'Measuring' and managing mandates

An investigation by Research Support staff at Brunel University London considers the role CORE might play in supporting funder compliance and the wider transition to open scholarship...

Reposted from the CORE blog, 7/7/2016

By David Walters (Open Access officer at Brunel) and Dr Christopher Daley (Research Publications Officer at Brunel)

In 2001, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) brilliantly and simply encapsulated the aspirational qualities of 'openness' that funders, scholars, institutions, services and publishers have since driven forward. This simplicity has been lost in the detail of implementing funder mandates over copyright restrictions, resulting in significant administrative overheads to support staff whose primary role is to smoothly progress a cultural change. Although the momentum is undeniable, the transition to open scholarship is now fraught with complexity.

We are now three months into HEFCE's open access policy. The urgency surrounding compliance requirements has, in some ways, been a useful tool in embedding good practice in the minds of our research staff. The emphasis has also ensured the speedy public dissemination of accepted research papers. Like most institutions, we have found that technical restrictions have limited our implementation of the policy to an intense institutional focus on internal compliance through our local repository. As a result, such internally driven workflows do not reflect the breadth of engagement with open scholarship or fully realise author compliance with HEFCE's policy.

Brunel University London assessed their entire research outputs portfolio against the data services of CORE. The assumption prior to undertaking this task was that the global force of the open access movement would highlight the emergent open cultures across disciplines - a view currently inaccessible to request driven institutional services - and this may reveal duplication of effort for both academic and support staff. We share some of our initial discoveries here.

The transition towards open scholarship vs. policy drivers

Research is by nature collaborative. Authors share a responsibility in disseminating their outputs as widely as possible. As an institutional service, our role is to provide expert advice and open dissemination options for our authors, which are tailored to meet the needs of local research communities. We recognise our role as one part of much wider and far reaching landscape.

To this end, our systems deployment centres around our research information management system, Symplectic Elements. The system records our institution's portfolio of research output; identifying, collating and relating bibliographic and other records from the myriad of services across the scholarly landscape. It drives our international impact through public web profiles. Crucially it enables academics to easily push research papers through to our institutional repository (Brunel University Research Archive) for open access dissemination.

There is a recognition in HEFCE's open access policy for the wide, varying and longstanding use of external repositories, although responsibility for managing the REF submission process lies at the institutional level. It is no small point that many of these have a special subject based significance, often conceptualised and implemented by scholars themselves. Despite this support, a lack of visibility or control of these systems has necessarily informed a 'one-size', compliance-driven workflow, which has been imposed on academics regardless of their use of subject repositories, or the engagement of collaborators with their own local repositories.

External repository systems now represent an unacceptable risk of non-compliance to an institution. It is data we too often cannot see and obviously cannot control. This position does not consider the suitability of the platform or the choice of the author in how they disseminate their paper. We are no longer enhancing the natural, researcher-driven workflows that are continuing to emerge across a huge and growing array of platforms, services and tools.

There is now a danger of alienating through bureaucracy those authors already committed to the cause and readily engaged in open practice, whilst simultaneously creating a culture of anxiety. In this environment, the true value of open scholarship within the research lifecycle is potentially reduced to the language of compliance and REF eligibility. Indeed, during an intensive advocacy campaign leading up to the implementation of HEFCE's OA policy, we have not found the rate of deposits of current research to be significantly increased. Instead, we witnessed a marked rise in the deposit of legacy publications, many outside of the current REF cycle, and invariably final published versions which we were unable to archive. This hints at an atmosphere of panic amongst some of the academic staff we aim to support.

CORE insights for Brunel

CORE represents one of the most highly regarded aggregators of repository content and is fast becoming an essential part of scholarly infrastructure. Leaving aside the fascinating project work in semantic analysis, we have long felt this resource may help offer a true insight in the collaborative, open publishing practices of our authors and, with a renewed REF focus, a new window for administrators who support compliance. This view is perhaps shared by JISC, who are now actively supporting the project.

We consider our CRIS to be the authoritative record of current research at our institution. We ran our lists of article titles and DOIs through CORE to see if we could identify any publications available:

• in any external repository harvested by CORE and in our institutional repository, which might suggest a level of duplicate effort for compliance.
• only in any external repository harvested by CORE, which might indicate a truer figure of readily HEFCE compliant outputs.

The results

We have found a huge increase in the identification of Brunel affiliated outputs available in external repository systems.

Fig 4. The distribution of Brunel publications across CORE (data from CORE and Symplectic Elements). Graph produced using google charts.

One finding was that only around 1 in 3 papers are to be found in our repository. The majority are spread across alternative resources. A significant proportion of our repository content is not currently being harvested by CORE as the on-acceptance mandate has led many academics to deposit non-PDF filetypes - an area the CORE team are working to address in future development.

We have only found evidence of a small number of publications (less than 1%) being deposited in both the Brunel University Research Archive and the same paper being available in other repositories harvested by CORE. This suggests that, so far, concerns about duplication of effort have not been realised. However, it should be reiterated that we have only recently entered the period of the REF policy and CORE only harvests publications where a full PDF text is available. After a year (or more), once embargoes begin to expire, this picture may begin to look quite different. For now, the distribution of individual publications appears to be quite evenly spread.

This is confirmation of accepted, and encouraged, academic practice. Namely that a huge number of our publications are widely discoverable in alternative, but suitable, repositories. This is perhaps the most unsurprising outcome given the scale of collaborative projects, funder and publisher policies, the regular migration of staff between institutions and the researcher driven use of subject based resources to disseminate research. The map below highlights the global distribution of Brunel's research on CORE, beginning to present a wonderful picture of our research as a collaborative enterprise.

