If you know of any more please comment below or tweet @ukcorr

University of Oxford – http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/decision-tree/
University of York – http://www.york.ac.uk/library/informationfor/researchers/openaccess/guide/
University College London (UCL) – http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/publications/MRC-flowchart.pdf
University of Edinburgh – http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/services/research-support/publish-research/open-access/how-to-guides
University of Exeter – http://as.exeter.ac.uk/media/level1/academicserviceswebsite/library/documents/openaccess/General_Open_Access_publishing_workflow_Jan13.pdf
University of Manchester – http://www.openaccess.manchester.ac.uk/showmehow/

The House of Commons enquiry focussed particularly on the RCUK’s preference of ‘gold’ open access over ‘green’, article processing charges (APCs), Creative Commons licenses and the ability of the UK to remain competitive in the international research arena under these conditions.  This blog post will be updated with the details of the other evidence given to the inquiry once this information is released.

The previous inquiry from the House of Lords, having heard and read all of the evidence presented to them have announced that they will be publishing the report of their findings and recommendations on the 22nd February.

UKCoRR prepared a written submission as part of the inquiry and the full written submissions have been released (being updated for the oral evidence as it is given).

People interested in the recordings of the oral evidence can find the sessions on the House of Lords pages:

1. Dame Janet Finch (Tuesday 15th January)
2. (i) Professor Ian Walmsley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research, ASUC), University of Oxford; Professor Matthew Bennett, Vice-Chancellor responsible for Research, Enterprise and Internationalisation, University of Bournemouth; Professor Maggie Dallman, Principal, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London and (ii) Steven Hall, Managing Director, IOP Publishing; Richard Mollett, Chief Executive, Publishers Association; and Dr Rita Gardner, Director, Royal Geographical Society (Tuesday 29th January)
3. Professor Rick Rylance, Chair of RCUK; Professor Douglas Kell, RCUK Information Champion; David Sweeney, Director (Research, Innovation and Skills), Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), (Tuesday 29th January).
4. Rt. Hon. David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Science and Universities, BIS (Tuesday 29th January).

There is now another inquiry coming from the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee which UKCoRR will be representing the memberships views again and more details will be posted as they become available.

*** Update 22/02/2013 ***

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has now published the findings of it’s inquiry:

• House of Lords Inquiry Report
• RCUK’s reaction to the report
• Story in the Times Higher

Please do also take the time to complete the RepNet survey at http://ukcorr.org/events/future-events/teesside-university-friday-9th-november-2012/repnet_survey/

________________________________________________________________

Much has been said in recent months about the Gold Rush and the financial unsustainability of a given way of planning the transition to research output dissemination through Gold Open Access publishing models. However, the ‘Gold Rush’ may be better than no rush whatsoever, and the post-Finch emphasis on Gold OA models has resulted in the profile of colour-agnostic Open Access getting significantly raised among Research Committees at HEIs following effective communication efforts by Institutional Repository (IR) managers and University Libraries. Furthermore, the current analysis on potential Open Access policy compliance mechanisms could well result in a substantial wave of supporting policies at institutions towards IRs and Green Open Access.

All these issues were discussed last Tuesday Dec 4th at the RSP webinar ‘The Role of Institutional Repositories after the Finch Report’. Three prominent IR managers -Sally Rumsey, U Oxford, Dominic Tate, Royal Holloway U London (RHUL) and Miggie Pickton, U of Northampton- were delivering presentations on the present state of IR/Open Access awareness and the role IRs will play for policy compliance purposes at their universities.

Each of them provided a very useful specific insight on the point discussions are right now at their institutions: research-intensive U Oxford (80k publications/year) has set up an OA@Oxford Programme lead by the Bodleian Libraries and involving Research Services, IT Services and Academic Divisions. The programme comprises ten projects, three of which are focused on the Oxford Research Archive (ORA) IR (see Sally Rumsey’s presentation to learn more). Royal Holloway Research Online manager and his Library Director presented a brief and solid report to their Research Committee last September on the current state of OA policies which was praised by the Committee and has lead the way to subsequent discussions on possible ways to deliver compliance – Dominic Tate incidentally made an offer to share this report with other IR managers interested in carrying out their own awareness raising activities for their Research Committees. Finally, Miggie Pickton mentioned her calculation of the costs attached to Gold Open Access publishing of the U Northampton yearly research output as an input to the University Research and Enterprise Committee.

