Open Research Quarterly Update – Issue 2: June 2021

“Hello, and welcome to the June issue of the Open Research Quarterly Update (Digest). Here in the Open Research Services team at Jisc our mission is to help members embrace the benefits of open research by removing barriers, embedding open practices and developing open infrastructure. Much of our focus across Jisc involves working with the sector to negotiate agreements and develop services which underpin open research. This quarter’s update includes numerous examples of this in action.

Publications Router continues to expand its publishers’ contributions, while the Sherpa team have developed a new dataset which will provide details of Transitional Agreements to our users. In addition, Jisc Collections have been working with SCONUL to provide the Unsub dashboard. This month sees the first meeting of the Research Identifier National Coordinating Council (RINCC) on 21st June, which will coincide with the publication of a Cost Benefit Analysis Report, funded by the UK Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for Open Access project….”

Indian Contribution to Open Access Literature: A Study Based on OpenDOAR

Abstract:  The study provides a comprehensive view of Indian contribution towards open access repositories particularly the repositories in OpenDOAR. The DOAR contains a total of 5391 repositories. These are scattered among the five continents namely Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. A total number of 94 repositories are from India. Out of 5391 repositories, 901 (16.71%) were contributed by the United States of America, 544 (10.09%) by Japan and 311 (5.77%) by the United Kingdom. India has 94 (1.74%) repositories with 16th position. The paper gives an analysis of the subject areas of coverage, software platform, language coverage and type of hosting organisation of the Indian share in OpenDOAR.

Full article: Open Access Initiatives in Western Asia

Abstract:  This paper highlights open access activities and resources from Western Asia. The development of open access journals from this region is analyzed through regional listings in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and information about the development and implementation of open access repositories is taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) platform. Additional information about OA resources and development projects was found through UNESCO’s Global Open Access Portal. The study’s findings show that, even with support from international groups like EIFL and OpenAIRE, the region’s open access market lags behind that of more developed countries. Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stand out among Western Asian states, and Cyprus took the important step of instituting a national public open access policy. Awareness projects and workshops will be a vital step in helping the countries of Western Asia to see the value of open access and to build a stronger OA infrastructure.

 

OpenDOAR and COAR collaboration

“Jisc and COAR announced their collaboration in October 2020 and will be working closely together on nurturing community governance over OpenDOAR. Our ‘Roadmap for sustainability and community governance for OpenDOAR’ details the plans for this exciting collaboration and the upcoming projects on OpenDOAR’s horizon….”

The never-ending story | Research Information

“At the same time, the REF open access mandate had just been announced, stating journal articles and some conference proceedings had to be publicly accessible within three months of acceptance for publication in order to be eligible for submission for the post-2014 research excellence framework. Given the double-whammy of easier depositing and REF urgency, WestminsterResearch saw self-deposits rocket from less than one per cent to more than 99 per cent while practice-based/non text-based entries mushroomed by 246 per cent.

‘The Haplo repository and REF open access mandate came at a similar time and the combined power of both led to this massive increase in self-deposits,’ highlights Watts. 

‘The mandates really helped people to comply to open access,’ she adds. ‘And we believe that factors contributing to more practice-based research included vastly improved templates and fields for these outputs… in the past, the repository just couldn’t take this content.’

Following these results and the looming REF2021, WestminsterResearch switched to a full Haplo open source-set up in 2018, and entries have continued to rise. As Watts put it: ‘I don’t think we’d have been able to support the increase in open access deposits without this rise in self-depositing.’…”

The never-ending story | Research Information

“At the same time, the REF open access mandate had just been announced, stating journal articles and some conference proceedings had to be publicly accessible within three months of acceptance for publication in order to be eligible for submission for the post-2014 research excellence framework. Given the double-whammy of easier depositing and REF urgency, WestminsterResearch saw self-deposits rocket from less than one per cent to more than 99 per cent while practice-based/non text-based entries mushroomed by 246 per cent.

‘The Haplo repository and REF open access mandate came at a similar time and the combined power of both led to this massive increase in self-deposits,’ highlights Watts. 

‘The mandates really helped people to comply to open access,’ she adds. ‘And we believe that factors contributing to more practice-based research included vastly improved templates and fields for these outputs… in the past, the repository just couldn’t take this content.’

Following these results and the looming REF2021, WestminsterResearch switched to a full Haplo open source-set up in 2018, and entries have continued to rise. As Watts put it: ‘I don’t think we’d have been able to support the increase in open access deposits without this rise in self-depositing.’…”

Quarterly OA Digest – June 2020 – Jisc scholarly communications

“As we move towards what we hope will be a loosening of lockdown and a reduction in the risk from the coronavirus itself, we are starting to see the wider damage that has been done to our HE sector and our economy as a whole. We do not know what the new normal will be, or when that stability will arise. Institutions have different ideas as to how they might work over the next year, but prominent amongst all of them is an increased reliance on remote access, remote presence, and serious and sustained cost saving. There will be increased pressure on libraries to show enhanced support at reduced cost. Open access is at the heart of all of these issues. We will continue to work hard to give our members the best value we can in our services to save them time and money in dealing with open access issues. As reported here, Jisc is returning to renegotiate national publisher contracts in line with the changed environment. We have completed the first round of supplier evaluations for the repository dynamic purchasing system to try and identify the best value for members. We are working across services to help members in policy compliance and improve system efficiency and workflows. As ever, contact us if we can assist you through our services, advice, relationships or information and we will do our best to help….”

December 2019 open access update now available | Jisc scholarly communications

“A range of enhancement reports in this issue. To pick a couple: we are delighted to report that Publications Router is now receiving feeds from 11 publishers and feedback from users suggests that the service is increasing in importance to institutional workflows. We are also very pleased to have added nearly 900 new repositories to OpenDOAR after working with CORE colleagues and carrying out some extensive QA work to resolve previously unlisted repositories. As the dust from the general election settles and policies are announced, we are looking forward to using the capabilities we have built into our new Romeo infrastructure to respond to national policy compliance. We talked a little about this at our recent event on “Planning for Plan-S”, which was well received by attendees with some good conversations and thinking about the challenge, and all this in the midst of REF preparations.  The event has given us some very useful feedback for future institutional needs. As we go forward into REF and Plan S next year, we will all face challenges and changes, but we are here to support you throughout. As ever, get in touch with us and tell us about the way you use our services: what you like, what you don’t like and anything you would like to see improved….”

March open access update now available | Jisc scholarly communications

Elsevier have now said they will work with Jisc to develop interoperability between Router and Pure, their CRIS product, by October. The commitment was made in a statement of intent announced in February. It will give a significant boost to the numbers of institutions able to benefit from the Router service. Another major CRIS vendor is also working with us and two institutions to test a workflow that will enable their system to ingest notifications sent from Router. On the publisher side, we have also been able to announce that Elsevier has been working with us to enable Router to distribute metadata notifications from Science Direct. The resulting feed will go live soon. Meanwhile, OA publisher MDPI has started supplying full text via Router, further adding to the list of content providers….

Work continued on our service improvement programme and we have this period focused on the datasets that drive Sherpa services. We have been reviewing the Sherpa RoMEO dataset and have made great progress towards transferring this data to the new version of Sherpa RoMEO. Once this data transfer work is complete, we will be releasing a public beta of Sherpa RoMEO v2 for community consultation and feedback. The implementation of Plan S principles is influencing the development of our services as both RoMEO and OpenDOAR have been identified by cOAlitionS as essential support services. Here we are upgrading our infrastructure to assist the implementation of Plan S-compliant policies….”