“Replacing a process where we pulled in citations with MSU affiliation, performed copyright clearance, then sent an email asking for the appropriate version of a paper (and then another email to ask for the postprint instead of the publisher’s PDF we are often sent), this new tool automates the copyright clearance and version checking processes while collecting detailed metadata and deposit information.
On my end, setup was easy. Shareyourpaper.org led me through a setup process that collected my contact information, repository name, deposit preferences, and OA policies at my institution, and customized some code that I could copy and paste into my library web page. With my basic (read: very basic) HTML skills, I was more than qualified to set up the service in about 7 minutes….
Retraining authors is a bit less straightforward. Six months into using Shareyourpaper.org as part of my permissions and request workflow for my institutional repository, the email still reads, “We are piloting a new system to make deposit easier and faster.” Recognizing that change is slow in academia and that it will take time to rebuild trust in the deposit system, we will be “piloting” this process for at least a year.
So far, the system works exactly as it should 99% of the time (and those 1% bugs are being worked through as I type), and my authors are really excited about the ease and efficiency of the system—we had 20% request fulfillment in the first 24 hours of sending out the latest batch. With a reminder email, we are collecting over 55% of our requested articles. And still, I’m going to be cautious….
While we haven’t perfected all of our internal processes yet, the introduction of Shareyourpaper into our workflow has decreased the time spent sending out article requests and doing copyright clearance from nearly 2 1/2 days (for about 100 articles) to close to 2 1/2 hours! …”
