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.
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
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