Open Access theses and Research@StAndrews:FullText : a personal view

Even as a student studying towards a degree in Librarianship, there are still many services libraries offer which I never learned about at university. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to do a work placement at the University of St Andrews Library as part of the Digital Repository and Open Access team which opened my eyes to just how vital Open Access and the digital accessibility of research theses can be for the academic community and the exchange and creation of ideas.

Open Access – the free access to research publications – has become a central part of academic research practice. The free access to research publications is, however, not limited to journal articles, book chapters, and conference contributions, but includes free access to postgraduate theses as well. 

At St Andrews, postgraduate theses from a wide variety of subjects can be downloaded from the university’s institutional repository Research@StAndrews:FullText– it’s quick, it’s available to everybody, and it’s free!

In the repository, you will find theses from physics and astronomy to mediaeval history, theses published this year and theses published back in the 1950s – one thesis submitted in 1983 has proved particularly popular and has been downloaded 12 times in the week after its full text was uploaded intothe repository.

Imagine your thesis being still highly sought after several decades after you wrote and submitted it – if you’ve always dreamt of your dissertation being read by dozens of interested students and researchers, allowing your postgraduate thesis to be uploaded into the institutional repository might help you make this dream come true! 

Using our institutional repository benefits both those interested in a particular topic and the authors of the postgraduate theses. Readers gain free access to a hitherto largely unused resource of hundreds of postgraduate theses which they can use as inspiration for their own research, while authors are given the opportunity to reach a larger audience, thus raising the awareness of their research. 

Even theses written many years or decades ago at St Andrews could be of great interest today. This is evidenced by the fact that we recently have received requests from EThOS, the British Library’s UK-wide service for the digitisation of PhD theses, to provide them with theses from every decade since the 1950s. (To me, it was absolutely astonishing to see that theses written back in the day of my parents’ time at university were still read today. I finally have proof that they were wrong when they claimed that “nobody apart from your supervisor will ever read your thesis”!)

If you have written a postgraduate research thesis at St Andrews prior to 2007 and would like your thesis to be electronically available in the repository, please get in touch. With your permission, we will be able to digitise your thesis and make it available to others – you never know what brilliant research your thesis might inspire!

Maja Gusavac
(Guest blogger)

St Andrews thesis ranks highly in EThOS downloads chart

We are delighted to report that a PhD thesis written at St Andrews over 30 years ago has been the second most downloaded thesis from EThOS in March 2014.

‘The Gospel of Thomas and the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels’ by Kenneth V. Neller, who sadly passed away in January last year, has been downloaded 18 times this March. Owing to the kindness of Dr Neller’s widow, who gave permission in his name for the thesis to be uploaded as an Open Access thesis to our institutional repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText, we were able to make it available to researchers and students from all over the world.

Dr Neller’s thesis has been downloaded from EThOS by post-graduates, researchers, and teachers from Finland, Brazil, the US, the UK, and Australia.

Following a request made via EThOS by a post-graduate student from Australia, we uploaded Dr Neller’s thesis to our institutional repository last week. Since the upload, ‘The Gospel of Thomas and the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels’ has been downloaded 12 times in only a week – these are truly phenomenal statistics, more than 1 download per day.

We hope that Dr Neller’s thesis will inspire its readers, encourage further research, and that its popularity will motivate other researchers to make their theses publicly available as well. 

Our thanks go to Mrs Neller for kindly allowing us to upload the full text into our repository.

Maja Gusavac 

(Guest blogger)

Workshop on Open Access for St Andrews staff

Do you want a better understanding of what open access means for you? Do you need to know how to comply with your funders' requirements for open access? Would you like an understanding of how using PURE relates to open access publications?

Why not sign up for our course for St Andrews staff:

Open access: publishing options, funder policies, support services and more

Date: Wed 14 May 2014
Time: 1400-1630
Programme: Academic Staff Development Programme

See more details and sign up on PDMS

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/pdms/index.php?Mode=Search&AudienceID=2&CourseID=3968

HEFCE's OA policy: guidance on key issues

Following the announcement by HEFCE of open-access requirements in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework, guidance is being offered to the research community on practical steps towards implementation.

Ben Johnson, Research Policy Advisor, HEFCE and Neil Jacobs, Head of Scholarly Communications, Jisc will deliver a webinar on 15 May 2014.

This Webinar will provide delegates with an overview of HEFCE’s OA policy for the post-2014 REF and the implications on research and the assessment of research. It will also consider what services, tools and guidance are available or are forthcoming to support institutions in the implementation of this policy and what key issues will need to be addressed if full implementation is to be fully realised. 

