Rumours, Bargains and Lies: How to advocate Open Access repositories more successfully

In this workshop seminar delivered twice at the CoFHE/UCR 2006 conference the author explored aspects relating to successful advocacy of Open Access and repositories. Areas covered included preconceptions on the part of academics and support staff, as well as models of implementation of an advocacy programme. A large portion of the material pulls together experience and narrative evidence from the SHERPA Consortium partners and repository administrators; with a particular focus on their successes and failures and the lessons that have been learned.

Can open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals coexist?

It is often assumed that open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals are in competition with each other and therefore will in the long term be unable to coexist. This paper takes a critical look at that assumption. It draws on the available evidence of actual practice which indicates that coexistence is possible at least in the medium term. It discusses possible future models of publication and dissemination which include open access, repositories, peer review and journals. The paper suggests that repositories and journals may coexist in the long term but that both may have to undergo significant changes. Important areas where changes need to occur include: widespread deployment of repository infrastructure, development of version identification standards, development of value-added features, new business models, new approaches to quality control and adoption of digital preservation as a repository function.

A mandate to self archive? The role of open access institutional repositories

This paper argues that the best way to achieve major improvements in scholarly communication in the short and medium term is to make it mandatory to deposit research papers in open access institutional repositories. This is what the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report of 2004 on scientific publishing recommended. The paper defines what open access repositories are and explains why they should be institutional. It also deals with question of what should be deposited in institutional repositories and why these improve scholarly communication. It then deals with the issue of mandating deposition: why deposition should be mandatory, who should mandate deposition and who should carry out deposition. The paper concludes with an analysis of the wider implications of mandating deposition in institutional repositories and a summary of the existing situation in the UK and elsewhere. The paper discusses the Select Committee report and the UK Government response in relation to institutional repositories.

Open Access Repositories & Scholarly Publication

This presentation briefly covers some of the issues around Open Access as it pertains to institutional repositories in the UK higher educational sector. It includes an overview of the current activities of SHERPA, along with the benefits, concerns and potential resolutions of issues in the open access sector. Some speculation as to future trends and developments in scholarly publishing and open access is included. The presentation is in no way comprehensive, and is intended to give an overview of the subject to a general audience who will be engaged with academic and scholarly publishing on a variety of levels.

A Wel(l)come development: research funders and open access

This paper discusses the implications of the Wellcome Trust agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer in which authors of accepted papers are able to pay an open-access publication charge to make their article freely available online. In bringing together flexible licence terms and clear funding streams, the agreement has the potential to be used as a way of migrating towards possible new business models for journal publishing. It also has the potential, if implemented more widely, to deliver greater open access in such a way as to work in the interests of a broad range of stakeholders.

Libraries and open access: the implications of open-access publishing and dissemination for libraries in higher education institutions

This chapter discusses the consequences of open-access (OA) publishing and dissemination for libraries in higher education institutions (HEIs). Key questions (which are addressed in this chapter) include: 1. How might OA help information provision? 2. What changes to library services will arise from OA developments (particularly if OA becomes widespread)? 3. How do these changes fit in with wider changes affecting the future role of libraries? 4. How can libraries and librarians help to address key practical issues associated with the implementation of OA (particularly transition issues)? This chapter will look at OA from the perspective of HE libraries and will make four key points: 1. Open access has the potential to bring benefits to the research community in particular and society in general by improving information provision. 2. If there is widespread open access to research content, there will be less need for library-based activity at the institution level, and more need for information management activity at the supra-institutional or national level. 3. Institutional libraries will, however, continue to have an important role to play in areas such as managing purchased or licensed content, curating institutional digital assets, and providing support in the use of content for teaching and research. 4. Libraries are well-placed to work with stakeholders within their institutions and beyond to help resolve current challenges associated with the implementation of OA policies and practices.

Open Access through the Depot

The mission of "the Depot" is to provide a service that enables all UK academics to share in the benefits of open access exposure for their post-print research outputs. It does this by providing a national intake and storage facility - the Depot - for use by any UK academic in Higher Education. This article describes the Depot and the service it provides.

O! She doth teach the torches to burn bright: How JULIET can help authors and repository advocates.

