Green open access, that is, when authors self-archive the peer-reviewed versions of their articles in an institutional repositories, where they are available for anyone to view is not a new concept.
Pioneering subject repositories such as ArXiv, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) have existed since the early-mid nineties, however, the adoption of open access has largely dependent on subject discipline and the work of a number of dedicated individuals. In the UK in 2004 the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Report, Scientific Publications: Free for all? recommended, “that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommended that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way”. Subsequently there were a number of Jisc funding calls as part of the Repositories and Preservation Programme. A number of UK funders altered their policies in favour of open access.
The section on APC processing services will discuss green and gold workflows for authors, this section will look in details at the workflows for repository teams and e-resources managers.
Although published in 2008, the Repository Support Project workflows document is still a very good basic guide to those setting up a submission workflow for green open access
The guide outlines a number of essential elements in the submission workflow, however, much of the content is for journal al articles.
For workflows regarding theses, there is an excellent guide put together by Josh Brown & Kathy Sadler as part of a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access in UK Universities and HEIs.
For non-text repository deposits, such as art material, the KULTUR and KULTIVATE projects prepared a toolkit for art and design researchers.
Metadata
The correct use of metadata is essential in order to comply with standards and aid discoverability. This is discussed in the sections on Standards and Discoverability. Metadata often comes direct from the researchers when they deposit an item, unfortunately this is where many errors can occur, so it is essential to double check all data – often this can take longer than adding an item from scratch. Grey material and conference papers can often prove very difficult to check, this may result in several conversations before the item can be submitted.
Increasingly, metadata submission can be automated, for example through the ISI plugin or via the SWORD protocol. In the UK, the Repository Junction Broker has been established to act as a ‘clearing house’ between organisations such as PubMed Central and ArXive and institutional repositories and other repositories who may need to import their metadata. This is especially useful for research that has multiple authors from a number of institutions. A quick check of institutional repositories can reveal as many different records as there are authors! Repositories need to register their SWORD credentials with the service to allow RJ Broker access to the systems. This allows another submission workflow to be established – an academic submits publication details to a publisher, these are passed to a subject repository such as PubMed Central and this is passed automatically to the institutional repository, thus duplication of effort and precious staff time can be saved.
Reproduced with kind permission from Edina
Much of the work around workflows has been led by STM subject, however, much of this work is also applicable to the social sciences and arts and humanities. The Repository Research Project contains a section on “maximising deposit through embedded workflows” in its guide to embedding repositories.
Permissions / copyright and licence handling
Obtaining the full text can prove problematic depending on the publisher and the researcher depositing the full text. Often researchers send through or deposit metadata only or often they send the published version, complete with watermark stating that it cannot be used in a repository! This is an issue to be approached as part of advocacy.
For journal articles Sherpa Romeo is the go to site for publisher copyright information. The service has truly worldwide coverage, including nearly 1,400 publishers and their policies. Although Sherpa Romeo includes a huge range of publishers, not everything can be included and in many cases permission will need to be sought directly from the publisher, this is also true for some publishers that are included in Sherpa Romeo, for example those that publish on behalf of learned societies. In these cases it is important to establish what a researcher has signed at the submission stage – although this is easier said than done! Again, this is an area that can be tackled as part of advocacy for open access, by making authors aware of their rights and what they are signing. In a small scale survey of researchers at the University of Huddersfield in 2010 (as part of open access week), it was found that although many thought that, “74% of those who responded thought that copyright should stay with the author, employer or funding council and of those who said ‘other’, the majority thought that copyright should be shared. However, 25% did not read the copyright transfer agreement which usually transfers all copyright to the publisher. Of the 68% who did read the copyright transfer agreements, the results from question 12 imply that they did not necessarily agree with what they were signing.”
It is worth noting that although copyright transfer agreements are rarely signed for conference papers (or presentations) and therefore the output can be added to a repository, this is common practice in some disciplines, notably computing and engineering. In these cases permission needs to be sought from either the societies that organise the annual conferences or in many cases, the organisational committee for the particular year that the conference took place. This can prove to be a major obstacle in getting these already hard to find papers out into the public domain.
For book chapter and monographs, it is often well worth contacting the publisher directly. There is potentially a mutual benefit for both the publisher and repository if a ‘sample’ chapter is made available. The repository benefits from open access to a particular chapter, the publisher benefits from a marketing opportunity as long as the repository links to the publisher’s catalogue. This approach isn’t always successful, but is worth a try!
File management
File management in a repository workflow raises a number of issues, such a preservation. There is still some debate about whether it is in the remit of a repository to preserve its content. It could be argued that only the final published version of an output needs to be preserved and that this is the role of services such as CLOCKSS, LOCKSS and Portico, however, this only covers journal articles and some book material.What about conference papers, theses, grey literature and non-text material? This is really a decision for individual institutions as there will be an additional cost involved. However, if this is the case, then file format does need to be considered, as most items are stored as PDFs and this may not be the ideal format for preservation.
In many cases the files that are submitted form the authors are word documents and these are then converted to PDFs. Often the Word file will be stored in the repository alongside the PDF, although access to the Word document will be restricted.
The question of versioning is also an important one, as discussed above, authors often send through a published version, which cannot be used for copyright reasons. Unfortunately there is not complete agreement about the terminology for versions of pre-published work.
A very helpful document is available from the Versions Project at the London School of Economics (LSE). The toolkit clearly defines the different versions of an article
- Draft – Early version circulated as work in progress
- Submitted Version – The version that has been submitted to a journal for peer review
- Accepted Version – The author-created version that incorporates referee comments and is the version accepted for publication
- Published Version – The publisher-created published version
- Updated Version – A version updated since publication
This guidance is extremely helpful and can be used to explain to authors via the use of email templates, for example:
Dear [name],
We have recently added the bibliographic details of an item of your research to the University Repository. However, the publisher also allows us to load the author’s ‘Accepted Version’ of the article, that is the final peer reviewed version (usually a Word doc) before publisher typesetting, which can then be made freely available on Open Access (OA).
[Citation]
Increasingly research funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils are mandating that all publicly funded research is made available in this way.
We would be grateful if you could supply us with the ‘Accepted Version’ of your research.
Please contact us if you have any further questions.
Unfortunately, this toolkit has not been adopted by all, and if there is one criticism of Sherpa Romeo it is that it uses different criteria, e.g. preprint and post print.
However, on a positive note, Sherpa Romeo also provides a list of publishers that allow the use of the final published PDF, which can greatly assist the Repository team in grabbing ‘low hanging fruit’ and added items in full text without the need for permissions, this includes gold open access material.
Research data management is a growing issue for Universities, and therefore repositories, as funders in the US and UK mandate that research data must be made publically available. In the UK the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) requires all institutions to make data available for re-use or archiving within three months of the end of the grant and all new research projects receiving ESRC funding must submit a data management plan as part of their application.
2.1 The ‘traditional’ green model
2.3 Funder mandates/policies for green and gold
2.4 The effect of gold on workflows and staffing
2.5 Pure gold vs. hybrid journals
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.