A Resonant Message: Aligning Scholar Values and Open Access Objectives in OA Policy Outreach to Faculty and Graduate Students

Author : Jane Johnson Otto

INTRODUCTION

Faculty contribution to the institutional repository is a major limiting factor in the successful provision of open access to scholarship, and thus to the advancement of research productivity and progress.

Many have alluded to outreach messages through studies examining faculty concerns that underlie their reluctance to contribute, but specific open access messages demonstrated to resonate most with faculty have not been discussed with sufficient granularity.

Indeed, many faculty benefits and concerns are likely either unknown to the faculty themselves, or unspoken, so the literature’s record of faculty benefits and perceptions of open access remains incomplete at best.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

At Rutgers University, we have developed a targeted message that both addresses these unspoken/unknown concerns and benefits and speaks to the promise and inevitability of open access in a changing scholarly communication landscape.

This paper details that message and its rationale, based on a critical review of the literature currently informing outreach programs, in order to provoke further discussion of specific outreach messages and the principles underlying them.

NEXT STEPS

A robust scholarly communication organization, open access policy advisory board, expanded outreach, and sustained momentum will be critical to ensuring success with measurable outcomes.

Metrics used to evaluate both OA policy implementation efforts and institutional repositories should be reevaluated in light of the governing objectives of open access outreach efforts and tools. It is hoped that a reassessment of the message and the metrics will better align both with the true promise and prerequisites of open access.

URL : A Resonant Message: Aligning Scholar Values and Open Access Objectives in OA Policy Outreach to Faculty and Graduate Students

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2152

Article Deposit Services in Support of Federal Agency Public Access Requirements

Authors : Michael Boock, Hui Zhang, Erin Clark

INTRODUCTION

Academic libraries have experimented with a variety of services to encourage article deposit to institutional repositories, with varying degrees of success. Universities now face the challenge of meeting federal agency public access requirements.

Following the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy public access directive in 2013, Oregon State University (OSU) initiated an article deposit service to help faculty meet funding agency requirements and facilitate deposit of articles to both federal agency repositories and the institutional repository.

This case study describes the article deposit form developed by the library to encourage article deposits to the institutional repository and federal agency repositories, the processes and people put in place to request and deposit the articles, and the impact of the service on the number of articles deposited to federal agency repositories.

DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT

In the two years since the article deposit service was initiated, a total of 102 articles have been deposited by the library to the PubMed Central or PAGES federal agency repositories.

The inclusion of a request for faculty to indicate federal funding in the article deposit form has not resulted in increased article self deposits. Identifying and requesting National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy funded articles from faculty for deposit to the institutional repository and to the agency repositories has also not received substantial uptake.

The majority of articles that have been deposited to federal agency repositories by the library were received after library staff reviewed bibliographies of grant funded research for compliance with public access policies.

NEXT STEPS

As a result, the library is now working with the university office of research to promote a service that asks faculty for a bibliography of their articles that result from NIH or DOE funding, identifies those that need to be deposited to the agency repositories, and provides a link to the library’s article deposit form for them to initiate article deposits to the institutional repository and to agency repositories.

URL : Article Deposit Services in Support of Federal Agency Public Access Requirements

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2147

What does ‘green’ open access mean? Tracking twelve years of changes to journal publisher selfarchiving policies

Authors : Elizabeth Gadd, Denise Troll Covey

Traces the 12-year self-archiving policy journey of the original 107 publishers listed on the SHERPA/RoMEO Publisher Policy Database in 2004, through to 2015. Maps the RoMEO colour codes (‘green’, ‘blue’, ‘yellow’ and ‘white’) and related restrictions and conditions over time.

Finds that while the volume of publishers allowing some form of self-archiving (pre-print, post-print or both) has increased by 12% over the 12 years, the volume of restrictions around how, where and when self-archiving may take place has increased 119%, 190% and 1000% respectively.

A significant positive correlation was found between the increase in self-archiving restrictions and the introduction of Gold paid open access options. Suggests that by conveying only the version of a paper that authors may self-archive, the RoMEO colour codes do not address all the key elements of the Bethesda Definition of Open Access.

Compares the number of RoMEO ‘green’ publishers over time with those meeting the definition for ‘redefined green’ (allowing embargo-free deposit of the post-print in an institutional repository). Finds that RoMEO ‘green’ increased by 8% and ‘redefined green’ decreased by 35% over the 12 years.