However, even this raises some questions. We would expect our partnerships in China, Australia, Japan, India and other parts of the world to have a far greater representation here, especially when international governmental and funder mandates are considered.

Fig 5. The global distribution of Brunel publications in repositories around the world (data from CORE and Symplectic Elements). Graph produced using google charts. Note this does not display data from BURA.

Some of the data in our CRIS already contains details of externally held files. These files are not necessarily held in Elements or an Institutional Repository, but purely hold file metadata relating to its holding at an external data source, for example arXiv or Europe PMC records. We have found some discrepancies by comparing this data with that found in CORE. If CORE is to be an essential component in future research service infrastructure, deposits must be completely harvested so as to enhance the efforts undertaken by scholars and institutions. So too, the flow of scholarly metadata must improve. It is essential that our ambition to uniquely attribute authors to their scholarly outputs (through initiatives like ORCID) is fully realised to form the underpinning of this vital research infrastructure.

	Externally held files found in Elements	Externally held files found in CORE
Europe PubMed Central	1774	447
arXiv	602	849

CORE provides an opportunity for a simple, retrospective measure of academia's inexorable move towards 'open'. The collective action of academics in disseminating their research cannot be overlooked in this transitory period. Policy compliance is an important factor in the movement, but so too are the traits required for twenty-first century research, namely discoverability, reach, impact and engagement.

Open research transcends borders and policies, and we can see this reflected from the available data in CORE. We see a global community working together in common cause to maximise the communication of their research.

Fig 6. The scale of Brunel publications in the repositories of European collaborators (data from CORE and Symplectic Elements). Graph produced using google charts. Note this does not display data from BURA

In closing

As an institutional service, we are driven by the responsibility we feel for the researchers in our community who require our support, encouragement and guidance. Policy drivers must enhance, and not inhibit, the developing practice of scholars who are rightly taking ownership of dissemination as an integral part of the research lifecycle.

The CORE service might help contextualise the global realities of open access and academic practice as we transition toward 100% open scholarship. There is the potential for CORE to help us re-simplify the agenda, whilst making the process more than just a 'tick-box' exercise. In doing so, support staff can then be released from an excessive administrative burden and instead focus greater effort on promoting open scholarship within their institutions.

References:

• HEFCE (2014) Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework
• Knoth, P. and Zdrahal, Z. (2012) CORE: Three Access Levels to Underpin Open Access, D-Lib Magazine, 18, 11/12, Corporation for National Research Initiatives
• Knoth, P., Anastasiou, L. and Pearce, S. (2014) My repository is being aggregated: a blessing or a curse?, Open Repositories 2014 (OR 2014), Helsinki, Finland
• Knoth, P., Robotka, V. and Zdrahal, Z. (2011) Connecting Repositories in the Open Access Domain using Text Mining and Semantic Data, International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2011 (TPDL 2011), Berlin, Germany
• Pontika, N., Knoth, P., Cancellieri, M. and Pearce, S. (2016) Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories, LIBER Quarterly, 25, 4
• Walters, D., Bulock, C. (2016) Managing Mandates, Serials Review, 42:2, 131-134
• Walters, D., Ritchie, M. & Kilb, M. (2016) CRIS Power! Taming the Reporting Requirements of Open Access, The Serials Librarian, 70:1-4, 229-235

Supporting data:

• Walters, D., Daley, C. (2016) All figures: Brunel University Research Archive (BURA) deposits 2015-16. figshare
• Walters, D., Daley, C. (2016) Output titles harvested by CORE for Brunel University London. figshare
• Walters, D., Daley, C. (2016) Duplication of output titles harvested by CORE for Brunel University London. figshare
• Walters, D., Daley, C. (2016) Institutional data in Symplectic Elements, DSpace instance and CORE. figshare
• Walters, D., Daley, C. (2016) Brunel publications found in CORE - aggregated count. figshare

Managing mandates: Interview with Chris Bulock

CHRIS BULOCK

Editor

DAVID WALTERS

Contributor

This is a re-post of an article published in 'Serials Review'. It gives an overview of current projects at Brunel, involving the management of open access data through the University's Symplectic Element's instance. This is to support both funder compliance and to implement better services that support the transition to open scholarship.

Chris Bulock & David Walters (2016): Open Dialog: Managing Mandates,

Serials Review, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2016.1173163.

Abstract

While Open Access (OA) policies and funds have impacted the work of many librarians, there are many in the United States who have seen relatively little change in their jobs. In the United Kingdom, several major funders have implemented aggressive Open Access Policies that favor Gold Open Access. As a result, many librarians find themselves managing Open Access publication funds or tracking compliance with a wide array of different policies. David Walters of Brunel University London gives some insight into how he's managed these new tasks, how it has changed perceptions of the library, and what may be in store for the future.

1. Introduction

Open Access (OA) publishing has certainly had an impact on the way librarians do their work, but those changes have not necessarily been evenly distributed. OA policies and mandates, for example, have completely altered the work of some librarians, while leaving the day-to-day tasks of others largely untouched. This uneven distribution is also true of funder mandates. Of course, research intensive universities are more likely to host externally funded research activities. In addition, many funding agencies focus on one particular geographic area and/or field of study. As a result of this uneven patchwork of policies and mandates, it's likely that many libraries at midsized or even larger universities in the United States have yet to develop much expertise on assisting faculty with compliance.

