting open access for output of research funded by the Trust.  However, from 1 April 2013, they too are expanding their open access publishing policies by stipulating that research output can be used for commercial purposes as well whenever a publisher has been paid an open access fee.  Their policy statement can be viewed here.

Queen Mary will receive a block grant to cover some of the Article Processing Cost (APC) of open access publishing for RCUK-funded projects; this block grant will be administered by the Library. Queen Mary Library also manages an institutional repository where researchers can deposit the accepted version of their paper.  In order to ensure that we administer funds efficiently for Gold access and to support researchers in self-archiving their papers for Green access, we will need to know early in the process when a paper is accepted and through which one of the open access routes it is going to be published.

Open Access Transition

The Open Access Transition team, based within Library Services, is overseeing the extension of services to support changes to open access policy announced by Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust in July 2012.  the project is due to be completed in March 2013 and is funded by a one-off pump prime funding grant from Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

From 1st April 2013 Research Councils UK (RCUK) require that all peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers arising from research funded in full or in part by RCUK Councils must be made open access, free at the point of use.

The Open Access Transition team will use the transitional funding to ensure that Queen Mary is in the best possible position to maximise the Open Access publication of research output. Our plan has five components:

•           Expanding our existing research publications services
•           Engaging with researchers and raising awareness of the RCUK and Wellcome policy
•           Reviewing existing processes and procedures for managing outputs prior to publication
•           Assessing the feasibility of new systems and processes for management of accepted publications
•           Development of an online training module for early career researchers and research students

Useful Links:

• Research Council UK Policy on Open Access
• Wellcome Trust policy on Open Access
• Open Access/ RCUK FAQ (Coming Soon)
• For enquiries concerning our work contact the Sarah Molloy.

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!