With the move to gold open access for some funders in the UK, new workflows and services are becoming available. There are really two parts of the overall workflow to consider when looking at gold open access, or more usually, a combination of green and gold. The first part is a revision to the traditional green workflow discussed above.

The JISC APC pilot, discussed in section 2.6, is starting to provide a number of case studies that will be useful to those looking at adopting and adapting to these new workflows.

These case studies allow other to see how various universities of different sizes and missions are approaching both green and gold open access workflows, for example many universities are still encouraging green open access over gold, while others have set up a gold open access fun.

Where universities have set up a gold open access fund this can be done in a variety of ways, for example,

• A first come first serve basis – this approach means that those that publish towards the end of a financial year may be disappointed
• Other others may establish a committee to overview the selection of papers, however, these papers will already have been peer reviewed for publication, therefore the selection is difficult and is open to calls of discipline bias
• A third option is to fund all papers put forward for gold open access, although the fairest way, this is also the most expensive and may be out of reach for most universities

Many universities are starting to publicise their new workflows to faculty, often these workflows are provided as simple PDF or JPGs. Increasingly, however, these are being converted into a series of web pages that allow the researcher to work through the often complex series of questions that need to be asked. As there are a number of different ways an institution may adopt gold open access, these workflows and web pages are heavily influenced by the preferences for either green or gold open access and the way the institution is funded.

A selection of workflows are available below:

• University of Exeter
• Loughborough University
• University of Leeds
• University of Warwick

In addition, many universities have a dedicated set of web pages, often containing the web forms discussed above, other include general information on open access and open access publishing:

• University of Aberdeen
• University of Manchester
• Imperial College
• University College London

A year has now passed since the RLUK mandate in the UK and a number of universities are now starting to report publicly on their compliance, these reports will also be very useful to non UK Universities who may wish to adopt the method of reporting, although there a no standard way of reporting as of yet.

RCUK will monitor how institutions use this money, and would like institutions to work with us to provide the evidence necessary to inform the review which will take place in 2014.

However, there is guidance in the final section of the
RCUK Policy on Open Access and Supporting Guidance document. This includes a summary of data that RCUK suggest institutions collect:

The reports are based on the funding universities get from the RCUK OA Block Grant. In this document RCUK indicate the number of papers they assume will be equal to the requirement of 45% of RCUK funded outputs being made available in 2013/14, in the case of Huddersfield this is 8 papers rising to 10 in the second year, for Glasgow, this would be 246 papers rising to 289 in 2014/15.

• University of Glasgow Open Access Update April 2014
• Queen’s University Belfast APC payments for RCUK 2013-14
• Cambridge APC payments for RCUK 2013-14
• University of Edinburgh Open Access update: March 2014
• University of Sussex APC data (2013-14)
• University of Manchester RCUK APC payments 2013-14
• University of Liverpool APC data 2013-14
• Imperial College APC data 2006-2014
• University of St Andrews APC data 2013-2014 and Compliance data report

As of summer 2014, the RCUK open access policy is 16 months old. An independent review, chaired by Professor Sir Bob Burgess, is now underway. As part of this institutions have been asked how they are complying with the policy and how they are spending the Block Grant.

A number of reports have now been made publicly available (in addition to the data listed above):

• UCL’s RCUK Open Access report 2014
• University of Edinburgh RCUK Open Access Report 2014
• University of Glasgow RCUK Open Access Compliance Monitoring Report 2014
• RCUK OA Compliance – Southampton report – initial data
• University of Huddersfield RCUK Open Access Report 2014

Staffing

The question of how to staff for Gold open access management has been raised. It all depends on how your organization has chosen to manage open access provision overall. If your organization is relying on the institutional repository staff to manage the majority of your open access provision, then the decision is to separate out open access management to a dedicated staff. How these duties are then deployed within that unit is up to each unit manager in consultation with their library administration. The University of Glasgow Librarians outlined their workflow process on APC management in an article for Insights: the UKSG Journal. 

However, if your library is in a small institution or unable to dedicate staffing just to this content stream, then it is likely that there are attempts to mainstream gold open access provision in with regular staff workflows. Staffing within the regular context of management would entail probably using existing staff familiar with article payment and delivery which has traditionally been the Inter-Library Lending (Loaning) [ILL] staff. Gold open access article funding would need to be coordinated through regular subject librarian contacts in consultation with the collection development librarian or library administrator in charge of budgets.

Many libraries, like the University of British Columbia Library have dedicated web pages to indicate where Gold open access publishing along with other open access publishing models can occur with discounts. Acquisitions staff and collection development or scholarly communication librarians can help in fully understanding what costs breaks occur with any given provider.

2.1    The ‘traditional’ green model

2.2    Gold Open Access

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

2.6    APC processing services

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