All three IR managers agreed that there were big opportunities for IRs as a result of the endorsement for Open Access delivered by the Finch report, regardless of what the recommended form was for realising it. As a result of the Finch report and the subsequent RCUK Open Access policy, scholars and institutional administrators now need to be aware of what Open Access is and what the requirements will be for universities in order to be eligible for receiving RCUK funding. Central Open Access publishing funds -such as the one already available at the University of Nottingham - are currently under consideration at many HEIs as a mechanism for effectively dealing with RCUK block grants and other funders’ requirements in terms of Open Access publishing. This discussion may very much reinforce the role IR managers and Libraries play in conveying the Open Access agenda to institutions, since no-one knows better about Open Access than they do. Preliminary Gold Open Access publishing cost analysis provided by IR managers to their Research Committees in the course of this discussions have resulted in Institutional Repositories being brought into consideration as a much cheaper, already available option for delivering compliance at institutional level.

IRs are however unevenly placed to take advantage of these opportunities: many of them are presently very poorly populated and feature large rates of metadata-only items. In order to be able to stand up to the requirements in terms of monitoring policy compliance, IRs will need to offer institutions a reliable set of functionalities for tracking Open Access outputs (and eventually payments, see the recently released RIN/OAIG report on the issue). This is what the UK RepositoryNet+ (aka RepNet) Project is working for: to provide the means to extend already existing IR tools and services to the whole IR network and to promote the implementation and use of new repository functionalities that allow IRs to become central pieces in the institutional research information management (RIM) services.

After the project presentations delivered a few weeks ago at the UKCoRR membership meeting at Teeside University, the RepNet put out a survey for collecting information from IR managers on the current state of service tool awareness and availability at IRs. The results of this survey -which account for over 20 answers so far- will shortly be disseminated from this UKCoRR blog. One of the questions in this survey deals with available RIM infrastructure at institutions, since we consider there is a pressing need for having an accurate landscape of CRIS/IR availability at HEIs in order to avoid effort duplication in building reporting tools. A preliminary RepNet note is already available examining use cases for RIM infrastructure configurations at HEIS, from IR-only and IR-as-CRIS to CRIS-only and CRIS-as-IR case studies through all possible ways of system co-existence. Once this CRIS/IR directory is complete, it will be made available by the RepNet and we hope it will be useful for building models on top of it, be it for REF reporting or now also for delivering OA compliance and reporting about it.

An overview of the different strategies for supporting and enhancing IRs the RepNet is working on will be delivered at the joint RepNet/RSP WS to be held in London next Jan 21st. After useful discussions last November at Teesside University, the RepNet will again be eager to promote discussion and to collect feedback and suggestions from the wider IR manager community.

It was a great privilege and an honour to be invited to participate in the DRF9 conference, which took place at the Pacifico conference centre in Yokohama, Japan on Wednesday November 21^st 2012.

I had been invited attend to give presentations in two different capacities – firstly in my capacity as External Liaison Officer for UKCoRR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories).  Secondly, the DRF (Digital Repository Federation) was interested in my practical experiences of working as a Repository Manager in a British university.

The day before the formal DRF9 conference, I met with several members of the DRF committee to run through presentations and to carry out the final preparations for the next day’s meeting.  I very much enjoyed learning about what Japanese repository managers have been doing in the way of promotional activities for their repositories.  I was particularly impressed by many of the repository-branded marketing and promotional items I was shown, including umbrellas, drinks holders and stationery.  This is one area where British repository managers could learn from their Japanese counterparts and I will be taking some examples of theses materials back to the UK to show my British colleagues!  After this meeting I was (very generously) treated to dinner by many DRF committee members at an excellent restaurant specialising in seafood.

On the day of the DRF9 meeting, the audience were briefed on the Finch Report, about which there has been much interest in Japan over the last couple of months.  I was asked to present UKCoRR’s response to the Finch Report and then to take part in a discussion about models in open access with Prof. Syun Tutiya, of the National Institution for Academic Degrees and University Evaluation.

In this part of the session I explained that the reaction to the Finch Report had been mixed, amongst the UK repository community.  Although we welcomed the fundamental support for open access, there was concern about the high costs of moving to ‘gold’ open access in the short term, as well as the possibility of ‘double dipping’, (whereby universities pay open access article processing charges – APCs – as we well as having to cover subscription costs).  Another concern was the international context, as UK universities would still have to pay subscriptions to access content written abroad.  The discussion with Professor Tutiya was very interesting, although because of the healthy discussion, the session did over-run for a good 15 minutes!

