FEATURE Open access
have thrown up several key issues including difficulties in identifying accepted articles, a key step in the OA process flow now notoriously known as ‘point-of-acceptance’. Other issues include monitoring compliance, tracking deposits in subject repositories, uncertainties over audit requirements including what exactly HEFCE means by an exception. ‘A few institutions raised the issue that they didn’t know what number of exceptions were acceptable,’ highlights Fahmy. ‘HEFCE has since updated policy to say this isn’t an issue, but we have a pathfinder project, led by University College London, that’s looking at how institutions can evidence a good approach to logging an exception.’
No doubt as the open access journey continues, pathfinder projects will continue to chip away at the issues, and for its part Jisc is also developing a dizzying array of packages to support OA repositories and more (see Jisc open access projects and services).
For example, so-called Sherpa services provide help at the point of submission. Sherpa RoMEO provides an analysis of publishers policies for authors’ rights when using OA repositories, while Sherpa RED will advise on compliance. Further along the open access process, Jisc Publication Router will direct content to the appropriate repository while Jisc Monitor will help institutions to track OA publication processes, especially with reference to compliance and costs.
And come pubication, RIOXX Guidelines Green or gold?
From word go, the 2013 RCUK policy has leaned towards the gold open access route, rather than the green route. Indeed, if a researcher follows the gold route, he or she publishes the final version of work in an open access journal, which is freely available via the publishers’ website immediately. In contrast, the green route, or self- archiving, sees the researcher publishing his or her work in a journal and then depositing the final peer-reviewed manuscript in an institutional repository, such as ePrints, or central repository, such as arXiv or PubMed Central. What’s more, access may be subject to an embargo, depending on publisher policy. Clearly the two are quite different, and as RCUK Research Outputs Network chair, Mark Thorley puts it: ‘Anything with an embargo period is not open access, its delayed access.’
‘In the world we live in we should be looking for research that is open and immediate access, and re-usable as of the date of online publication, now six, twelve or twenty four months down the line.’ And while many favour green open access, experience indicates this route demands a sturdy infrastructure between publishers and repositories to process peer-reviewed manuscripts. Still, the gold route demands article processing charges (APCs) in the region of £1,000 to £2,000, that do not apply to green open access. However, the RCUK can provide funds, and as Thorley emphasises: ‘A green repository model that still relies on subscriptions is just a transition mechanism. We have to find a more robust and open way of dealing with access.’
42 Research Information OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 Researchers will soon have to ensure that their peer-reviewed research is widely available to anyone with an Internet connection
and Application Profile provides a mechanism for institutional repositories to comply with the RCUK policy on open access, supporting the consistent tracking of OA publications across scholarly systems. CORE also provides the text and data-mining interface for all open access literature from repositories and some journals. As Fahmy’s colleague, Neil Jacobs, head of scholarly communications support at Jisc, puts it: ‘Take RIOXX, I think it’s fair to say that before we developed this, most repositories encoded information in a fairly idiosyncratic way and there were interoperability issues.’ ‘We hope [the tool] will standardise this,
and also help with other policies, such as the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme,’ he adds. ‘From an institutional point of view, there is a lot to open access and it really matters to institutions that they get it right.’
For his part, Jacobs is confident that the tools and services are coming together so institutions can begin to comply with OA policies, more seamlessly: ‘We have compliance, interoperability and issues such as these, so there’s work to do, but it’s not an amazing amount of work,’ he says.
Case-in-point, a recent independent study from several funding bodies including RCUK and the Wellcome Trust, on Jisc’s Sherpa/Fact tool, revealed positive results. This funders and author’s compliance tool was found to be more than 95 per cent accurate when checking publisher policies against funder mandates for open access.
Such results indicate that step by step, progress on fulfilling the latest OA policies is being made, and as the RCUK’s Mark Thorley asserts: ‘This is all part of what research means in an Internet age.’ ‘We have to make the outputs of our research more easily accessible,’ he adds. ‘Come 2020, we’ll be a lot further down the road and my hope is innovative new business models to disseminate research will have started to come through.’
Relevant URLs
RCUK OA policy:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/ openaccess/
HEFCE OA policy:
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/oa/Policy/ JISC services for OA:
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/open-access
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
JISC/Matt Lincoln
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