The story for research universities in the United Kingdom (UK) is quite different though. The Finch Report in 2012 pushed the UK toward a future of Gold OA, and this was quickly followed by such a policy from the Research Councils UK (RCUK) (Hall, 2012). There have also been OA policies from the Wellcome Trust and the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England), each with their own requirements. Universities must now ensure their researchers comply with these OA policies in order to continue to receive research grants. Additionally, institutions must manage the Gold OA funds set up to address the numerous Article Processing Charge (APC) payments that come along with the Gold model. While many units of a university may be involved with these efforts, librarians certainly have some expertise in tracking scholarly communications and managing payments to publishers.

David Walters is the Open Access officer at Brunel University and attended the NASIG Annual Conference in 2015 to speak about his institution's efforts to track OA payments and compliance. Using a Current Research Information System (CRIS) to monitor the university's research output, Walters' unit within the library monitors APC payments and works to verify researchers' compliance with the policies of major funders. Megan Kilb's summary of the talk will appear in the conference proceedings and can currently be found on Walters' blog. It's very instructive, especially to librarians who may just now be diving into the topic. However, the landscape of funder mandates and efforts to track compliance are continually changing. Local efforts at Brunel have continued to develop since last summer and work on a more centralized system in the Jisc Monitor project are proceeding as well. (For more information about Jisc, see https://www.jisc.ac.uk/.) Given all this change and the increasing complexity of the topic, Walters agreed to answer some questions by email, and the result follows.

2. How much of the research that goes on at Brunel University is subject to OA mandates?

Systemic processes that help institutional services in identifying research subject to mandates are improving, but this continues to be a difficult question to answer. Mandates are challenging established structures of service support built around the researcher and traditional models of the research lifecycle. Funder requirements are increasingly made up of many components that intercede different points in the research lifecycle; from the inception, development, and funding of a research idea, through to an eventual open communication of that research idea, alongside the research data underpinning the results. An example of this is the Wellcome Trust, who now require an ORCID (http://www.orcid.org) as a precondition to application for an award, but who also have a longstanding Open Access mandate for their research publications. One only has to visit the ROARMAP aggregation of funder mandates to understand the demands being placed upon scholars and the challenges facing academic services in providing support for our communities. (Within ROARMAP's browse at http://roarmap.eprints.org/view/country/826.html, one can single out funder mandates specifically. The list of institutional mandates within the UK is also instructive).

Due to the HEFCE requirements (commencing in April 2016) all research articles and conference proceedings in the UK must be made Open Access in order to be eligible for research assessment. (More details are available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/oa/). It is expected that between 75–90% of outputs will have a compliant Open Access option available to them. Most of Brunel's output falls within the scope of this policy, affecting the majority of our researchers. Therefore you could say 100% of our research is subject to at least one mandate. Funded research will most likely have others. Whilst there is often overlap, no two policies or set of requirements are ever exactly the same.

Within our CRIS system, Brunel has access to information about funders at opposing ends of the research lifecycle spectrum; grants awarded to academics and outputs related to those grants. An on-going challenge is encouraging actions from academics to link associated grants to publications in the CRIS. This can be an irritant for academics, many of whom are also obliged to use other funder-specific reporting systems like ResearchFish. Vendors and the library community really need to find technical approaches to better connect these systems and processes.

3. Can you estimate your institution's current compliance rate for mandates? Has your institution's compliance rate improved since you implemented a CRIS?

This continues to be one of the biggest technical and procedural challenges facing institutions today. Compliance is really about the ability to undertake a census, available in real-time, as to how researchers are engaging with Open Access.

Research is a global, collaborative enterprise, and this presents certain technical challenges. Brunel needs to know which subject or institutional repositories are being used for Green OA and the associated licenses for reuse for papers following a Gold model.

In our early experiments, Brunel adopted a multi-phase approach to populating our CRIS and using its data to analyse research output and design research services. Brunel linked data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the SHERPA-RoMEO database of publishers' policies on copyright and self-archiving, and Open Article Gauge (OAG) APIs to its institutional records, which enriched the institutional data sufficiently to allow Brunel to monitor dissemination trends at different levels of scale across the university's portfolio.

This trial was somewhat limited because our experiments largely took place outside the CRIS. We've just been given the OK to implement these Open Access data services directly into our Symplectic reporting database.

This will enable us to:

• Focus attention on engaging with tools like OAG to ensure they work better for our institutional use case. Brunel wants our investment made for Gold Open Access to be reflected in automated systems of the future.
• Reduce manual monitoring processes as far as possible, essential when so much Gold and Green OA publishing happens beyond the field of vision of a request driven service
• Examine in detail the use of external repositories by our academics - a component of the HEFCE policy, but also in extending our understanding of how the communities we support are positioned within this environment so that we might provide better services.

The reporting database will feed analytics and dashboards that can be made available through elements to research managers and (hopefully) academics so that progress is current, transparent, clear, and support cycles are perpetually self-sustaining. This approach informs the library's service response in real time, enabling evidence-based conversations with departments or researchers needing help with understanding and applying the Open Access mandates of their funding agencies and navigating the services available at the university to support compliance with the mandates.

We intend to take this further through the use of other data services as they become available, such as the forthcoming Sherpa Research Excellence Framework (REF) tool, which should enable us to see whether our academics have historically been publishing in REF ‘compliant’ journals. (Readers outside the UK may wish to read up on REF at http://www.ref.ac.uk/about/.) There are a number of others we hope to employ in the future.

We look forward to reporting our results in the coming months, and we will make any useful definitions or code available via GitHub

4. At NASIG, you spoke about a proactive approach to identifying research subject to mandates. How has that been working out, and do researchers seem receptive to it?

We used an approach that allowed us to identify funding organizations from the acknowledgements section of the Scopus and Web of Science databases. By extracting and analysing this data, library staff identified publications by Brunel researchers that were subject to an Open Access mandate.

