Author: pstainthorp

WP2 communicating policies – your involvement needed!

The HHuLOA project team are at the National Railway Museum in York today for our good practice event on open access and research development. Before lunch I’ll be giving a 10-minute overview of the work we’ve done in Work Package 2 to break down OA policies into reusable data.

One thing we’re very keen to do next is to involve and work with other projects, and any staff from HEIs and organisations who have an interest, to improve the spreadsheet data and documentation, and to use it to build useful tools and services for people at the ‘sharp end’ of communicating and understanding OA.

We think this might be done in a number of ways:

  1. *By crowdsourcing the spreadsheet (it’s already open for anyone to edit) to improve the quality of the information and to make it more complete – in particular, perhaps, to include more policies from non-UK funders.
  2. Related to (1): to include more of HEIs’ own policies – add your own.
  3. To test/prove and challenge the column headings and the language used in breaking down the policies, to make sure the spreadsheet is sensible, useful, and future-proofed.
  4. To help to reconcile the field names with the recommendations of the PASTEUR 4OA project.
  5. Developers needed – to use the data contained in the Google spreadsheet, which can be interrogated and used in a number of ways (from a simple .csv dump to the Sheets API) to drive web applications or forms
  6. Any other ideas you have are welcome!

If you’re interested, please contact Paul Stainthorp (University of Lincoln) or the other HHuLOA project members.

Communicating the Open Access policy landscape for HHuLOA

Communicating Open AccessParallel to this project’s work on the UK Open Access Life Cycle, the HHuLOA project team have been investigating solutions to the problem of “communicating the policy framework” of Open Access to staff in UK HE institutions.

This forms Work Package 2 in our project plan:

“…the policy landscape for OA has shifted dramatically in the past two years. The project will examine this landscape and create a workflow that enables all stakeholders to navigate through the OA requirements they need to take account of, including local as well as external mandates. By simplifying this navigation the project will seek to enable the focus of attention to be around the benefits of open access as a component part of research dissemination overall.”

The first step of this work has been to identify as many policies, mandates, and statements from stakeholder organisations as possible, and to record them systematically. Stakeholder institutions will include funders, publishers, and HEIs.

We have recorded the details of all these policies in an open, editable Google spreadsheet which is embedded in this blog post below. In particular we have attempted to draw out the statements from each policy which are meaningful for people at the ‘sharp end’ of dealing with OA in HEIs, and to draw up a quick-and-dirty set of standard terms for categorising and ordering similar terms from different policies.

This is an open spreadsheet which you can edit and modify if you wish.

There are 25 fields for each record in the spreadsheet. The column headings are as follows:

(N.B. Please ignore for the time being the pseudo-variable placeholder field names used in the spreadsheet header row. In the next iteration of the spreadsheet we will be revising these in line with terms used in the PASTEUR4OA project recommendations and elsewhere.)

  1. HHuLOAPolicyID
    *An arbitrary internal numeric identifier for the record within this spreadsheet
  2. policyName
    *The full name of the policy as it appears on the document or web page where the policy is found
  3. policyBodyFullName
    *The name of the organisation which owns or enacts the policy
  4. policyBodyAbbreviatedName
    *The name of the organisation which owns or enacts the policy in abbreviated form
  5. policyBodyType
    *=Funder (RCUK); Funder (non-RCUK); Government; HEI; Publisher
  6. policyBodyGeoJurisdiction
    *The name of the country or area within which the policy applies
  7. policyTakesEffectDate
    *The date that the policy takes or took effect
  8. policyPersonScope
    *A description of who is bound by the policy
  9. policyPublicationScope
    *A description of the types of research output which the policy covers
  10. policyURL
    *The URL where the text of the policy can be found
  11. goldAccepted
    *=Y/N for whether the policy allows Gold OA
  12. greenAccepted
    *=Y/N for whether the policy allows Green OA
  13. preferredMethod
    *=Whether Gold or Green is the preferred method, if a preference is given
  14. policyLicenceGold
    *The licence(s) which should be applied for outputs covered by the policy made OA under a Gold route
  15. policyLicenceGreen
    *The licence(s) which should be applied for outputs covered by the policy made OA under a Green route
  16. policyEmbargoGreenSTEMMonths
    *Green embargo periods for STEM subject disciplines, expressed as a number of months
  17. policyEmbargoGreenA&Hmonths
    *Green embargo periods for Arts & Humanities subject disciplines, expressed as a number of months
  18. versionGreen
    *A description of the permitted version(s) of a document which may be made Open Access through a Green route
  19. fundingAcknowledgementRequired
    *=Y/N for whether the funding body requires acknowledgement of funding in the published output
  20. policyBodyHasDataPolicy
    *=Y/N for whether the policy body also has a research data policy
  21. dataPolicyURL
    *The URL of the data policy if one exists
  22. repositorySpecifiedName
    *The name of a specific repository if one is specified in the policy
  23. repositorySpecifiedURL
    *The URL of a specific repository if one is specified in the policy
  24. discoveryMandated
    *Whether discovery is mandated (i.e. metadata should be made available) immediately or after embargo of full text
  25. notes
    *Additional, human-readable information about the terms of the policy that does not fit into any of the other fields

The next steps in this Work Package will be, by September 2015:

  • To complete the spreadsheet with further examples of OA policies. We will add another batch of policies by the end of June 2015, and periodically after this based on community input on prioritisation.
  • To make the spreadsheet widely available and to encourage other institutions to complete it with details of their own institutions’ policies or other policies they are aware of.
  • For the HHuLOA project to provide support for other institutions on interpreting policies in line with the fields above – to provide support and guidance on filling in the spreadsheet including clearer instructions on the allowed values in each field.
  • To test and make sure that the data is publicly available via the Google Sheets API.
  • To review and revise the field names in light of recommendations made through the PASTEUR4OA project and elsewhere.
  • In further blog posts: to describe the use of this data by a proposed web application which will allow users to select multiple policies to which they are subject (along with some local information), and generate an individual report of the policy sections which are applicable to them at a given point in time. We will scope the work involved in production of such a tool and intend to explore options for navigation and use. We welcome input and suggestion on how this might best work.