'OA in the REF' workshop : Building bridges

Fresh from the excitement of Repository Fringe 2015 the Jisc Pathfinder Lessons in Open Access Compliance (LOCH) partners and representatives from HEIs all over the UK met in Edinburgh on 5th August to learn from the experiences of project partners and each other.

Queensferry Crossing - north cable tower © Copyright M J Richardson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Sarah Fahmy, Jisc Open Access Good Practice Manager, welcomed delegates and discussed the challenges Open Access poses for HEIs - absolute costs, administrative costs, system interoperability, the problem of low awareness, publisher and funder policy confusion and the international dimension.

Project partners presented their institution's Open Access challenges and solutions. Anna Krzak gave a fascinating talk on the devolved model of support at Edinburgh's College of Medicine. The following workshop explored models of support that can help researchers navigate Open Access policies. Common themes emerged included the importance of establishing a dialog with researchers and other stakeholders in Schools and Units, making sense and sense-making and resourcing. 

The programme outputs from all projects are available from the Open Access Good Practice blog and the presentations and notes are available from Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA):

Storify run-down of the event
Notes from the workshop session
Presentations

Sarah Fahmy Jisc
Linda Kerr Heriot Watt
Jackie Proven St Andrews
Dominic Tate Edinburgh
Anna Krzak Edinburgh Open Access Administrator in CMVM
Rowena Rouse Oxford Brookes

Our lives in a year of Open Access support

As part of our contribution to the Jisc Pathfinder project Lessons in Open Access Compliance for Higher Education (LOCH), the Library has now published its case study. A year in the life of Open Access support: continuous improvement at University of St Andrews tells the story of our engagement with the University's well-established Lean method to streamline OA processes and how this impacted on team activities. It is hoped that along with our partners' case studies this will help in defining an Open Access support service within higher education institutions that face a range of different challenges. Since publication on 3 April there have been 92 downloads of the study which is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

From the Case Study: Mapping the interim state of Open Access at St Andrews, May 2014

All that glisters is not gold

Chaired by Sir Bob Burgess this independent review covers the first 16 months of RCUK's Open Access policy April 2013-July 2014. Although this seems a bit early, the review panel felt it was necessary to gather a baseline of evidence.  The timing also underpins its conclusion - that it's too early to properly assess many of the policy's impacts, particularly on embargoes and licensing.  This is the first of several reviews within the 5-year transition period. It is also the first since the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee published its September 2013 report criticising RCUK's preference for Gold Open Access.  The panel does not challenge RCUK's Gold preference, instead advocating a mixed Gold/Green model.

Detail from cover: Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access
Licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution 4.0 International Licence

The thread of limited data collection for an evidence base runs through the report and the panel felt it relied on opinion more than it would have liked. This confirms the health warning in the St Andrews Compliance Data Report:

One particular area of difficulty is actually capturing complete and accurate information about all the publications which arise from Research Council-funded research.

Key recommendations

• Compliance monitoring - improve data collection, mandate the use of Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs) in grant applications, introduce the possibility of including monographs in a future review.
• Communication- improve dialogue between RCUK and researchers, publishers and HEIs, promotion of the mixed Green/Gold model and authors' right to choose the most appropriate publication.
• Embargoes - more evidence to be collected, particularly in relation to reasonable embargo periods for Humanities and Social Sciences publications.
• Licenses - CC-BY licenses are necessary for compliance and publishers should make authors aware of this default requirement at the point of need.
• Administrative effort and costs - promotion of best practice sharing between HEIs and encourage use of standard terminology by publishers to avoid confusion around their policies. 
• Block grant - exploration of using the block grant to incentivise less research-intensive institutions who nevertheless publish high quality research; likewise exploration on whether particular departments and disciplines within HEIs might be disadvantaged in the current allocation.

The RCUK Executive will respond to the recommendations shortly.  The next review will be in 2016. 

Although St Andrews is not listed in Annex C, it did contribute written evidence. St Andrews is already working with Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt on the Jisc LOCH Pathfinder project to establish and promote best practice.