Open Access Transition project update - Publications Service pilot

Open Access Transition activities have been moving on apace here at QM, with the team working on a series of workstreams to provide enhancements to current services, identify potential new ones, and put in place procedures for accessing Publications Funds.  With the project end date looming, there is still a lot of work to be done, and some activities that will continue to be undertaken going into April.

Piloting an enhanced Publications Service

From checking journal open access publishing to a survey of needs within the Queen Mary research community, the Publications Service was set the objective of identifying what support researchers might need in order to under the new Research Councils policy on open access, and what additional services or information needs they might need.  The majority of this work has fallen into two sections:

Survey and one-to-one meetings

We launched a survey in February 2013 to gain insight into researcher understanding of, culture and engagement with open access, in particular open access publishing, the survey was agnostic of funding organisation and targeted both research staff and students.  We asked about researchers' familiarity with our very own institutional repository, Queen Mary Research Online, hoping to measure how much work is still needed to raise awareness here, how to engage with it, and how it meets funding requirements in many cases.  Lastly, we asked an open-ended question, as a steer for future endeavours in this area.  The question:  If we were able to offer a full handling service for the publication of journal articles and conference papers, including submitting and acting as a go-between to manage the progress of papers through the publication process, is this something you would want?  

The survey is now closed and we are still analysing the results.  Headline (anonymised) results will be published shortly.

Thank you to everyone who provided information via the survey.

A second line of enquiry in the information gathering part of the Publication Service pilot, was to hold one-to-one meetings to get into a little more detail about researcher reaction to the changes announced by Wellcome and Research Councils UK, how they felt this would affect them, what their own plans are to meet these new policies, and how they will use services available to them.  These were quite illuminating, and seem to demonstrate a broader acceptance of the value of open access, with plenty of caveats and misunderstandings, particularly around the rhetoric that has been published in the national press, and other fora.

The results from these meetings is being converted into a narrative about the perceptions of open access and will be used to provide anecdotal evidence in conjunction with the survey results.

Compliance checking, 

At the beginning of 2013, the OA transition team began putting out a call to researchers asking for examples of journals that they felt would be a high priority for them to target for publication.  We received many responses to this call, and have been working on long lists of titles, attempting to interpret the information made available by publishers about open access publishing options, reuse permissions, and self-archiving permissions.  A significant undertaking, this has proved both depressing in some instances, confusing in many others, but rewarding overall.  We now have a better understanding of the current position, taking into account recent updated announcements from RCUK and Sherpa Services, and the varying information publishers have been putting out about pending changes to their policies.  Given the rather fluid nature of the open access landscape at the moment, some simple guidance about where to check and how will be provided shortly, and there will be ongoing support from Library Services handling enquiries on an ad hoc basis.