From darkness to the light: raising the visibility of St Andrews research on the internet

"That’s why I filed the paper into PURE – the system does a great job of making materials widely visible." Dr Philip Roscoe, Reader, School of Management

PURE and Research@StAndrews:FullText have served as the University's research information system and Open Access repository for a number of years. As the mechanisms for curating and surfacing the University's research they also provide data and feeds that Schools can configure to present Open Access publications. A good example is Jennifer Kerr's and Mary Woodcock Kroble's work on the School of Management publications pages that also list theses and feeds into individual researcher profiles. The School of Classics was one of the first to incorporate PURE web services feeds and repository links into its web pages to present its publications lists dynamically. Dedicated IT staff  like Jennifer and Mary work within Schools to extract data from central services and present it in ways that showcase publications in attractive and appropriate styles for their research disciplines. This makes more efficient use of research publications data and allows Schools to build on developments in central services to present data dynamically instead of maintaining static lists of publications. We encourage Schools to consider using these services to make their research more visible and to support Open Access. Above all, we hope these services encourage researchers to deposit into PURE to raise their profile and the visibility of their publications on the internet.  PURE and Research@StAndrews:FullText are under active development.

PURE deposits
The Research Policy Office offers advice and training on accessing and using the PURE system and can provide more information on web services for School IT staff.
The Open Access and Research Publications Support (OARPS) team can help with questions about publication deposit, Open Access and PURE web services open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk
Our Theses web page provides support and contact details for questions about theses deposit and locating St Andrews theses.

Open Data is an increasingly important aspect of Open Access that researchers need to consider. The St Andrews Research Data Management website provides detailed information on funder compliance, policy, data management plans and other aspects of managing research data.

Repositories: extending the reach of research

Repositories such as our own Research@StAndrews:FullText are a great way to increase the visibility of research. It is also a way to extend the reach of research to those unable to afford the pricey subscriptions demanded by many publishers.

A great example of the benefits of depositing manuscripts in Research@StAndrews:FullText is Forgiving you is hard, but forgetting seems easy: can forgiveness facilitate forgetting? by Saima Noreen,  Raynett Bierman, and Malcolm David MacLeod.

The paper can be found in Research@StAndrews:FullText here http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4779.

Many people won't go directly to our repository to find content, but will instead rely on Google. The Google search results clearly show the favourable rankings of Research@StAndrews:FullText; of the 30,000 results the repository is ranked 2nd. So, someone looking to read the article might be inclined to click on the first link and go to publisher source first. However, upon clicking that link, unless they have a subscription they will be met with a pay-wall. This pay-wall is particularly expensive at $35 for a mere 24 hours!

So, repositories like Research@StAndrews:FullText provide the second option: an accepted manuscript with all the same information as the published version, but free of charge (and with no time constraints!)

5000 items celebration notable deposits

Following the post on our 5000th item readers might be interested in some deposits into Research@StAndrews:FullText occurring at the same time that stand out for various reasons in terms of their publication paths:

REF deposits
1. User support for managed immersive education : an evaluation of in-world training for OpenSim
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6047

This article was sourced by the Library in preparation for the introduction of the HEFCE Open Access requirement for REF admissibility. In this case the 3-month window from the point of acceptance for deposit doesn't apply, as the policy does not start until 1 April 2016.

Embargoes ending
2. New class of metal bound molecular switches involving H-tautomerism
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6050

This accepted manuscript has just been released from publisher embargo. As it was deposited within 3 months of acceptance it would satisfy the HEFCE Open Access requirement.

3. Development of autobiographical memory in children with autism spectrum disorders : deficits, gains, and predictors of performance
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6045

4. China's resource diplomacy in Africa : powering development?
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6046

3&4 are both articles published by Cambridge University Press and recently out of embargo, deposited as publisher pdfs which was permitted under its old policy. CUP last year changed its policy and the version of record is no longer permitted on institutional repositories. This shows that publisher policies need to be constantly monitored - work that is done within the the Library Open Access and Research Publications Support Team (OARPS).