Concludes that the RoMEO colour codes no longer convey a commitment to green open access as originally intended. Calls for open access advocates, funders, institutions and authors to redefine what ‘green’ means to better reflect a publisher’s commitment to self-archiving.

URL : https://works.bepress.com/denise_troll_covey/82/

Large scale implementation of open access: a case study at the University of Edinburgh’s College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine

Authors : Anna Krzak, Dominic Tate

Journal papers and conference proceedings accepted for publication from April 2016 must be deposited in an institutional and/or subject repository within three months of acceptance, and following this must be made open access, in order to be eligible for submission to the next Research Evaluation Framework in the United Kingdom.

This paper describes the programme to facilitate this at the University of Edinburgh’s College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1842/16058

Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics

In high energy physics scholarly papers circulate primarily through online preprint archives based on a centralized repository, arXiv.org, that physicists simply refer to as ‘the archive.’ This is not a tool for preservation and memory, but rather a space of flows where written objects are detected and then disappear, and their authors made available for scrutiny.

In this work I analyse the reading and publishing practices of two subsets of particle physicists, theorists and experimentalists. In order to be recognized as legitimate and productive members of their community, physicists need to abide by the temporalities and authorial practices structured by the archive. Theorists live in a state of accelerated time that shapes their reading and publishing practices around a 24 hour cycle.

Experimentalists resolve to tactics that allow them to circumvent the slowed-down time and invisibility they experience as members of large collaborations. As digital archives for the exchange of preprint articles emerge in other scientific fields, physics could help shed light on general transformations of contemporary scholarly communication systems.

URL : Beams of Particles and Papers. The Role of Preprint Archives in High Energy Physics

Alternative location : http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.08539

The implications of the new UK Open Access policies on the ownership of copyright in academic publishing

The issue of who owns the copyright in works produced by academics during employment is not new. The practice is that academics, as authors – copyright creators, are routinely assigning the copyright for free to academic publishers in order to have their works published even though the production of such works might be said to be in the course of employment and therefore the copyright belonging to the employer (the university). A literature review will show only one side of the coin where – unsurprisingly – intellectual property (IP) scholars agree that they own the copyright in the works published during employment.

The other side of the coin is not usually discovered because employers are not IP experts and are not in the business of writing academic articles. However, the general belief of the management is that the universities own the copyright as employers. More recently, UK universities have to comply with new Open Access policies which basically requires that publicly-funded research should be freely accessible. The Gold Open Access model is preferred by many academic publishers whose business model relies on academics (actually their funders) paying article processing charges (APCs) while the Green Open Access model is preferred by the universities as being virtually free of any charges.

But since most of the research is publicly-funded, suddenly the issue of who owns the copyright in works produced by academics during employment becomes a very stringent one, not to mention expensive. This paper will discuss the problem of copyright ownership in academia and how the new Open Access policies might affect it. While it is possible to discuss copyright without mentioning Open Access, it would be quite difficult to discuss Open Access without mentioning copyright. A possible solution will be proposed and discussed in order to help universities comply with the new policies by using their preferred Green Open Access route.

URL : The implications of the new UK Open Access policies on the ownership of copyright in academic publishing

Alternative location : http://hdl.handle.net/1842/11682

Institutional policy implementation at University of Minho, Portugal

This case study describes the implementation process of the Open Access institutional policy at the University of Minho (UMinho), Portugal. Starting with a brief introduction about the institution, in terms of its academic community and research, the document then provides a detailed description of the steps taken to implement the UMinho’s institutional repository (the IR) and the Open Access policy. We highlight the main goals which oriented the implementation of the repository, the devised communication plan, the value-added services created for authors, and finally, the engagement within the international community in these areas.

Regarding the Open Access policy, we present a brief summary of the main points of the self-archiving policy, approved late 2004, and also point out the main additions to the policy when it was upgraded in 2011.
This case study also provides some figures and tables about the results of the various monitoring processes carried out by the University of Minho Documentation Services to follow-up and measure policy compliance.
In summary, since the beginning of 2004 with the IR implementation, several initiatives have been taking place with the purpose of increasing the number of deposited documents. The Open Access policy adoption was, definitely, the main success factor amongst all the other initiatives and efforts.

URL : Institutional policy implementation at University of Minho, Portugal

Alternative location : http://www.pasteur4oa.eu/sites/pasteur4oa/files/resource/Case%20Study_UMinho.pdf