JULIET is a service provided by SHERPA. Its mission is to provide a brief summary of each funding agency’s policy on self-archiving of the published research they have funded. Each entry covers the requirements and details: -Whether archiving is mandatory or encouraged, -What should be deposited -Within what time frame this deposit should take place -Where articles should be deposited -Any conditions attached to this deposit. JULIET interacts with other services such as RoMEO, which listed publisher policies on self-archiving. JULIET is being developed to include funding agency’s policies on open access to data.

SHERPA and Institutional Repositories

The SHERPA project (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) has been set up to encourage change in the scholarly communication process by creating open-access institutional "e-print" repositories for the dissemination of research findings. This article looks at the terminology involved with such repositories and at the issues that such repositories raise for their construction and use. It reviews the advantages of having an institutional basis for a repository and identifies the key issues that have arisen so far in project work.

Self-archiving publications

This chapter discusses the historical development, current practice and future prospects of the self-archiving of research papers in open-access repositories (so-called 'e-print archives'). It describes how the development of interoperable e-print repositories in a number of subject communities has shown that self-archiving can benefit academic researchers (and potentially others) by enabling quick and easy access to the research literature and therefore maximising the impact potential of papers. Realising that the possible benefits are high and the technical entry barriers low, many organisations such as universities have recently tried to encourage widespread self-archiving by setting up institutional repositories. However, major barriers to self-archiving remain - most of them cultural and managerial. There are concerns about quality control, intellectual property rights, disturbing the publishing status quo, and workload. Ways in which these issues are currently being addressed are discussed in this chapter. A number of self-archiving initiatives in different countries have been set up to address the concerns and to kick-start e-print repository use. However, issues remain which require further investigation; those discussed in this chapter include discipline differences, definitions of 'publication', versioning problems, digital preservation, costing and funding models, and metadata standards. The ways in which these issues are resolved will be important in determining the future of self-archiving. Possible futures are discussed with particular reference to journal publishing and quality control. If widely adopted, self-archiving might come to assume a central place in the scholarly communication process, but a great deal of restructuring of the process needs to take place before this potential can be realised.

RoMEO Studies 8: self-archiving: the logic behind the colour-coding used in the Copyright Knowledge Bank

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to show how the self-archiving of journal papers is a major step towards providing open access to research. However, copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that are signed by an author prior to publication often indicate whether, and in what form, self-archiving is allowed. The SHERPA/RoMEO database enables easy access to publishers' policies in this area and uses a colour-coding scheme to classify publishers according to their self-archiving status. The database is currently being redeveloped and renamed the Copyright Knowledge Bank. However, it will still assign a colour to individual publishers indicating whether pre-prints can be self-archived (yellow), post-prints can be self-archived (blue), both pre-print and post-print can be archived (green) or neither (white). The nature of CTAs means that these decisions are rarely as straightforward as they may seem, and this paper describes the thinking and considerations that were used in assigning these colours in the light of the underlying principles and definitions of open access. Approach – Detailed analysis of a large number of CTAs led to the development of controlled vocabulary of terms which was carefully analysed to determine how these terms equate to the definition and “spirit” of open access. Findings – The paper reports on how conditions outlined by publishers in their CTAs, such as how or where a paper can be self-archived, affect the assignment of a self-archiving colour to the publisher. Value – The colour assignment is widely used by authors and repository administrators in determining whether academic papers can be self-archived. This paper provides a starting-point for further discussion and development of publisher classification in the open access environment.

Journals and repositories: an evolving relationship?

It is now widely accepted that there are two routes to open access (OA): OA repositories and OA journals. It is often assumed these are distinct alternative parallel tracks. However, it has recently become clear that there is potential for repositories and journals to interact with each other on an ongoing basis and between them to form a coherent OA scholarly communication system. This paper puts forward three possible models of interaction between repositories and journals; services such as arXiv and PubMed Central, and the work carried out by the RIOJA project, are working exemplars and pilot implementations of these models. The key issues associated with the widespread adoption of these models include repository infrastructure development; changing ideas of the ‘journal’, ‘article’, and ‘publication’; version management; quality assurance; business and funding models; developing value-added features; content preservation; policy frameworks; and changing roles and cultures within the research community.