HHuLO Access

One of the HHuLOA project’s workpackages is to carry out technical work to ensure that the repositories at the partner institutions are fit for purpose in capturing the information we need to ensure compliance with the HEFCE REF Open Access Policy.  Paragraph 38 in the HEFCE Open Access FAQ states:

“The RIOXX profile is designed primarily to fulfil Research Councils UK’s requirements for metadata collection and reporting on open access. It is compatible with the information and audit requirements for the open-access policy in the next REF, which also overlap with RIOXX. The REF information requirements document shows all areas where overlaps exist between RIOXX and REF.”

The information requirements document outlines how the RIOXX profile can capture relevant information, acknowledging the additional information that will be required as well (mainly around the reporting of exceptions).  As it is anticipated that the detail of HEFCE’s requirements aside of RIOXX will be developed further, HHuLOA decided that we would start by examining the RIOXX profile and understanding how this would work in our repository systems.  The output from this is the attached analysis of the RIOXX elements, with proposed practice on applying these and capturing the information for them.  We can’t say that the guidance will necessarily apply across all repositories, but we hope that by sharing it we will help those working with RIOXX.  Feedback is very welcome.

HHuLOA RIOXX review

Most of the elements generated some queries, even if minor, and we are going away to understand better what the implications of these are.  Two of the mandatory elements, though, resulted in more discussion than others:

ali:licence_ref – this element is intended to hold information about licences under which the open access article is held, to make it clear under which permissions it can be used.  Where a Creative Commons or equivalent licence is being applied it is clear how this can be used.  However, it is less clear in the context of publisher licences, as the presentation of this information is not yet standardised or, in some cases, persistent.  The RIOXX standard provides a back-up approach by using URLs that refer to ‘all rights reserved’ statements generically, and we will most likely default to these until publisher information is more readily available.  This element is taken from NISO, and they do indicate they see this as being an ongoing development.  We would urge publishers to heed this call and make licence information available through persistent URLs akin to CC licence link availability.

rioxxterms:version – this element is intended to hold an entry from a fixed category list defining the version of the file available through the repository. Whilst having a fixed list clearly has value in helping to structure this information, it is very unclear what versions from publishers fall into which category: most institutions struggle with acquiring an AAM, never mind understanding which type of AAM it is.  It is not clear that the category list is understood or being used by publishers.  Hence, defaulting to NA for not applicable or unknown (or making a best guess) will be necessary, at least initially.  Further definition and common application of the category types is essential if this information is to be collected properly and be of value.

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As a project we will be taking forward our review of RIOXX into our system developments, following three distinct paths:

Hull – RIOXX will be implemented alongside other REF-related fields within our Hydra repository.  We will also be exploring how we can best share this work with other Hydra adopters in the UK.

Lincoln – RIOXX is being implemented within a locally-hosted version of EPrints, making changes in liaison with the EPrints team in Southampton.

Huddersfield – RIOXX is being implemented as part of a system upgrade to the EPrints-hosted repository, using the RIOXX plugin.

We will endeavour to report on our ongoing experiences in making use of RIOXX as we go along.

Back in March the University of Hull was visited by the OA Pathfinder team from Northumbria and Sunderland, who were on their travels interviewing a number of institutions on how they were dealing with open access.  The interview has now been written up as a case study.  This followed on from the successful workshop ran by Northumbria at the end of October 2014 that HHuLOA and the O2OA project based in Coventry had attended.

Being interviewed on our work with open access was a great way of reflecting on how we are doing and what work still needed to be done.  It was also a useful way to engage some internal stakeholders, with representatives from our Strategic Development Unit and an academic member of the School of Biological, Biomedical and Environmental Sciences also taking part alongside staff from the Library.  Our thanks go to David Young and Barry Hall for taking the time to visit and help us better understand how we are getting on.

A further case study is being prepared based on an interview with HHuLOA partner the University of Lincoln.

Parallel 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.

• You can access the spreadsheet on Google Sheets at the following URL:
  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1asbBZWBwPBs8p4tvOyO62acz1i3sjnZ09rbYY1Yk2Sc/edit?usp=sharing
• (ShortURL: http://lncn.eu/cdz8)

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.