Date: 15th May 2014
Time: 1400 GMT
Duration: 45 minutes including Q&A

Jisc Open Access Implementation Community Webinar: HEFCE's Open Access requirements for REF
Sign up at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jisc-open-access-implementation-community-webinar-hefces-open-access-requirements-for-ref-registration-11446421555 

HEFCE policy on open access announced

The UK has taken another huge step towards open access of its research outputs, with the announcement of a new policy from HEFCE on behalf of all 4 UK funding bodies. The policy describes new eligibility requirements for outputs submitted to the post-2014 REF.

The policy is interesting in its approach; separating out deposit, discovery and access requirements. It applies to journal articles or conference proceedings (with ISSNs) which are accepted for publication after 1 April 2016, with encouragement for institutions to work towards compliance as soon as possible. Certain exceptions will apply, provided these are justified in the eventual REF submission.

At the heart of the policy is the requirement to deposit publications in a repository within 3 months of acceptance. Bibliographic metadata should be made available to allow discovery by readers, and access to the full text must be provided as soon as possible (unless an exception applies). The full text is expected to be an author’s accepted (peer-reviewed) manuscript, and embargo periods are allowed.

Further details on how to comply and support available for St Andrews researchers will be available soon.

Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework available at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2014/201407/#d.en.86771

Open Access opportunities from a Learned Society and a Cheeky Monkey

It's obvious that Open Access is becoming ever more mainstream when one of the world’s oldest and most reputable publishers is broadening its open access opportunities. Following quickly after the launch of their first purely open access journal Open Biology in 2011, the Royal Society have now announced that they will be launching their second. The new open access journal Royal Society Open Science will cover the entire range of science and mathematics and aims to publish work without the length and scope restrictions observed by more traditional journals. What is of particular interest is that the publishing model aims to offer open peer review as an option, will offer open access to data, implement article level metrics and offer researchers the opportunity to add post-publication comments.

In contrast to the historic Royal Society is the relatively youthful PeerJ, an open access publisher that has invented one of the most daring and innovative open access business models in years. PeerJ uses a model which differs enormously from the major open-access publishers in that the publication fees are levied not per article but per publishing author and at minimal cost.

PeerJ's 'Cheeky Monkey' mascot

Essentially, an author is charged a one-time membership fee that allows them to publish in the journal for the rest of their life. Authors are charged $99 to publish one paper a year, $199 for two papers a year and $299 for unlimited publications per year. Submitted research is judged solely on scientific and methodological soundness and there is a facility to view peer reviews alongside published papers. The PeerJ model is proving increasingly popular with researchers and was judged 'Publishing Innovation' of 2013 by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

The good news is that St Andrews is currently offering its researchers support to publish open access with these two very distinctive publishers. The Library has recently renewed its Open Access membership with Royal Society Publishing and this will continue to give University St Andrews authors a 25% discount on standard article processing charges. Open access charges for Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science are waived by the publishers for an initial period.

We have also initiated a PeerJ Basic Plan for St Andrews authors. The Library will support the cost of individual membership for grant funded and non-funded researchers. The Basic Plan will allow individual authors to publish one peer-reviewed publication per year for life. A quick reminder as well (see recent blog post) that PeerJ are offering a free submission period for authors until 31 March 2014.

For further information contact open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk

Knowledge Unlatched pilot exceeds 200 sign-ups

The Knowledge Unlatched team are delighted to inform us that they have reached (and exceeded) the target of 200 libraries joining their pilot project to share the costs of ‘unlatching’ a collection 28 front-list titles from 13 recognised scholarly publishers.

With sign-ups from 19 countries in 4 continents the pilot has revealed the interest in Libraries worldwide in examining new business models that help to decrease the cost of monograph acquisitions. St Andrews signed up at the start of the pilot as we were also very keen to support this new model for OA publishing.

Here’s a brief explanation of how the model works:

The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF.

The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines. For example:

Access to the Title Fee allows publishers to feel confident that they will not make a loss on a title if it is made Open Access. Publishers are willing to provide libraries with discounts and make books available on Open Access licences if they can be assured that their core costs will be covered.

Due to the success of the pilot, the Knowledge Unlatched team anticipate that the number of sign-ups will continue to increase as will the scope and range of monographs made available for ‘unlatching’. The model is also expected to be financially self-sustaining as the costs of operating the project will be covered by a small percentage of each Title Fee.