Gold OA
5. The use of genome wide association methods to investigate pathogenicity, population structure and serovar in Haemophilus parasuis
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6074

6. Selective modification of the β-β linkage in DDQ-treated Kraft lignin analysed by 2D NMR spectroscopy
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6056

7. Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6053

5-7 Are all Gold (author pays) articles that have been published under the most liberal Creative Commons licences (CC-BY) often mandated by funding agencies. HEFCE does not mandate a particular licence under its policy.

This publication route means that the version of record can be deposited into Research@StAndrews:FullText; in these cases the author’s accepted manuscript is still archived in our system to show compliance with the HEFCE Policy, but the final Open Access article can be added later.

Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS-UK) downloads*
We have previously blogged about IRUS-UK's role supporting the work of institutional repositories.  As a University Library we want to see St Andrews research publications optimally available. The figures below give some idea of the most popular content downloaded January 2014 - January 2015 (downloads in brackets):

Sex differences in impulsivity: a meta-analysis (980)

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2161
A new metric for probability distributions (819)
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1591
Retrospective power analysis (715)
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/679
Mediaeval and modern concepts of race and ethnicity (694)
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1869
Hypervalent adducts of chalcogen-containing peri-substituted napthalenes; reactions of sulfut, selenium and tellurium with dihalogens (618)
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1918

Source: IRUS-UK Article Report 4 (AR4)
*IRUS-UK collects raw usage data from UK IRs and processes these data into COUNTER-compliant statistics. This provides repositories with comparable, authoritative, standards-based data.

We now have 5000 items in the repository!

We’ve reached another milestone! We now have over 5000 items in the repository, with a variety of research outputs including theses, reports, books, chapters, journal articles completely free and available for anyone to read.

We have reached this milestone in only 6 months, whereas the previous 1000 milestones took around 12 months. The graph above reflects the recent upsurge in activity. This is largely a response to two recent policies that have helped to reshape the UK higher education publishing landscape. Firstly, Research Councils UK (RCUK) produced an open access mandate requiring RCUK funded authors to make their research outputs open access either by paying an Article Processing Charge (APC) for "gold" access, or by depositing an accepted manuscript in a repository ("green" open access). RCUK later requested a report by institutions who had received a block grant to fund APC payments. They wanted to see where the money had been spent and how much impact the money was having on open access compliance. The library produced a report in September 2014 that showed our compliance rate at 71%, which comparatively speaking was excellent. This involved a lot of communication between the Open Access team and academic colleagues to ensure that those with RCUK grants knew about  the open access requirements. The reaction from the academic community was very positive, and this is reflected in the 71% figure.

The second big motivator contributing to the increased activity is undoubtedly the HEFCE open access policy for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF).  In a nutshell, the policy states that articles and conference proceedings must be deposited in a repository when they are accepted for publication in order to be included in the next REF. Although the policy doesn’t come into effect until April 2016, the Open Access team has been working hard over the past few months promoting the message, and ensuring that the research community is compliant well in advance. The Open Access team have delivered presentations at Physics and Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Economics & Finance, Management, Computer Science, Philosophy, and History. We have also been invited to Earth & Environmental Sciences and Medicine. In support of the presentations we have also been communicating the message through email, having contacted over 80 authors in 16 Schools and Departments across the University.

Copyright Stephen Ritt, CC-BY-SA

We continue to have electronic deposit of our postgraduate research theses into Research@StAndrews:FullText according to University regulations, and the 5000th item in the repository was the PhD thesis A phenomenological-enactive theory of the minimal self, authored by Brett Welch. The thesis presents a fascinating study of self-hood derived from two areas of research: phenomenology and enactivism. To mark the occasion we will be sending a copy of the book Open Access and the Humanities by Martin Paul Eve to Brett at his home in the United States. Martin Eve's book is available open access from the publisher's website and in print form.

