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

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!

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?

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

Depositing for beginners... (journal articles)

A simple guide to what to think about when depositing in QMRO:

1. the repository is open access, nothing confidential please
2. if you are not sure which version of your item can be made public in the repository, speak to a member of the team: QMRO repository team
3. when uploading, make sure you grant rights by clicking on the link in PubLists 
4. we want to be able to make as much of your research output available as possible 
• if we cannot deposit the version you initially supply we will contact you for a suitable alternative if copyright permits
• please be prepared to supply an alternative version by keeping working and original submission versions
5. Versions:

• pre-print - the one you submitted to the publisher initially
• post-print - the one they supplied back to you after refereeing
• publisher PDF - the one that got published with all the publisher's formatting

No two publishers have the same policy when it comes to open access, and some have different policies for different journal titles, so please be patient we want to get your submitted content public as soon as possible but sometimes this might take a little bit of time to sort out.

An ever-growing backlog

Whilst the repository staff beaver away, attempting to work through some of the backlog of new deposits to the repository, all I can focus on is the fact that we have a backlog in the first place.  It is very comforting to know that there are some early adopters out there, willing and ready to get content into the repository and offer us an opportunity to go public with something substantial.

The barriers to going public are almost resolved, and hopefully this means the repository should be available in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, keep that content coming!