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

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!

Open Access - Keeping the Big Picture in View

I've been thinking a lot of late about the Open Access movement, as I imagine many of my repository manager colleagues, researchers and research managers have.  The movement seems to have been hijacked recently by the triumvirate of Finch, RCUK and Wellcome.  So much of what these groups are trying to do is valid and valuable, but consistently only covers the very specific area of academic publishing that is journal publishing, and is therefore myopic when it comes to the true meaning of open research.

It would be too easy here to get lost down the rabbit-hole that is academic journal publishing and open access, but I actually want to think for a while about non-journal publishing.

Whilst it's true that most researchers publish some of their research output, to a greater or lesser extent, in academic journals, there is a wealth of scholarly knowledge out there that will never see the journal editor's desk.

Data (yes there is a lot of work in this area at the moment), software,  video recordings, audio recordings, images, webpages, blog posts, media interviews, collaborations, areas of expertise, and not forgetting the books, chapters, monographs, reports, working papers, etc. that make up the breadth of scholarly output generated by researchers.  Research funding bodies only talk in terms of the journal articles that may constitute part of the researchers complement of materials from any research project, perhaps with a bit of research data curation thrown in for good measure.  To lose sight of the full complement of scholarly output and the work of researchers does us no favours in advocating for a more open research environment, fixation with peer-reviewed output and metrics is not good research.  Perhaps what is really needed here is that institutionally we take a broader approach to supporting open scholarship, by providing support and mechanisms to perform, manage and disseminate that research, not just through provision of institutional repositories and research information systems but also through hosting of blogs and services to enable dissemination, hosting webpages that have the proper mechanisms for preservation through centralised provision, and endeavouring to provide that 'connectedness' that will enable researchers to point to projects to point to output to point to public engagement to point to impact...

Yet, even this does not go far enough in my mind.  What we really need, and what chimed so much in Cameron Neylon's keynote address at the recent OR2012 conference, was that connectedness taken further to engage not just researchers and research systems, but private individuals alike; that harnessing the power of the collective mind can fully realise the open research agenda and increase the rate of discovery.  But where to begin...

So, whilst we get bogged down attempting to understand that latest round of policy statements and changes, and how this impacts on our day-to-day tasks of engaging researchers with open access, I try keep in mind that it isn't just the selected best samples of that research that we are trying to gain greater access to, but the full, untidy, unedited, mass of the research in all its forms that we are aiming to share more widely, and for that we need more than OA policies from funding bodies, we need hearts and minds of researchers.