The time since the last overview of the HHuLOA project seems to have been a very long time ago. In which much must have happened. Whilst that is not exclusive to the HHuLOA project on its own, it does feel like some good progress has been made in the past six months.

Project workpackages
Baseline template – In creating our own baseline we wanted to capture information on all aspects of open access activity that may be taking place, or required, within our institutions. The project partners developed this through the autumn, with helpful insight from Northumbria and others, and the final template was released in February for general use. The template was the topic of a separate blog post, which also provides the link to this openly available Google spreadsheet. The partner institutions have been busy adding the second round of data for March 2015 recently. This has highlighted that in many areas there is little or no change since September, albeit that this can be good (indicating stability of service provision) and bad (lack of momentum in areas that need change). In other areas there has been very positive developments, some of which are highlighted later in this blog post. Further analysis will be carried out in due course to assess overall progress and priorities for ongoing effort.

Dissemination of the baseline spreadsheet has been widespread and other institutions invited to contribute their own data, both as a tool for their own benefit and as a way of identifying any broad trends and/or issues that may be arising. So far, seven institutions (both large and small) have added data. In building up a picture of open access development, and being open about open access, others will be encouraged to also add their data in the coming months.

Policy landscape tool – Our intention in creating a policy tool was to provide a means by which academics could easily understand what each funder required of them, and what open access those funders were prepared to support. An initial call for input from the OA Pathfinder projects provided a great response (thanks to all!), and a very long list of funders. The work was at risk of becoming unwieldy, or at last much bigger than anticipated. We have, thus, stripped it down initially to key funders, and generated a spreadsheet that captures the valid information. This will be shared more widely imminently – watch out for the blog post and link from OAWAL – and comment is very welcome. Using Google spreadsheets again, we will be exploiting the ability to provide different views onto the data for navigation as a next step.

Open access service review – This work set out as an exploration of where services sit within the open access lifecycle, and what gaps there may be. Interestingly, there did not appear to be many gaps: many others have thought this through and there are initiatives across the board. The work did, though, highlight that placing these services in the context of a lifecycle was itself helpful. The final touches are being put to this and it will be disseminated shortly – look out for the blog post on that as well!

A specific area of investigation in this area was how we capture rights information in open access materials, as this is essential in clarifying their re-use by others. Work is being undertaken with the British Library on this, who are proposing how it might be managed for e-theses. A blog post outlining their thinking has been disseminated and feedback is welcome.

Programme activity
At the first Pathfinder programme meeting last June, the potential synergy between HHuLOA and the projects from Northumbria and Oxford Brookes was highlighted. This led to a successful workshop in October that highlighted some valuable ways forward and areas that needed attention.

At Hull, we followed up this contact with Northumbria recently by acting as one of the institutional case studies they are pulling together: Lincoln will also be the subject of a case study within this series. This involved David Young from Northumbria and Barry Hall from Sunderland visiting and running a workshop for us from which they gathered the relevant information they needed. Invited to gather a range of staff to contribute, this was a great opportunity to bring together different stakeholders (we included librarians, an academic and a policy maker), and a chance to take time out to simply talk through the issues of open access and how institutions respond to them.

HHuLOA was one of the projects asked to present at the RLUK conference in November.

We attended the second programme meeting in Edinburgh in December, which was a useful catch-up with the other projects, and a useful chance to reflect on the various issues we are tackling.

We also attended the Jisc Monitor workshop in January looking at the data model that any related service would need to operate using, and have been in contact with Jisc Monitor staff to feed in our thoughts about technical needs and developments.

Institutional activity
Hull – Recent months have seen a flurry of local activity in getting the open access message out, largely driven by the HEFCE REF OA policy deadline. Hull’s institutional Open Access Policy was approved in October and is in the process of being rolled out in time for a start date on 1st April 2015, to be overseen by a cross-Faculty Open Access Working Group. This date is deliberate, in being one year prior to the HEFCE policy start date, so that we can take a full year to put HEFCE’s requirements into practice in partnership with the academic community. Open meetings are taking place with academic staff to make them aware of the HEFCE and University policies, to engage their participation, and to describe what they need to do. To assist with this, an open access libguide has been launched to provide guidance.