The publications we focused on were those where Brunel was qualified as the correspondence address. This makes it likely, but by no means certain, that the accredited grants are held by Brunel researchers. So much research today is collaborative, and this kind of breakdown is not available in these systems.

However, this exercise has given us an approximation of the state of the current environment and enabled us to renew our focus on the major funders. We managed to increase the identification of RCUK funded research by about 400%. This did require us to contact authors directly for confirmation, and we did get some slightly perturbed responses like “how did you know who funded my paper?” but on the whole authors welcomed our intervention and it meant a number of papers were able to immediately go ahead with compliant Gold funding or deposit.

So far with the other funders we have taken a pragmatic approach, using this information as a guide on what funders to focus on during visits to departments and as a comparator of accuracy for data in the CRIS.

5. Do you see most researchers choosing a Gold OA option, or are Green OA approaches also popular?

The question of choice for academics, especially given ongoing concerns about funding around hybrid Gold Open Access, is extremely interesting and an area that deserves greater consideration. I think it's fair to say that, certainly in the UK, non-compliance and the associated risk to future research grants is certainly driving action but not necessarily choice.

Complexities arise due to the differing emphases placed by funders upon open scholarship. This invariably depends on the size, resources, research focus, and ethos of these organisations. Some require Gold if available; some prefer Gold but allow Green; some require Green; for others it's simply nice to have.

RCUK and the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) both established funding mechanisms to enable researchers at participating universities in the UK, including Brunel, to pay the APCs necessary to disseminate their research through a Gold Open Access model. Additionally, in 2014, HEFCE mandated that all research papers included in the next REF exercise must be available in a repository via a Green Open Access dissemination model in order to be eligible for submission

Brunel has created polices and services around these drivers, and we support academic choice within the available open dissemination frameworks as far as possible. This is true even around funder requirements, so long as we can do so compliantly. Alongside repository services, Brunel administer a central fund for all academic staff, supporting authors equally where money is unavailable from their funding body or where research is not funded.

From institutional funding streams, Brunel paid for Gold for around one third of our research articles and conference proceedings last year – even with funding available to all academics.

For the first time, Brunel are about to plug-in those key Open Access data sources, discussed at NASIG (Walters, 2015), directly into our CRIS reporting architecture. We plan to extend the range of these resources to include Sherpa Funders and Authors Compliance Tool (FACT) and (launching soon) Sherpa REF, so that we shortly hope to have more accurate figures on the publication choices taken by our academics compliance tools

6. When choosing the vendor for your CRIS, did you find a crowded marketplace, or is there a pretty limited number of vendors?

Systems supporting research outputs and activities management have evolved from local bespoke databases into fully-fledged commercial services better able, some might say, to cope with the domain demands of research management and dissemination actions.

I couldn't claim to be an expert in the landscape of systems that are out there, but I have worked directly with two of the biggest global competitors: Pure (Elsevier) and Symplectic (Digital Science). Both systems have markedly different selling points and approaches, which impact local services managing the research publications process. Both, I believe, began life in Universities. Symplectic, for example, was originally incepted at Imperial College London.

Ultimately, the choice in acquiring a CRIS is dependent on institutional objectives around business requirements and international outreach. Even within vendors there are different configurations that can be tailored to meet the needs of institutions. The advantage for universities considering such a system now, is they are highly likely to find an institution with a deployment comparable to their needs.

I am supportive of the use of global service suppliers. Cooperation is an essential part of our role within a rapidly evolving landscape and being part of a large user group, comprised of colleagues from other universities facing similar challenges, is essential in steering vital development decisions undertaken by vendors.

7. Tell me a bit about the Jisc Monitor project and your university's role with that.

Jisc is exploring how a managed shared service might support institutions in meeting HEFCE and RCUK policies. The project is constructing two main prototypes to respond to specific use cases. Prototypes will be used to assess the feasibility of developing a full service. A key development partner in the project is Cottage Labs LLP (of the OAG and Lantern tools).

Jisc has already released the first prototype, Jisc Monitor global. This is essentially an aggregation of APC expenditure across participating UK universities. Data in the first phases were collected by collating an array of spreadsheets that institutions had been using to capture this information and can be found at http://apc.ooz.cottagelabs.com/.

From March 2016, Brunel along with 12 other institutions, will be full participants in the iterative development cycles for Jisc Monitor local. We will be using a working prototype to record live and legacy data on our institution's APC spend.

Aggregate financial and article data will be pushed out automatically to the global system, integrating with KB+ (https://www.kbplus.ac.uk/kbplus/about) in order to maximise the opportunities to get value for money from fuller analysis of the combination of subscription, OA costs, and OA access. There is certainly a need for institutions to manage this data more efficiently, to share this data with our colleagues in the sector more effectively, and for more detailed, automated compliance checking around funding streams we administrate.

The end of the development process is expected by the summer of 2016. We intend by that time for all of Brunel's historical finance data on Gold Open Access (undertaken since our central fund was established in 2008) to be available in Monitor global along with other contributing universities.

8. Do you think this heavy involvement with OA research has changed the way researchers see the library?

Yes, absolutely. The extension of the support now provided by the library is radically redefining the relationship we've had with our research community.

Open dissemination is fundamentally about maximising discovery opportunities within the scholarly corpus. Our developing research support services in the library are really about helping academics to increase discovery opportunities for their own outputs (i.e. attention and impact) as part of the research lifecycle. We are effectively working directly with academics as partners supporting this enterprise. So far the response from our academics has been overwhelmingly positive. I'm sure this will evolve in the future as this new relationship matures and further develops.

9. What do you see as your library's future related to OA research? Will it be different mostly in terms of scale, or do you see major qualitative differences on the horizon?