The repository holds theses going back to 1949 and, at the time of writing, theses account for 35% of the content, totalling 1,752 items. David Collins is the thesis contact in the OARPS team, and the person responsible for archiving and mediating the deposit of most of the thesis content in the repository. The work involved in obtaining permissions to archive theses is complex and requires a great deal of time and effort. But the rewards for doing so are great as it increases the visibility of the theses and also showcases the high quality postgraduate research the University of St Andrews is famous for.

In the preface to Martin Eve's book, Peter Suber (who's book entitled Open Access is also available freely from publisher) writes about the difference in open access uptake between the humanities and the sciences. He suggests that the reason the humanities have been slower to adopt open access has nothing to do with lack of desire, but is rather because there are fewer working examples of open access in the humanities to prove that it works. We think that it is safe to say that Brett's thesis adds to the body of working examples we have collected in the repository, and, hopefully, it can prove to be an inspiration to others.

Well done to Brett!

The Repository: helping to feed the impact of research

Over the years, the OARPS team has spent a great deal of time acquiring academic manuscripts and releasing them to the world through the repository.

Much of our current work involves assisting academics with complying with funder open access mandates. For instance, the RCUK mandate states that RCUK funded research papers should be made Open Access either by choosing "Gold" and paying an APC charge, or by choosing "Green" and uploading the accepted manuscript of the final article to Pure (and then the library can transfer the paper to the repository).

Presently, the team focus has incorporated the new HEFCE open access policy for the next REF as well. The HEFCE open access policy states that in order to be eligible, the accepted manuscripts of articles and conference proceedings (with an ISSN) must be deposited in a repository. The HEFCE open access policy does not come into effect until 2016, but we are tying to push the message now so that we are 100% compliant by that point.

With both these cases the result is more content in the repository. But with deposit being imposed from on high the other benefits of depositing can sometimes play second fiddle. In light if this, we have chosen to show some of the usage metrics from a recent article in the repository. We hope this demonstrates that archiving in the repository can greatly benefit the Impact of research.

A great example is The meanings of chimpanzee gestures which received a lot of media attention when it was published. The authors deposited the accepted manuscript for the article into Pure, which then allowed the OARPS team to get the manuscript into the repository.

Here are some of the repository usage stats for the article:

With statistics like this you have to read between the lines a little bit, but one thing they definitely show is that the article received a lot of attention in July (this was when the article was being covered in the media). Crucially, the stats also tell us that the vast majority of those visiting the page ended up downloading the document. This reliably indicates that the majority of people visiting the page did not have access to the publisher version.

So, with the manuscript in the repository a wider range of people, who do not have a subscription to the journal, can read the full article. This means it can be distributed more widely through society, thus widening the reach of the paper and helping to feed the impact of the research.

Scottish Journal of Performance now available in the repository

This week the Open Access team archived the first two issues of the Scottish Journal of Performance (SJoP). SJoP is a peer-reviewed postgraduate-led Open Access journal published by The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

CC-BY 4.0 Scottish Journal of Performance

We were lucky enough to get Ben Fletcher-Watson and Thomas Butler from SJoP to speak at the open journals workshop held in Parliament Hall last week. Just to recap, last week the University hosted a workshop called Managing Journals: Challenges and Opportunities. The workshop brought together journal editors and managers, with varied perspectives and editorial practices, to speak about their experience of running locally operated journals. The presentations delivered by Ben and Thomas gave a fascinating insight into a truly unique journal which comprises of more than just text, but also multimedia such as videos, images, and soon audio.

In his presentation, Ben mentioned the need to preserve the journal in as many places as possible. With this in mind, Ben requested that the library archive SJoP articles in the institutional repository. This has the dual benefit of giving the journal an additional permanent storage location as well as potentially increasing readership by offering another access avenue. When uploading content to the repository, we also enhance the metadata and add elements such as subject headings and classifications, which further increases the discoverability of content.

You can read the SJoP articles held in the repository here: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/5513

New Open Access Button Launched

CC-BY 4.0 (Open Access Button)

The new Open Access Button has landed!

