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.

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!

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!

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.

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?

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

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

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!

Repositories and publications blog

Welcome to the Repositories and Publications blog!

Aimed at helping academics and researchers find their way through the minefields that are Open Access archiving, Institutional Repositories and Research Publications Management.

I'm hoping to build a corpus of information, useful links and special events to help myself keep track of what's happening and what's useful.  So, comments, suggestions and recommendations readily accepted.  If you find it useful for Scholarly Communication, then I want to know about it.

Are we there yet?

You start with an ideal... and then you wait.  And if you're really unlucky, you wait a bit more.  If you're a bit impatient, like me, waiting for someone to give you the green light can seem interminable. 

There's a reason the phrase, 'so close yet so far' is a favourite of mine.  It feels like we've been 'almost there' for so long that we might never actually arrive.

There are complex and often time-consuming decisions to make regarding a repository, talk to someone in the repository community and you'll hear them often, talk to someone else and they will have no idea what you're going on about.  Is that part of the problem?  We talk about making research public, about communication and dissemination, but are we as a community becoming so insular that we are part of the problem? 

Here at least we are finally so near arriving that it's tangible.  This thing that I've been working towards for so long is finally here.  But what then?  A new phase, a new stage of the journey, and more development.  See, having a live public repository is only the beginning, the journey is endless and there are still more exciting adventures out there...