In the years leading up to the next Research Excellence Framework, I see rapid and sweeping change taking place in the UK. If this approach is successful, it is exciting to hope that this might catalyse more radical change around the world. A world of free and ubiquitous access to research has never felt so tangible!

I'm seriously overreaching now, but what will we do when we live in a world where most academic output is Open Access? Almost certainly the services we are providing now would not be required, or at least not required in its current form.

Brunel included, I feel research libraries will eventually play a greater role in the ecosystem as the disseminators and curators of current research and digitised historical archives. Perhaps not unlike cultural centers and museums, I believe we will help our research collections discover new audiences through online channels, in turn bringing new minds and research ideas back to the university.

References

1. Hall, M. (2012, November 1). Green or gold? Open Access after Finch. Insights, 25(3), 235–240. doi.org/10.1629/2048-7754.25.3.235. [CrossRef]OpenURL Brunel University

2. Walters, D., Ritchie, M. & Kilb, M. (2015). Presenting at NASIG 2015 - CRIS Power! Taming the reporting requirements of Open Access. Presented at the NASIG 2015 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://openfutures.blogspot.com/2015/07/presenting-at-nasig-2015-cris-power.html

Institutional services as drivers for a transition to open scholarship: a presentation at the altmetrics 2:AM conference

Back in October I presented at the altmetrics 2:AM conference in Amsterdam in the 'altmetrics and open science section'.

The causal effect to the impact of scholarly outputs disseminated under an open model may be mirrored in the statistical analysis provided by Altmetrics. We at Brunel University London have a longstanding commitment for open access to our research outputs, going back over ten years. A single campus, community focused institution, our services and systems been tailored to support our scholars and effect cultural change during the transition toward open scholarship.

I talk about how the evolution of our systems deployment has led to a support network that facilitates University publishing for new, open forms of scholarly output and that enables the monitoring of traditional published outputs through green, gold or paywall distribution models. Our publishing systems include an Institutional Repository (IR) and FigShare Data Repository. Our Current Research Information System (CRIS) provides the mechanism to monitor publication trends across our entire portfolio.

With the monitoring of open academic activity fully supported by the CRIS along with partner services Cottage Labs, DOAJ, Sherpa and Core, I  outline how we developed a small centralised service around these tools tailored to foster engagement and to transform dissemination practice across our community.

Alongside the proliferation of social tools for researchers has been the growth of alternative metrics. From our services at ground level we are well positioned to comment on the divide that exists between those researchers who actively use their social media networks to promote the discovery of their output and those who don’t.

I discuss our ‘Altmetric for Institutions’ setup, which monitors the records held in our CRIS. I will demonstrate how this information is shared with authors, research managers and marketing to benefit different areas of institution, but in particular how this provides a powerful visual prompt to users of our service who may be unsure about the academic return of the open movements in real terms.

We are beginning to see how the data we work with every day could be used to extend the discovery of our academics work and to promote the institutions reputation in this space. We curate a huge range of high quality metadata within our CRIS; keywords, subjects and themes to name but a few. We want to see better ways of using this data to select and promote our publications across the social sphere – ideally making use of and developing our existing local networks and the networks of our researchers, and I will speak to our progress in this area so far.

I will conclude by arguing that the clear, mutualistic relationship between the altmetrics and open science movements necessitates effective co-operation with local university services to bring about a smooth and swift transition for authors to the open scholarly model.

Impressions of 2:AM

​It's been 5 years since the subject of ‘altmetrics’ was incepted ​through a manifesto, and brought forward into academic consciousness. The second annual altmetrics conference, 2:AM, was held this year at the science park in Amsterdam.

Altmetrics intend to measure impact of scholars and scholarly documents not captured by traditional bibliometrics, which are usually restricted to counting peer-reviewed journal articles and citations within them. The diverse set of altmetrics are mostly derived from social media but sometimes expand to online events that have existed long before the web 2.0 context, such as mainstream news media, policy documents, library holdings and downloads.

As a movement it has wider ambitions. It seeks not only restrict its function to counts and measures, but also to apply authentication to social engagement. This has implications for the way that research is accepted by the academic community and the way ideas are communicated and filtered for discovery. Against this background, there was discussion around the validity and meaning of social media metrics in scholarly context as well as the sustainable and op​en access to impact data.

It’s an interesting event with dramatic implications for the future of research. For those who might be interested in attending in the future, there is an opportunity to apply for a travel grant. Most delegates were able to get access to this fund to support attendance.

Presenting at NASIG 2015 - CRIS Power! Taming the Reporting Requirements of Open Access

DAVID WALTERS

Presenter

MONIQUE RITCHIE

Contributor

MEGAN KILB

Recorder

This article will available in the NASIG 2015 conference proceedings. It's based on the presentation I delivered at NASIG Conference this year "Building the Digital Future".

Walters began the program by providing background information on Brunel University London to contextualize the challenges the library faced in supporting open access at their institution. The university is a single university campus in West London with 13,504 students, 2454 staff, and £23.7 million in grants in the 2013-2014 fiscal year.1 The single geographically contiguous campus helps foster a well-established sense of community among faculty, staff, and students, and the library resides in the heart of campus. The university has made impressive strides in recent years and has done well operating within the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF), a national exercise for research institutions that determines funding allocations from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). This in turn drives academic excellence and demonstrates the global impact of the UK research base to the world at large.