 
The Open Access Button project was started by a group of students who were frustrated by the paywalls they came up against when searching for research material. To try and tackle the issue, they created an app that documents and shares the experience of coming up against a paywall. The app they produced stores details such as who hit the wall, what they were trying to access, and for what reason. The app also records where the paywall was hit on a world map. The new Button builds on previous functionality by adding a great new feature called Your Wishlist which keeps a list of any research you failed to gain access to.

 "The Open Access Button will be used to support data driven campaigns and tell stories to support Open Access and fix the long-term issues that stop people getting the research they need."  (Open Access Button)

Here's how it works:

CC-BY OAB

Step 1.  When you come up against a paywall push the button (after downloading the app of course)

CC-BY OAB

Step 2. The Open Access Button will then search for an immediately accessible Open Access version, such as those held in our repository. If it cannot locate anything, the Button will email the author and request a copy.

CC-BY OAB

Step 3. Share your experience with the community.









The beta Open Access Button, released in November 2013 (launch covered here), recorded over 10,000 instances of people finding useful research hidden behind a paywall. The team behind the Button are hoping to increase the impact of the button by introducing a suite of new apps including dedicated Chrome and Firefox web-browser apps, as well as a specific app for Android operating systems.

Why not have a go and download the Button, either for your mobile or computer, and start documenting paywalls you come across. And don't forget to share your stories as well!

Historians look to an open access future

Quick update from your OA support team

On the first day of Open Access Week 2014 we made a visit to the Postgraduate Early Modern and Modern History Forum. Despite the fact that the attendees had yet to begin their publishing careers, we were invited to talk about routes to open access, funder policies, and 'how open access might affect the way early career academics go about publishing'. The students were particularly interested in hearing about the benefits of open access, such as enabling reuse by readers without journals subscriptions, easier referencing through social media or translation into other languages. They were also keen to know how they can go about depositing their work in Research@StAndrews:FullText, given that students currently don't have access to the University's Research Information System, PURE, which handles the deposit process for publications.

We will take this feedback on board, and look at ways we can meet the needs of our new 'Generation Open'. As we continue visiting Schools around the University, lets hope the other disciplines are as forward-thinking as the historians!

4000 items milestone: Featured researcher - Dr Nicole Hudgins, University of Baltimore

As we continue to highlight the recent contributions to our growing research repository, we are reminded how the streets of Paris looked 100 years ago this month.

Paris Police photograph captioned, ‘August 1914. Arrival of refugees from the Nord and from Belgium.’ MHC/BDIC.

[Image source: Identité judiciaire (August 1914). MHC/BDIC.]

This image comes from the latest Open Access book in the series St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture: Hold still, Madame: wartime gender and the photography of women in France during the Great War, by Nicole Hudgins. This volume presents a fascinating study of the way female images were used in wartime France, and how photography and captioning presented images of traditional and non-traditional traits such as distress, devotion and toil.

Nicole Hudgins, Assistant Professor of History at University of Baltimore, liaised for over 2 years (across the Atlantic!) with the series Editor, Dr Guy Rowlands, former Director of the Centre for French History and Culture at University of St Andrews, to bring the book to fruition. A significant amount of work was involved in ensuring the work could be made available under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence. Nicole gave us an insight into this work:

The editors of the series posted a call for volumes on H-France a couple of years ago, which I happened to see.  I was interested in writing about French civilians during the war, and this interest evolved into a focus on representations of women:  There was little need to catalogue the new roles picked up by women during the war, but no one had written about how photographs were used to represent women in a particular light as part of the war effort.  Gender played a significant role in the French war effort.

Except for one meeting at a professional conference, Dr. Rowlands and I never saw each other, but racked up probably hundreds of emails over the course of my research, writing, and preparation for digital publication.  We used Dropbox to pass the manuscript back and forth.  Fortunately, the bulk of the photographs for this book come from French national collections and period magazines in the public domain., though of course we had to take extra care in preparing an open access work.  This being a book about photography, I’d venture to say that it contains more images than all the other volumes in the series combined.