Lincoln – Following on from the launch of their open access policy, Lincoln is now re-animating their RDM policy to sit alongside this. Encouragingly, a review of the policy, which was originally put together in 2012, highlighted that very little needed updating as the work carried out then had put in place a policy that has stood the test of time. In looking to make sure that the locally-hosted EPrints repository can hold the necessary information for HEFCE compliance an audit is being carried out, with a view to identifying the best way forward.

Huddersfield – Huddersfield’s Open Access Policy has also now been agreed, and will be launched shortly. An RDM policy will follow, again as a companion document. To improve the user experience of their EPrints-hosted repository as we move toward HEFCE compliance, the system will be re-skinned in the summer, and the results display adapted to use an APA citation style that is consistent with other library systems. The EPrints RIOXX plugin will also be added via system update in the next couple of months.

What next?
Completing the outstanding parts of the workpackages described above will be a short-term priority, but what comes after this?

• Technical enhancement – Described in part above under institutional activity, there are moves afoot to make local repositories RIOXX-compliant. This will be core to making the systems fit for purpose. HHuLOA will be holding an internal half-day workshop on April to look at the schema in detail, and understand better how it should be implemented.
• The impact of Open Access on research development – Building on internal discussions, the next major area of work will be to identify how open access can benefit research development, and consolidate its position in institutional processes around research dissemination. A half-day workshop is being organised (again in April) with institutional stakeholders across the partner institutions to get different viewpoints, and these will be brought together for wider dissemination in June.

Oh, and ongoing advocacy, advocacy, advocacy…

We are pleased to release our baseline of current OA activity within our institutions as a way of identifying areas that require attention, and also to highlight where there has been progress as we move towards April 2016.  A Google spreadsheet has been created to capture this information, which will be updated every six months by the project partners.  This spreadsheet is openly shared under a CC-BY licence at the link below for information.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MN7Qw_wlU2LMGnlcmjzgufJZuhzL6F_ay4lhcQEGKv8/edit#gid=0

The spreadsheet is made available openly also as a tool that other institutions may wish to use to establish their own baselines and help identify progress based on this.  The University of Glasgow has added their information, and the HHuLOA project invites other institutions to do the same.  In doing so, a picture of activity across the sector will be gathered, which can usefully inform sector-wide issues and highlight where additional effort outside of institutions may be merited.  The data can usefully be applied to local initiatives as well: seeing what is happening elsewhere need not be a matter of guilt, but could be a chance to make a business case based on progress at the competition!  It is not intended that any institution-specific analysis will take place – this is simply a resource for being open about our work on open access.  Editing for any specific institution entry can be limited to individuals through the protected range facility in Google Sheets if desired.

The HHuLOA partners completed their initial entries in the autumn, and we will be capturing our first update in March.  It is suggested that institutions wishing to make use of the tool start their entries from March 2015 to align the status of activity across institutions going forward.  The spreadsheet covers many areas that we considered affected by open access, but should take no more than 30 minutes to complete.  The more data gathered, the more valuable it will be!

Feedback on the tool is very welcome, and enhancements will be made where useful.

I’m delighted to be asked by the HHuLOA team to write a little about open access, research data management and licensing from my institution’s perspective, the British Library. The project was formed in recognition that through collaboration we can meet funder requirements in a more efficient and coordinated way. The British Library is in many respects an outlier, we do not publish OA articles or receive research council funding however we do license the use of journal content and metadata for use in our products and services. Recently we’ve had to give careful consideration to how we manage funded articles so that publicly funded material can be fully exploited and to ensure that we do not contravene the terms of use for Gold OA content. We’re working with publishers to standardise Open Access metadata and, internally, we’ve had to develop flags to identify OA content to ensure it is used in accordance with Open Access principles, for example not applying a fee or DRM to an OA funded article. Finally we need to inform our users of what they can and cannot do with articles – and that depends on which licence the article comes under. We are conscious that we could/should be doing a lot more to get EThOS to reflect existing rights information where its available. Institutions are generally leading the way in terms of managing rights and permissions for theses, so we are keen to reflect this into the EThOS e-theses service and work with institutions to share licensing experience around OA content, including metadata to maximise the discovery and reuse of publicly funded content.