Like many higher education institutions across the UK, staff at Brunel have been working diligently to ensure that university researchers are complying with both the recommendations set for in the Finch Report and other national mandates.2 The Finch Report recommended that publicly-funded research be published as gold open access. Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) both established funding mechanisms to enable researchers at participating universities in the UK, including Brunel, to pay the article processing charges (APCs) necessary to disseminate their research through a gold open access model. Additionally, in 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) mandated that all research papers included in the next REF exercise must be available in a repository via a green open access dissemination model in order to be eligible for submission.3 These updated recommendations and mandates, along with the new streams of income, required institutions to invest staff time and administrative resources in tracking research outputs and associated funding affiliations, and ensuring that each article in question, indeed, became open access upon payment to the publisher and/or was deposited in the institutional repository or mandated subject repository. Compliance with funders’ expectations is essential to ensure future grant applications are not put at risk. Non-compliance could negatively impact an individual academic’s career and limit the research undertaken by institutions.

The library quickly realized that the time involved in the administrative tasks necessary to support the open access recommendations of the Finch Report and accompanying national funding initiatives quickly eclipsed the time available for other tasks and services. In particular, the library desired to play a greater role advocating for open access to university researchers to help bring about lasting cultural change and widespread adoption of open access at Brunel. The library has a dedicated research team poised to support these tasks and visionary services, but they found themselves in a reactionary position, needing to create and respond to the university community with administrative services to facilitate authors’ compliance with the new policies. Typical tasks and services included checking licenses, populating the institutional repository, monitoring budgets, and tracking the status of individual articles on spreadsheets. While important, the demands of operating these services, did not allow library staff to directly engage with end users as fully as they would like, forcing them to find new ways of communicating efficiently and effectively with researchers.

To better ensure and monitor compliance with these new recommendations, many universities in the UK have deployed a Current Research Information System (CRIS), a database used to monitor academic output alongside the universities’ internal business systems. The data extracted from a CRIS can be examined across different scales, from the academic department, to an interdisciplinary research group, all the way down to individual authors. The data is often useful across all levels at the university, from individual researcher teams and department heads, up to university administrators for both decision-making and advocacy. The heart of the system is based on research output, but data is also fed in from local business systems, such as the university’s human resource database, any databases that track grant receipts and funding, along with other traditional purchasing system data. Relating the information within the CRIS architecture provides a much richer system of data reporting that would otherwise require a significant amount of manual work to compile and normalize.

Although the CRIS touches all areas of the institution, the library was a logical sponsor and administrator for the tool at Brunel. Library staff are familiar with their local academic communities and are accustomed to building information services and responding to research needs for these communities and the university at-large. University researchers and administrators quickly leveraged the data from Brunel’s CRIS to better showcase the university’s research output. Library staff at Brunel were quick to embrace the advanced data ingest and reporting features of their CRIS implementation and quickly realized the system’s potential to curtail the staff time associated with the administrative tasks of managing open access compliance across the university.

Brunel uses Symplectic’s product, Elements, for their CRIS system which pulls in custom data feeds from other services via APIs, such as Scopus, Web of Science, and subject-specific repositories, along with institutional instances of ORCID and figshare, a sister company to Symplectic, used to host Brunel’s open access research data, to provide a richer research information data set that will expand the scope of applications for the data. For instance, library staff were able to harvest publication-level metadata records from Elements and deposit that data in the institutional repository, BURA (DSpace) along with the full-text of the corresponding article, while sending this data to various campus units to be used for the university’s REF report in 2014. These additional data feeds, along with the tool’s native reporting features, allow library staff to quickly create custom reports for internal and external audiences. 

<figure1 – A representation of the CRIS Architecture at Brunel>

Library staff implemented a CRIS-led data-managed approach to support the facilitation aspect of open access services. Library staff wanted to manage the data more effectively by making best use of existing data sources to curtail administration time and give scalability to the administrative tasks that support the service requirements. Additionally, the library was interested in simplifying the administration process and achieving a greater level of understanding of the university’s publications data over different dimensions, particularly in the area of open access dissemination. 

At Brunel, existing open access publications data serves a range of diverse applications. Holistically, these collections of data could be described as a jigsaw containing a number of distinct components with clear relationships and interdependencies that can be pieced together to meet service requirements. . Some are data sources maintained by the research community and are accessible via the Web, some data feeds are available locally from other university units through the CRIS system, and for others, library staff have had to create and define the collection of remaining data requirements. Uniting all these data feeds within the existing CRIS infrastructure helped support the development and implementation of library open access services. 

The library adopted a multi-phase approach to populating the CRIS and using its data to analyze research output and design research services. Brunel linked data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ),4 the SHERPA-RoMEO database of publishers' policies on copyright and self-archiving5, and Open Article Gauge APIs to its institutional records, which enriched the institutional data sufficiently to allow Brunel to monitor dissemination trends at different levels of scale across the university’s portfolio. This, in turn, informed the library’s service response in real time, enabling evidence-based conversations with departments or researchers needing help with understanding and applying the open access mandates of their funding agencies and navigating the services available at the university to support compliance with the mandates. 

During the second phase, library staff created a transactional relational database so that open access funding and information requests for accepted manuscripts could be funneled into a coherent, shared workflow. Locally held records are ultimately linked to, and therefore updated by, records from the enhanced set of CRIS data, giving staff direct access to high quality metadata and attributes like publication dates and licenses, which are available post-publication for reporting, thereby obviating the need for time-intensive data entry. Syncing data across these systems was a critical step that allowed data on research outputs to be mapped to its corresponding financial data, thereby reducing the amount of time and energy library staff devote to creating reports for external funding bodies, like RCUK, and internal progress reports for university administrators. 