The resulting book provides a fascinating visual narrative, from images of distress at the outbreak of war in 1914:

Agence Rol photograph captioned, ‘Refugees from Paris waiting at Dieppe for a boat to England’ (1914). BNF/Gallica.

[Image source: Agence Rol (1914). Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Gallica]

Devotion - capturing the fantasy rather than reality:

Photo-illustrated postcard by ‘J. K.’ entitled, ‘The dream of the Chasseur’ (postmark is 1916). Municipal Archives of Mussy-sous-Dun (Bourgogne).

[Image source: http://www.decouvrezmussy.org/rubrique%20histoire/cartespostales.htm]

To representations of women taking to the world of work (1917/18):

French Army photograph captioned, ‘Paris: Workshop of the Metropolitan [Paris subway system], rue des Maraîchers. Laborer [ouvrière] employed in the repair shop’ (1917).

 [Image source: SPA photograph in Album Valois (28 Mar 1917) MHC/BDIC]

Photo halftone illustration in Le Miroir magazine, entitled, ‘Responding to German Aerial Raids’ (1918). Subtitled ‘Acetylene welding of a large torpedo used with Allied aircraft,’ the caption explained how for ‘several weeks Allied aviation has affirmed its superiority not only on the front, during incessant offensive expeditions, bombardments and reconnaissance, but also in the numerous raids that are executed on German cities, train stations and factories, reprisals for enemy expeditions on our open cities. British aircraft, notably, deploy daily. Here is a torpedo of which our aircraft can take a number of specimens.’

[Image source: Le Miroir (21 July 1918, p7)]

Nicole went on to say:

My home institution, the University of Baltimore, and I are thrilled that my book can be studied by anyone in the world at any time.  Readers can enlarge the images for a closer look, or search the text for words and phrases.  I really think St. Andrews is at the forefront of academic publishing’s future.  They’ve seen how to reduce expense and bottleneck in order to bring the latest historical research to a wide audience.

We are delighted to see that the book has had over 70 downloads from our repository Research@StAndrews:FullText already and that she chose this route for publication. The full series is available from the repository and from Centre for French History and Culture website.

Learn more about the author at http://www.ubalt.edu/cas/faculty/alphabetical-directory/nicole-hudgins.cfm

4000 items milestone: Featured researcher: Dr Fabiola Alvarez

In recent weeks we have been celebrating reaching 4000 items in the repository by showcasing some of the researchers who have been instrumental in attaining the milestone. We have already highlighted DR. Kim Mckee, Professor Derek Woollins, and Professor Alexandra Slawin for their invaluable input. In this blog we will be shining the spotlight on another researcher whilst also highlighting a highly important aspect of our repository: E-theses.

© University of St Andrews

Since September 2006 the University of St Andrews has required all theses to be submitted electronically to the repository. This has the advantage of making the details of research outputs immediately visible. In most instances the full text is also made available, thus increasing the visibility and impact of the research. One such thesis is The Scottish national screen agency: justifications of worth by Dr Fabiola Alvarez.

© University of St Andrews

Dr Fabiola Alvarez attained her PhD earlier this year. Her doctoral research was concerned primarily with the demise of the Scottish Screen agency for Scotland which was disbanded in 2010. In her thesis, Fabiola came to the conclusion that the incompatibility between different forms of valuation within the agency and among its stakeholders played a role in its demise, and specifically there were internal disagreements over the worth of projects which caused conflict over funding decisions.

We approached Dr Alvarez for her thoughts on Open Access:

"The thoughts that come to mind about open access is that it was definitely useful to me during my years as a PhD student (which obviously are still very fresh in my mind) and it continues to be so now that I'm working on my first academic paper. I hope that, by the same token, the possibility to easily access my and other people's work will be useful to others - not only students and academics, but also people working in other domains who, like me, would like to see a growing rapprochement between academic and non-academic activity."

