Queen's University Belfast, RCUK Open Access Compliance Report 2015/2016

Queen's University Belfast has submitted its open access compliance report to the RCUK for 2015/2016. Queen's receives an annual open access block grant from RCUK. The funds are made available to support universities in meeting the requirements of the RCUK open access policy, in particular meeting the cost of article processing charges (APC) to make articles open access through the publisher.

Professional service productization and its implications to knowledge transfer in internationalization processes –Case: Company X in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian markets

As a result of globalization, two thirds of the world’s business takes place nowadays in the service sector. In line, professional service firms are growing their share of the global service production. However, saturation of the professional service sector has forced professional service firms to search for more heuristic ways to conduct business in the international markets. By leveraging effectively the firm’s professionals, a professional service firm can lower its costs to clients and simultaneously generate additional value for the company and thus gain competitive advantage. Even though the academic field has shown growing interest towards services for decades, the fields of service productization and service internationalization are heavily understudied even today. Hence, the objective of this study was to contribute to the research on professional service internationalization and productization. The study concentrated on examining the impact that productization has on knowledge sharing and leveraging in professional service firms operating internationally. The research question focused on examining what implications productization has on knowledge transfer and leveraging during professional service internationalization by leaning on the existing research and on an empirical research. The empirical research was conducted as a single case study within a professional service firm operating in debt-related administrative service business. The case company is one of the leading operators in its field of business and therefore offered a fruitful environment to observe and analyze the topics in question. Additionally, the case company has a strong international presence and a large scale of operations in the selected markets, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Based on the previous literature and on the empirical research, this study found that for professional service firms to efficiently utilize individual, tacit knowledge, in its internationalization processes, it must be shared with the whole organization. By exploiting productization as a knowledge leveraging mechanism, a PSF can apply and transfer knowledge profoundly during its internationalization processes that would otherwise be difficult to tap into. Productization might not be sufficient alone, but by complementing it with a favorable organizational structure and culture, and by encouraging open communication, a PSF may take advantage of the whole potential that productization has to offer.

Monitoring Compliance with Open Access policies

In the last few years, academic communities have seen an increase in the number of Open Access (OA) policies being adopted at the institutional and funder levels. In parallel to policy implementation, institutions and funders have also been engaged in developing mechanisms to monitor academics and researchers compliance with the existing OA policies. This study highlights a few of the cases where compliance is being effectively monitored by institutions and funders. In the first section, Open Access is briefly overviewed and the rationale for monitoring OA policy compliance is explained. The second section looks at best practices in monitoring policy compliance with OA policies by funders and institutions. The case studies reflect on compliance with the UK Funding Councils and the USA National Institutes of Health OA policies. The third section makes recommendations on what processes and procedures universities and funders should adopt to monitor compliance with their OA policies. The final section recapitulates some of the key ideas related to monitoring policy compliance.

Regional Challenges in Achieving Open Access and Proposed Recommendations

Working Together to Promote Open Access Policy Alignment in Europe

Open Access in the UK Briefing on the UK Open Access Case Study

Open Access (OA) policies have been adopted at the national, institutional and funder levels in the UK and various infrastructural support mechanisms are available to facilitate open access. In July 2012, following an independent study on ‘Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications’ the UK Government announced its OA policy. The Government’s policy determines that ‘support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by Article Processing Charges (APCs), [i]s the main vehicle for the publication of research’. At the same time that the UK Government announced its OA policy, the UK’s major research funder, the Research Councils UK (RCUK), revised its OA policy announcing its ‘preference for immediate [Gold] Open Access with the maximum opportunity for re-use’. In March 2014, the UK Funding Councils announced their OA policy for the post-2014 Research Evaluation Framework (REF). The policy requires the deposit of peer-reviewed article and conference proceedings in repositories (Green OA) and is applicable from 1 April 2016. By and large, two distinct OA routes are being promoted by the UK Government and RCUK (Gold OA) and the Funding Councils (Green OA). This scenario requires that continued efforts are made to ensure that advice and support are provided to universities, academic libraries and researchers on the distinct OA policies and on policy compliance. The UK research institutions have been adopting OA policies from as early as 2003 and there currently are 85 institutional OA policies. Despite distinct OA policies having been adopted by policymakers, national research funders and research institutions, the UK’s movement towards OA has been a result of stakeholders coordinated efforts and is considered to be a case of good practice.

The impact of Open Access outside of European Universities

The Open Access movement has encouraged the availability of publicly-funded research papers, data and learning content for barrier-free use of that content without payment by the user. The impact of increasing availability of content to researchers in European universities is understood in terms of easier access to previous research and greater exposure for new research results, bringing benefits to the research community itself. A new culture of informal sharing is evident within the teaching and learning communities and to some extent also within the research community, but as yet the growth in informal sharing has not had a major effect upon the use of formal publication choices. This briefing paper explores the impact of open access upon potential users of research outputs outside the walls of research-led European universities, where the economic value of open access may be even greater than the academic value within universities. The potential impact of open access is understood in many communities but requires a greater volume of open access content to be available for the full potential to be realised. More open access content will become available as the opportunities in open, internet-based digital scholarship are understood. This briefing paper was written in cooperation with SPARC Europe. All links provided in footnotes in this Briefing Paper are to studies available in open access.