The third and most recent phase of CRIS deployment at Brunel involved proactively identifying funding organizations from the acknowledgements section of the Scopus and Web of Science databases. By extracting and analyzing this data, library staff identified publications by Brunel researchers that were subject to an open access mandate. This proactive approach allowed the library to innovate and build services around this data, ensuring Brunel’s researchers’ timely compliance earlier in the research lifecycle across a huge spectrum of funders, which is not exclusive to the requirements of RCUK and COAF. 

Walters provided some results and charts from the enhanced set of CRIS data. Figure 1 breaks down Brunel’s open access data across its publications portfolio, illustrating the scope of open access at the institution, which goes far beyond the boundaries of the library. Walters noted that Brunel sees far more gold open access publications over the course of a year than requests for funds, which makes perfect sense, considering that in the UK many non-RCUK funders now support costs for gold open access through mechanisms not visible to the library. The relevant financial statements are also modeled in Figure 2. Access to this data at such a high level allowed library staff to generate several reports looking at different areas to enable effective financial management, another difficult aspect of facilitation. 

<figure2 – Open access articles from automated tool results, 2013-2014>

<figure3 – Open access articles from automated tool results, 2013-2015>

<figure4 – Approved payments – estimated, soft, confirmed, 2013-2014>

Walters also touched on the future services that might potentially emerge from this kind of data-led approach. Applying Altmetrics data points towards the potential to develop new services that actively promote research and discovery alongside the university’s institutional brand. For instance, tweeting relevant papers on timely topics – elections and other current events – helps contextualize the university’s academic research for both a scholarly and non-academic audience, while increasing research impact at different points in the research lifecycle. Again, the university CRIS is ideally placed to support this endeavor, containing as it does the rich metadata required to identify and extract relevant papers, for example through keywords and subject areas.

Walters asserted that the library staff’s roles and tasks must be rebalanced in order to effect the cultural change we wish to see within our institutions. This rebalancing can be achieved through effective analysis of CRIS-provided data combined with specialized, authoritative data services maintained by the community. Much of the library’s resources thus far have been devoted to the administrative work of supporting open access at Brunel. By successfully leveraging the data and functionality of the university’s CRIS, library staff have been able to reduce the amount of time spent on facilitating the administration of open access, thereby allowing them to focus on developing targeted outreach initiatives to specific departments on campus and investing more energy in advocating for open access on Brunel’s campus. Taking the necessary steps to build a culture of open access takes time and requires that library staff invest energy in building and maintaining relationships with both academic departments and other administrative units across campus. Taking the time to engage researchers with library services that support open access is just as critical as the facilitative and administrative tasks, if not more so, in leading this cultural change in the scholarly community.

During the question and answer portion of the session, Walters answered many questions related to CRIS databases, confirming that they are not usually open source. Most of the major CRIS vendors offer different tiers of access and modules with additional functionality. Brunel additionally had a basic CRIS implementation, but then received support to purchase the reporting and open access module to maximize the utility of the system. The system has become fundamental to the library’s work. In response to the enormous pressure to drive up research standards and hold researchers accountable for the grant funds they have received, most universities in the UK either have implemented or are in the process of implementing a CRIS. At Brunel, the library has taken a real leadership role in managing this data, implementing and funding the campus instance of the CRIS system with full support from the University’s executive board and senior management. The library receives grants from funding bodies for open access, which can in part be used to develop new services to support open access at Brunel. The library was intentional in engaging the campus research office, since it is difficult to move ahead on such a large-scale project at a university without that support and collaboration. Populating and managing this system has also been a great opportunity for library staff to curate public metadata to a high standard. Walters speculated that the library might be the only unit on campus with the resources to engage with the data deeply enough to ensure accurate reports and effective decision-making. Walters also noted that Brunel has an institutional implementation of ORCID, which is managed via CRIS, eliminating the need to manage data in and transfer it between multiple systems.

As libraries across the UK grapple with the best approaches in managing and reporting research trends at their institutions, many of them are turning to CRIS solutions to integrate research metadata with data from local financial and human resources systems. While these powerful tools have the potential to craft compelling narratives about the research impact of a university’s scholarly output, librarians are most energized by the potential of the datasets to articulate the need for new research services and conversations that will advance the culture of open access across the UK.  

---------------------------------

1. Brunel University London, “Financial Statements: Brunel University London 2013-14 in numbers (infographic)” (London, England: Brunel University London, 2014), accessed 30 July 2015, http://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/398069/finance-annual-report-2013-infographic.pdf
2. Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, Janet Finch, “Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications” (London, England: Research Information Network, 2012), accessed 29 July 2015, http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf.
3. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), “Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework: Updated July 2015” (London, England: HEFCE, 2014), accessed 30 July 2015, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2014/201407/
4. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): https://doaj.org/
5. SHERPA-RoMEO database of publishers’ copyright policies and self-archiving: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Presenting at UKSG 2015: CRIS Power! Taming the service requirements of Open Access

Speaking from UKSG 2015, I share the results of applying institutional publications records with data from partners Cottage Labs, Sherpa, DOAJ, CORE and AltMetrics in support of open access service requirements at Brunel University London and King’s College London.

The presentation was broadcast live over the internet on 30/3/2015 at 17:00.

The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEkc-oEwv_0

The video is also available from https://tv.theiet.org/?home (go to 'Partners/UKSG2015)

The presentation can also be found on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/Dav1dW/presentation-5-46928488

The presentation program can be found at http://www.uksg.org/sites/uksg.org/files/UKSG%2036pg%20Conference%20Programme%202015_AW_lo-res.pdf

-----------------------------------------------------

An overview:

UKSG is an organisation spanning a wide range of interests and activities across the scholarly information community of librarians, publishers, intermediaries and technology vendors. In the past they were heavily focused on serials but today are continually expanding to support the new emerging framework of scholarly communication. As well as a one-day conference, forum and many other courses and webinars made available for the information community, they annually host their main conference up and down the UK - this year in Glasgow. Brunel has institutional membership with UKSG.