© Scottish Screen

© Creative Scotland 2014

Creative Scotland has since taken the responsibility of distributing funding for Scottish creative arts. It is interesting to see that this year Creative Scotland set out a 10 year plan which aims to provide a "shared vision for the arts, screen and creative industries in Scotland". Although it is not clear whether academic research influences public bodies, the value of such research being Open Access is that it helps to create further research and might positively influence public policy and decision making in the future – Fabiola’s vision of harmonious “academic and non-academic activity”.


So, from all of us in the Open Access and Research Publications Support (OARPS) team, thank you Dr Fabiola Alvarez for your contribution to the 4000 celebration.

4000 items milestone: Featured researchers - Professor Derek Woollins FRSE FRSC and Professor Alexandra Slawin, FRSE, FRSC, School of Chemistry

Research in Chemistry moves fast. Professors Derek Woollins and Alexandra Slawin between them have recorded over 1200 articles in our Research Information System, PURE. Over 100 of these have been deposited in Research@StAndrews:FullText to make them available Open Access. As our researchers with the highest number of OA publications, we are delighted that Derek and Alex agreed to be interviewed to celebrate our 4000th item milestone, the second post in our series.

Alex recently had her 1000th paper published (and keeping track of all that is quite a task!). There is a good reason for this rate of publication- new compounds are constantly being developed and their 3D structure analysed by X-ray crystallography leading to further development. So high is the rate of research output in the field that keeping up is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s impossible to read everything. Instead keyword searching and matching new research effort to compounds with known structures are driving the direction of research. As Alex pointed out the dynamic research environment also poses practical challenges such as tracing data and lines of research when students and staff move on.

In this research environment where does Open Access (OA) stand?

“To a certain extent OA is an extra piece of work and doesn’t change how we are publishing in mainstream journals in any case”, says Derek

"We're still in the transition zone with various external drivers and changes we need to be aware of. We've got to deposit in PURE, but it's hard to get a clear picture of the overall OA environment. Southampton led the way in e-publishing its research and this may have helped them to advance significantly in the league tables."

“But to do the work and not publish it? You might as well not have bothered - Open Access makes it more published.”

Do you find there are any advantages in OA publishing?

“People outside of chemistry may not have enough specialist knowledge to take full advantage of OA in our discipline. My experience with journalists is that they can easily misinterpret or misrepresent research. OA may get a few people who don’t have access to the journal interested, so they can have a more informed response. Widening access to research is enabled through various schemes, for example much of Africa gets free access to many journals. 10 years from now, it might make more difference. Right now, it’s likely to have more resonance with the general public in Humanities and Social Science.”

Do you find Open Access easy?

“I like PURE, but platforms such as ResearchGate are preferred by many academics for their prompts and ease of upload”, says Alex.

“People should just be accepting that it’s part of the publication process”, says Derek.
“There is a need to get OA into our culture, as Open Data will be even more demanding; people have just got to get into the habit of doing it. There are anomalies such as publisher restrictions on abstracts, which are rather absurd.”

“We do all the work; we referee the papers, mostly unpaid. It’s [subscription model publishing] a disaster as a model. However, I think publishers are still going to have the upper hand in the end. What the publishers provide is a refereeing moment. Self-publishing, for example, wouldn’t work for research assessment and OA could potentially wash out all that impact factor stuff”

“As an Editor for Elsevier for 10 years I understand that more journals mean more profit, as the number of subscribers to individual journals generally never increases. Journal subscription costs are rising to cover increased costs. And there is also the problem of the Learned Societies who make more money from journals that from membership fees - there is a lot of fear factor among societies and publishers and uncertainty among academics.”

“But do you think it’s worth 5 minutes of your life? Because that’s all it takes. It’s not really a complicated thing*. I just don’t see why people wouldn’t do it.”

“We are going to be in a world where people are assessed. They should make a real effort from Day One, not just for the University, but for themselves. It’s just another form of networking. It’s just going to happen.”