In support of this we carried out a horizon scan of current practice and HEIs’ theses policies in autumn – and thank you to those of you who responded, your feedback was extremely useful. We were particularly interested in institutional policies around e-theses where they deal with rights or author permissions as where there is clarity on rights issues, that is to say where publication policies or author agreements permit, we would like to include rights information alongside the thesis. This rights information would include links to licences, e.g. Creative Commons licences where applicable accompanied by a “machine readable” version of each licence, ideally in the CC Rights Expression Language (CC REL).

We’re looking forward to working with HHuLOA partners to investigate how the ingest and display of rights information for open access materials can be improved. For those institutions that follow a risk based approach toward making theses available in lieu of formal author permissions,  the project would like to support institutions in their move to having greater clarity on licence terms and we’d like to propose the following package of work to support this:

• Model permissions letters and take down policies
• FAQs on the permissions letters including guidance around what constitutes publication, e.g. whether adding DOIs to a thesis makes it a publication.
• Guidance on rights clearance and due diligence search for rightsholders.
• Template online form for retrospective rights clearance for IR content.
• Briefing on the management and communication of rights for senior managers
• A model publication policy around the submission of theses in an institutional repository
• BL/ HHuLLOA to work with repository software suppliers such as DSpace and EPrints to investigate ways of automating and streamlining the accurate communication of usage rights for research content.

Finally the project will host a series of forums for institutions to discuss and test recommendations from the HHuLOA project, including an event focussing on doctoral theses held at the British Library.

Posted on behalf of Anna Vernon, Licensing Manager at the British Library

On Friday 12^th Graham and I attended the second Programme Meeting for the Pathfinder projects, kindly hosted by Edinburgh.  A long day, but well worth it for hearing about the work being undertaken by all the projects and for highlighting common issues arising from this.  Actually, it was notable that whilst all tackling the same broad issue of open access, all the projects have maintained their unique selling point from the original bids – and we are all the richer for it.

Sarah kicked off with an update on Jisc activity.  A clarification of the six stages of the OA journal lifecycle being examined through Jisc work currently was provided:

• Submission
• Acceptance
• Payment (where applicable)
• Publication
• Monitoring/reporting
• Download

There are, of course, other stages either side of these, but they form the core areas of activity that need support to make OA work effectively.  Much of this is being examined through the Pathfinder projects, and also the Jisc Monitor project, as well as through other strands of activity with existing services like Jisc Publications Router. A theme that emerged from the meeting was how best to bring all of the findings from these investigations together.  Part of this is summary blog posts, so keep an eye on this and other blogs over the coming months as outputs are disseminated.

Sarah also highlighted proposed work being scoped by Sherpa and HEFCE on an equivalent service to FACT to aid compliance with the REF open access policy.

An update from each project was provided.  Each project will update its news via its own blog, so I’ll focus on summarising our update here.  This covered:

• The production of a baseline template to enable institutions to record progress against a range of criteria over time. This will be disseminated shortly through discussion lists and a further blog piece.
• The ongoing development of a tool to assist researchers in navigating through OA policies from funders. This links to work on an OA policy schema within the PASTEUR4OA project, which will help focus attention on key areas of policies that researchers need to take account of.
• Work to identify gaps in OA service provision and how we might best address these. This has generated its own diagram of the OA lifecycle which we’ll be putting out for comment in due course.

General discussion also took place around the Counting the Costs of Open Access report recently produced, and the development of a joint high-level action plan for the projects so we can capture outputs within context – another way of bringing together the findings from all the work being undertaken.

Finally, a very useful discussion about how we need to develop Hydra to meet REF open access requirements with Masud Khokhar from Lancaster.  A plan for technical enhancement will be produced (for internal use at Hull) and shared in the New Year.

We left enthused that so much work is taking place and we have a clear common goal.  Onward to 2015…