It's a great opportunity to share practice and experience with colleagues from different institutions experiencing the same turbulent change. It's also a great chance to catch up with old faces.

Brunel was well represented this year by with myself and Ola in attendance. With different areas of focus we were able to cover the vast majority of sessions on offer. There was a very heavy focus in the plenary and breakout talks on open access, RDM and new innovative outputs and platforms from the publishing world.

I presented a lightning talk on the work being done in administering and developing our open access services, which was a great chance to promote the good work being done by Brunel. It sparked lots of interesting conversations with like minded delegates. I expect these new contacts to be helpful to us as our services mature and develop.​ A recording of my presentation was made and it's available at the link here if you would like to see it.

Given the rapid pace of change it's vital for research library communities to connect in this format in order to meet the challenges efficiently and head on! UKSG provides an excellent platform for this.​

-----------------------------------------------------

Odd bits:

Please find below a few photos and other odd bits from the conference:

Being interviewed by IET TV

Merchant Square in Glasgow City Centre

Scottish band with Scottish Highland dancing,,, of course!

Lombard plenary main stage

A Conceptual Data Model for Open Access Publications data and APC funding requests

The model

This illustrates the data model implemented for a system at Brunel and King's College London to better facilitate services for open access for authors.

JISC Monitor, a webinar, an update and some commentary

I’ll try and keep this brief. An update on this will be forthcoming on the JISC Monitor blog and the audio of the webinar will also be made available. For details on the project so far visit the blog here and the space on GitHub here. Aims of the project are to meet JISC requirements on monitoring open access/APC expenditure using a format that is achievable and makes best use of data capture available

Monitor so far

There are two parts to this project:

1. Registry of all UK research publications
2. APC administration system at institutional level

Outcomes of the project so far include:

• GUIDE ‘Getting useful IDs early’ 
• Best ways of capturing and storing data, e.g. when is it available in the overall ecosystem
• Ways of improving data over time

Monitor Publications Registry (Richard Jones of Cottage Labs)

A prototype is available for online testing here.

So far Monitor has been working with aggregated data provided by Stuart Lawson through the JISC APC spreadsheet. The prototype allows you to break down expenditure by publisher/publication and this can be limited to institutional level. You can see the average APC price as well as min/max/avg spent against other institutions.

This raises some interesting questions like why is the average price not consistent across different institutions and this might help form a basis for discussion at future negotiations.
In the short term they are focusing on three reports that they believe will be of most interest and use to stakeholders:

1. Expenditure by publisher
2. Expenditure by institution
3. Gold publications and compliance

Spend across institutions

Min/Max and Avg APC Article Cost

This data has been applied to the Sherpa FACT API for compliance information. The preconditions for checking this data require a FACT funder (RCUK/COAF) along with a publication. This has already revealed a large number of compliant green options available with these publications.

APC administration

Workflow

Lots of work is being done in terms of scoping requirements and identifying processes. The project is primarily centred on tracking OA journal publications. So far there is no software but a working specification that should address some of the problems facing administrators in managing OA publishing grants.

The scope of the project is to:

• Ensure information from publication of open access outputs are being captured correctly
• Ensure APC funding is being used appropriately
• Ensure appropriate decisions are being made
• Internal/External reporting, requiring data output in a flexible manner
• Outputs other than journal articles

This flow diagram describes the overall process of publication, paying for publication and identifies points of data collection. It was noted that in practice administrators often arrive in this workflow at different points, e.g. when the author requires an invoice to be processed for payment.

Conceptual data model

This conceptual data model illustrates how this workflow can be captured. The dark blue tables illustrate that academic output (and associated cost) is at the heart of the data captured by the system. Other tables are designed to handle other associated administration tasks concerning payment

The core requirements are that the system is centred on outputs and tasks. Data capture and entry must be easy and where possible make use of local finance systems, Cross ref, ORCID, Sherpa etc. The system must be locally configurable to meet requirements at institutional level.

Wireframes

Numerous prototype wireframes for user interaction (forms etc) have been developed and will be made available soon. This shows a list of APCs. All attributes can be used to filter and sort this list as required. It’s a list of academic output that has been submitted to the system.

Filter and sort list as required

This screen illustrates an ability to track progress against tasks

Note tabs which breakdown administration

Going into a record shows a breakdown of tasks by authors/article/funding/finance/compliance. This was influenced by in-house systems developed by UCL and Imperial, as well as other use cases and workshops in the specification development. They are also following the ‘End-To-End’ and ‘Good Practice’ JISC pathfinders.

My comments

Monitor Publications Registry

The data this is based on suggests a focus on COAF and RCUK funders, although I understand that HEFCE is also a key consideration. Sherpa FACT, however, is only applicable to COAF and RCUK so it's not yet clear how the project will make use of ROMEO data in order to monitor REF compliance. Surely repository information will also be a requirement here?

Average cost does not appear to distinguish between use of prepayment accounts, memberships or Nesli2 discounts. The system 

The method of aggregation is not yet clear. Where and how will this data be sourced? How will they deal with duplication? How will GUIDE be used?

APC administration

The framework for the data capture seems sound but it's not clear how use of external data sources will be used to standardise the process (list of publishers/funders etc). Unclear how system would interact with internal college finance systems for payment.

Recording negotiation that sometimes goes on between authors/publishers/librarians for compliant archiving of papers into required subject repositories?

Will funder entity also include subj repository requirements? Can the system check if these have been met or assist with this aspect of compliance?