Preparing for the Research Excellence Framework: Examples of Open Access Good Practice across the United Kingdom

This article concerns how higher education institutions across the United Kingdom are implementing systems and workflows in order to meet open access requirements for the next Research Excellence Framework. The way that institutions are preparing is not uniform, although there are key areas which require attention: cost management, advocacy, systems and metadata, structural workflows, and internal policy. Examples of preparative work in these areas are taken from institutions who have participated in the Open Access Good Practice initiative supported by Jisc.

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.

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.

Usefulness of social tagging in organizing and providing access to the web: An analysis of indexing consistency and quality

This dissertation research points out major challenging problems with current Knowledge Organization (KO) systems, such as subject gateways or web directories: (1) the current systems use traditional knowledge organization systems based on controlled vocabulary which is not very well suited to web resources, and (2) information is organized by professionals not by users, which means it does not reflect intuitively and instantaneously expressed users’ current needs. In order to explore users’ needs, I examined social tags which are user-generated uncontrolled vocabulary. As investment in professionally-developed subject gateways and web directories diminishes (support for both BUBL and Intute, examined in this study, is being discontinued), understanding characteristics of social tagging becomes even more critical. Several researchers have discussed social tagging behavior and its usefulness for classification or retrieval; however, further research is needed to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate social tagging in order to verify its quality and benefit. This research particularly examined the indexing consistency of social tagging in comparison to professional indexing to examine the quality and efficacy of tagging. The data analysis was divided into three phases: analysis of indexing consistency, analysis of tagging effectiveness, and analysis of tag attributes. Most indexing consistency studies have been conducted with a small number of professional indexers, and they tended to exclude users. Furthermore, the studies mainly have focused on physical library collections. This dissertation research bridged these gaps by (1) extending the scope of resources to various web documents indexed by users and (2) employing the Information Retrieval (IR) Vector Space Model (VSM) - based indexing consistency method since it is suitable for dealing with a large number of indexers. As a second phase, an analysis of tagging effectiveness with tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity was conducted to ameliorate the drawbacks of consistency analysis based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Finally, to investigate tagging pattern and behaviors, a content analysis on tag attributes was conducted based on the FRBR model. The findings revealed that there was greater consistency over all subjects among taggers compared to that for two groups of professionals. The analysis of tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity in relation to tagging effectiveness was conducted to ameliorate difficulties associated with limitations in the analysis of indexing consistency based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Examination of exhaustivity and specificity of social tags provided insights into particular characteristics of tagging behavior and its variation across subjects. To further investigate the quality of tags, a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was conducted to determine to what extent tags are conceptually related to professionals’ keywords and it was found that tags of higher specificity tended to have a higher semantic relatedness to professionals’ keywords. This leads to the conclusion that the term’s power as a differentiator is related to its semantic relatedness to documents. The findings on tag attributes identified the important bibliographic attributes of tags beyond describing subjects or topics of a document. The findings also showed that tags have essential attributes matching those defined in FRBR. Furthermore, in terms of specific subject areas, the findings originally identified that taggers exhibited different tagging behaviors representing distinctive features and tendencies on web documents characterizing digital heterogeneous media resources. These results have led to the conclusion that there should be an increased awareness of diverse user needs by subject in order to improve metadata in practical applications. This dissertation research is the first necessary step to utilize social tagging in digital information organization by verifying the quality and efficacy of social tagging. This dissertation research combined both quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (content analysis using FRBR) approaches to vocabulary analysis of tags which provided a more complete examination of the quality of tags. Through the detailed analysis of tag properties undertaken in this dissertation, we have a clearer understanding of the extent to which social tagging can be used to replace (and in some cases to improve upon) professional indexing.

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.

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.

Comparison of access to medicines between Klang Valley and East Coast of peninsular Malaysia for children living in poor households

Purpose: To compare access to medicines in children living in poor households (income of USD1/person/day) between urbanised Klang Valley and rural East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Methods: A semi-structured interview was conducted with caregivers to determine demographics, access to medicines, knowledge, attitude and practice of parents in obtaining medicines for children. Results: There was no significant difference socio-demographically between poor households in Klang Valley (N = 58) and East Coast (N = 40). The study found that access to medicine for children (N = 325) in the households was adequate, where all households that reported illness in the children over the last 1 month and the last 6 month periods, obtained medicines and 99 % of the children were fully immunized. Qualitative analysis showed that poor households face several barriers in accessing medicines for their children such as financial, transportation, physical and attitudinal. Conclusion: Access to medicines for children living in poor households in both areas were similar and adequate. However, barriers to access remain and further studies are required.

Measuring QoS in an aeronautical opportunistic network architecture with limited access to a satellite communications backhaul

We measure quality of service (QoS) in a wireless network architecture of transoceanic aircraft. A distinguishing characteristic of the network scheme we analyze is that it mixes the concept of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) through the exploitation of opportunistic contacts, together with direct satellite access in a limited number of the nodes. We provide a graph sparsification technique for deriving a network model that satisfies the key properties of a real aeronautical opportunistic network while enabling scalable simulation. This reduced model allows us to analyze the impact regarding QoS of introducing Internet-like traffic in the form of outgoing data from passengers. Promoting QoS in DTNs is usually really challenging due to their long delays and scarce resources. The availability of satellite communication links offers a chance to provide an improved degree of service regarding a pure opportunistic approach, and therefore it needs to be properly measured and quantified. Our analysis focuses on several QoS indicators such as delivery time, delivery ratio, and bandwidth allocation fairness. Obtained results show significant improvements in all metric indicators regarding QoS, not usually achievable on the field of DTNs.