“We need to up people’s interest in it. Some will assume they’re excluded from it. But there will be a moment when the EPSRC ask about papers that might influence whether we get £1M for a new piece of equipment. It’s not an immense amount of staff time. If they spent an hour on it one evening, that’s not too much.”

Derek takes up his role as Vice Principal Research in January 2015. The accepted manuscript of his article Isolatable organophosphorus(III)-tellurium heterocycles published in Chemistry A European Journal will be made available from Research@StAndrews:FullText 16 December using the University’s preferred Green publication route. However, you can access the paper now using the link above, if you have a subscription to the journal.

The Library Open Access and Research Publications Support (OARPS) team would like to thank Derek and Alex for their time and sharing their views on Open Access.

*To find out how to deposit your own work in Pure, contact the team open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk!

4000 items milestone: Featured researcher - Dr Kim McKee

Recently we hit the milestone of 4000 items in the University's research repository: Research@StAndrews:FullText! That is over 4000 full text research papers and theses available to read free of charge anywhere in the world without the paywall barriers that usually accompany academic research.

It is also great to see that this milestone was reached in less than 12 months compared with the 13 months the previous 1000 milestone took to reach. This really shows the hard work over the past year from everyone involved in the research publication process, whether in research or support. So, we in the Open Access team would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has assisted in reaching this milestone.

To celebrate we decided to analyse the content in the repository, to identify authors with the highest number of OA papers, those with individual items that took us to the 4000 mark, and the authors that have the highest percentage of their publications in our repository - what we are calling the ‘OA Ratio”. Over the next few weeks we will be posting blogs about individual authors highlighted during our analysis of the repository.


The researcher with the highest OA Ratio, and the subject of this first blog post, is Dr Kim McKee.
 

Kim is a lecturer in the School of Geography and Geosciences, and is also Director of the Centre for Housing Research. Kim is also a keen user of social media, using twitter and a blog to advance her views on social and urban policies.
 

Kim stood out during our analysis as she has an astonishing ratio of 57% Open Access content! That is, 57% of Kim's authored content in the Research Information System (PURE) is Open Access and freely available for anyone in the world to read. The nature of Housing Research makes Open Access a natural choice; as the Centre for Housing Research website states: "It is pivotal to our ethos that our research has wider social benefits."

The statistics for Kim's research held in the repository reflects this desire for wider social impact. One particular article, Post-Foucauldian Governmentality, is the fourth most downloaded paper of all the Open Access publications in PURE in the past year, and the fifth most viewed. As the figures below show, publishing in the repository can have a significant additional impact.

We approached Kim McKee for her thoughts about Open Access and the recent milestone, and this is what she had to say:

"I’m delighted to hear I have the highest Open Access Ratio in PURE!  As a researcher engaged in policy-relevant research in the fields of housing and social policy, it is really important to me that my work reaches a wider audience beyond the academy.  Open Access is a really easy and accessible way for me to make my work freely available to colleagues in policy and practice who may not have institutional subscriptions to academic journals.  But it also benefits me as an author by increasing the visibility of my research in the public domain, and maximising the likelihood of it impacting and influencing policy agendas.  I think Open Access and Social Media (e.g. blogging, tweeting) are the future of academic publishing, and I would encourage all academics to think about how they can take this forward in their own work.  Advancing and sharing knowledge is at the heart of what we do as researchers, and Research@StAndrews can really support and enable this process whilst also protecting intellectual property and copyright."

It is very inspiring for us to see a researcher really embracing the fundamental principles of Open Access. It is especially nice to see as this quote really crystallises the feeling we have regarding the growing level of support for Open Access across the University as a whole.

Kim went on to say: "Having the library on hand to help, makes it much easier for authors to do open access properly."

From everyone in the Open Access team thank you Kim for your words of encouragement, and well done attaining the henceforth sure to be coveted and sought after Highest OA Ratio award!


Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting other researchers who have made significant contributions to the ever growing research repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText. Watch this space!