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.

Impact of open access on teaching

During this year's Open Access Week, BioMed Central highlighted a number of open access articles that address questions of impact on society. Having just caught up with the collected tweets, we are delighted to see an article in BMC Bioinformatics by St Andrews authors Daniel Barker et al. mentioned as a way that open access can benefit the public:

.@univofstandrews lecturers use @raspberrypi & #OpenAccess materials to teach bioinformatics http://t.co/PZLjSxUdKw #OAWeek #imFact
— BioMed Central (@BioMedCentral) October 23, 2013

The article is about teaching bioinformatics to biologists at the University of St Andrews with a low-cost computing environment, and an embedded open access course:

By including an explicit Open Access licence, and removing or replacing material incompatible with this from 4273π Bioinformatics for Biologists, we have been able to share it with anyone interested, the world over, in such a way that they can – with minimal care – re-use and adapt it without accusation of plagiarism or copyright violation.

The article is of course open access itself, paid for by the University's membership of BioMed Central

The full list of stories are available from the BioMed Central blog

Spreading the word on public engagement

A group of researchers at St Andrews recently published an assessment of their public engagement activities in the open access journal PLoS ONE. One of the authors, Mark Bowler stated:

It's great to have it in a high impact open-access journal so that zoos can access it freely as well as universities.

Not only have they made sure that the results of their research can be accessed by anyone, the authors have promoted their work in a guest blog post for the Wellcome Trust: The Science of Public Engagement. The blog highlights the point that 'while assessment of engagement is increasingly a requirement for some funders, it is still far from the norm'. It also describes the continuing importance to researchers of having their research peer reviewed and published on a recognised platform.

See the article on the University of St Andrews Research portal and of course in our repository Research@StAndrews:FullText

Bowler, M., Buchanan-Smith, H., & Whiten, A. (2012). Assessing Public Engagement with Science in a University Primate Research Centre in a National Zoo PLoS ONE, 7(4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034505
(This research was supported by a Wellcome Trust People Award to Prof Andy Whiten.)

UK alliance backs Open Access

The Wellcome Trust has announced the formation of the UK Open Access Implementation Group to " coordinate evidence, policies, systems, advice and guidance, to make open access an easy choice for authors and one that benefits all universities."

The high level group is chaired by Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor at the University of Salford who spoke at the recent Future of Research conference, and includes senior members of RLUK, the UK Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust. They aim to drive debate and maximise the impact of UK research.