In the next part of the session I was asked to present on some best practice relating to the open access advocacy activities undertaken by repository managers in the UK.  I explained that over recent years, a number of different approaches have been tried, but the general feeling is that scheduled meetings with individual academics tend to have the most successful outcomes for repository managers.  There are a number of reasons for this.  Firstly, these meetings allow you to build relationships with academics and understand their motivations and priorities.  Secondly, you create an environment whereby academics are more comfortable asking questions and raising objections.  Repository managers have to be able to elicit objections in order to be able to handle them using evidence and opinion.

From my point of view, it was very interesting to see that the list of common objections prepared by the UK’s Repositories Support Project (RSP) was very familiar to the Japanese repository managers.  It seemed very obvious that both UK and Japanese repository managers deal with precisely the same problems on a daily basis, and that we could do a lot to help each other by working in partnership.  To this end, UKCoRR would like to do more to build on its special relationship with DRF over the next year, to see what partnerships and exchanges of knowledge can be developed to support repository managers in both countries.

The final session of the day provided progress reports and discussion on a number of consortial repositories in Japan, and I was asked to provide a brief overview of the situation in the UK.  This strikes me as another approach where the UK could learn from the Japanese culture of shared services, and I expect that the lure of potential savings of cost and effort may see more consortial repositories in the UK in the future.

Discussions about building international relations and sharing expertise continued over drinks and dinner where all the attendees participated in a fun quiz testing knowledge on a range of subjects ranging from open access to Japanese football players in the UK premier league (Shinji Kagawa).  It was great to be a part of this dinner and I was particularly impressed by the way in which Japanese colleagues work (and play) together – I suppose, much like we do in theUK.

I will always have very fond memories of my first trip to Japan and the warmth with I was welcomed.  I am very much looking forward to developing relationships further between UKCoRR and the DRF, and for the moment, all that remains is for me to thank the DRF for their superb hospitality.

Dominic Tate

UKCoRR External Liaison Officer 

My presentation at the UKCoRR annual meeting focussed on our experience of installing the EPrints REF2014 plugin in LSE Research Online. The repository will be the main source of bibliographic data for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014 and the plugin has enabled us to make use of the high quality bibliographic records for reporting publications information to HEFCE for the REF. Reusing bibliographic information in this way has provided a clear extension of the services LSE Research Online (LSERO) offers and, without a CRIS with an active publications module, enabled us to do so without needing to build a bespoke in-house solution to pull out publications reports in the REF format.
Our road to the installation of the EPrints REF2014 plugin was a slightly winding one, with an untraditional implementation set-up – we have the plugin installed on a separate instance of LSERO due to confidential information held within it. It’s now fully installed and running on the latest version, v1.2.2. In the video below I give a background to the repository set-up at LSE, describe our preparations for installation and reflect on the entire process so far:

As I explain in my presentation, we have now added details of our REF selections (REF2) and staff details (REF1) to the REF2014 plugin. We have also exported the full details of a Unit of Assessment in Excel format (converted from the CSV plugin report) and imported this successfully to the REF2014 test submission system. Reports are also available in XML format. This was a relatively straightforward process and the tweaks to reports on v1.2.2 helped tidy up previous bugs. As data in the plugin changes, we can simply re-upload files to the REF2014 submission system and this updates existing data. We’re also using the plugin REF2 reports functionality to check for missing metadata fields.

During the entire process, the repository community, EPrints team and REF submission system support have been helpful in sharing experiences and offering technical advice. If you are considering using the EPrints plugin, I’d recommend keeping an eye on the EPrints REF2014 Plugin Releases Changelog and signing up to the mailing list: EPRINTSREF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. There’s also a User Guide, which is useful for initial set-up and instructions on creating benchmarks and assigning user privileges.

The slides from my presentation are available here – http://ukcorr.org/files/2012/11/REF-Preparations-LSE-UKCORR.pdf. The next steps for us in the REF2014 process will be continuing to update publications information, complete the metadata clean-up process and considering when to make the final transition from the plugin to using the REF submission system.

For more information see http://projecthydra.org/

Repository managers are encouraged to complete the short survey on behallf of RepNet at http://ukcorr.org/events/future-events/teesside-university-friday-9th-november-2012/repnet_survey/

Part 1 – Andrew Dorward:

Part 2 – Pablo de Castro: