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!

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.

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!