This week marked the first Jisc OA Implementation Community (OAIC) workshop which brought together the current, newly commissioned OA Good Practice Pathfinder projects with those from the wider HE community, who have in common interest of implementing Open Access requirements of research funders and HEFCE.
Packing a huge amount of information into one day but allowing for the free-flow of ideas and knowledge, was a challenge, but certainly made for an energetic and pragmatic workshop. It became clear that by bringing together librarians, research managers and other administrators, the OAIC may provide a much needed space for discussion, problem-solving and information sharing.
Each of the current Pathfinder projects were asked to deliver a ‘lightening’ presentation on what made their project unique in terms of its approach to working around the challenges of OA implementation (slides below). In doing so, the considerable range of unique perspectives that each project was using to address the OA challenge was clear. However, a recurring issue was that of potential over-lap between the Pathfinders which would need to be addressed and the sheer complexity of the projects, standards and stakeholders involved at all stages of the process of OA implementation.
With this point in mind, Neil Jacobs (Head of Scholarly Communications) outlined how Jisc was aiming to support the journey of OA implementation through a range of interventions at key stages of the OA workflow (slides). Whilst it was clear that navigating the OA labyrinth was still difficult, the building blocks were being putting in place through the development in IT tools, standards and services, for OA implementation to be integrated into the related workflows and organisational arrangements easily and seamlessly. This message was underpinned in a number of publications that accompanied the workshop that aimed to give a clearer view of Jisc work in the area, which also included a landscape scan of OA policy developments given the speed of change across the sector:
Another example of Jisc’s ongoing support in this area was articulated in the presentation of Jisc APC and Jisc Monitor projects (Jo Lambert and Frank Manista, Mimas), which had been designed to be flexible and responsive to the needs of HEIs, especially with regard to the addressing the challenges faced in remaining compliant with HEFCE’s new OA requirements for REF (slides).
The afternoon session allowed for the chance to reflect on the challenges in more depth, but also to start the rather more difficult task of coming up with solutions. An issue that recurred again and again was that of the importance of advocacy and clarity: advocacy/clarity in the support offered researchers by their institutions and advocacy/clarity in the support offered by funders to support institutions. The distinction was made that whilst researchers were obviously committed to their work being accepted and recognised by REF, this did not always translate into full engagement institution’s policies where they existed and that more effort was needed on sides (including that of the publishers) to have a clear and consistent message to researchers. Related to this, was the issue of work with publishers to make that systems and standards were interoperable.
Other issues included knowing and having copies of research outputs on publisher acceptance (as opposed to publication) as per the HEFCE OA policy; in many cases institutional support staff simply did not know what and when outputs had been accepted as they had not been involved in the submission process. Whilst it emerged that some institutions did already have policies/ processes in place that could cope with this change, this was by no means the complete picture from across the sector with each HEI approaching the issue from a different starting point.
Whilst other challenges were raised, below are a range solutions that the groups considered:
Title of the Solution: OA Engagement
What is the solution?
- Better allocation of resource to advocacy
- Identify new ways to advocate (possibly through the Pathfinders)
(a way to share videos of academics advocating OA, and other resources, eg through youtube / tags, etc)
- Encourage champions, case studies and evidence
- Share the business cases for using RCUK funds
- Please share everything!
- (possible idea might be that all HEIs should (?) implement an openaccess@univ.ac.uk
Who will benefit and how?
- Senior management- reassured re: financial income
- Administrators- more data
- Researchers- more kudos
- Public- more research available
Title of solution: Academic Champions
What is the solution?
- Recruit and incentivise
- Public/ face2face events
- Tell the story of OA usage
- Tell the story of impact and research benefits made possible through OA
- Advocate OA solutions/ options
Who will benefit and how?
- Researchers
- Research office
- PG students
- Library
- Public
Title of solution: Clarity
What is the solution?
Institutions need to take responsibility to provide:
- Staff
- Clarity over requirements
- Deliver systems and support to enable staff to comply
To sum up, the solution can be articulated as: ‘resources’ and ‘institutional lead’
Who will benefit and how?
- Everyone- through more funding, there will be better citations and re/use as well as improved REF compliance
Focus on compliance (with RCUK and HEFCE’s REF requirements), and the mismatch between publishers and funders was also a strong theme throughout discussions:
Title of solution: Adapting autonomous authors on acceptance
What is the solution?
- Every type of output to be submitted to the repository at all stages of the process?
- Reward system for the community
- Linking deposit to progression/ appraisal
- Technical solution around doing something (anything!) on acceptance
- Forward an email, click a link, report back on deposits
Who will benefit and how?
- Researcher- one consistent process
- Institutional research administrators and senior staff: Improved coverage, compliance and equity
- Wider public- greater research coverage to access
An interesting point for Jisc to consider also emerged during discussion i.e. whether Jisc should have a role in defining general system requirements and then perhaps brokering national deals with CRIS/repositories that meet them. Certainly, this is an issue that Jisc was aware of and was taking active steps to investigate further.
The Twitter hashtag for the event was #oagp (OA Good Practice) and this gives a good flavour of the discussion at yesterday’s meeting which are also available at: http://oapathfinder.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/what-can-the-oaic-do-for-you/
A programme of events (workshops, webinars etc) are currently being planned to support the OAIC and will be available through this blog and twitter feed: @OA_GoodPractice
All current Pathfinder project presentations and blog links are available below:
Coventry University (slides)
Associates: University of Northampton; DeMontfort University
– Northumbria University (slides)
Associate: Sunderland University
– Oxford Brookes University (slides)
Associates: Nottingham Trent University; University of Portsmouth
– UCL (University College London) (slides)
Associates: Newcastle University; University of Nottingham
Associates: University of Bristol; University of Exeter; University of Cardiff
Associates: University of Huddersfield; University of Lincoln
– University of Glasgow (slides)
Associates: University of Southampton; Lancaster University; University of Kent
– University of Manchester (slides)
Associates: Edge Hill University; Liverpool John Moores University; University of Liverpool; University of Salford