At the start of 2019 the University of
Cambridge announced its Position Statement on Open Research. This blog looks at
what has been happening since then and the current plans for making research at
Cambridge more open.
Our Position
In February 2019, the University of
Cambridge set out its position on open research to support and encourage open
practices throughout the research lifecycle for all research outputs. The Position
Statement made clear that both the University and researchers have
responsibility in this space and that there would be no one size fits all
approach to how to be open. As part of forming a position on open research, the
University also created the Open
Research Steering Committee to oversee the open research agenda of the
University. This Committee is currently looking at three key areas –training, infrastructure
and Plan S.
Training
In 2018, we ran a survey
on open research [available to Cambridge University only] which highlighted
our research community’s desire for more training on open research practices
and tools. In order to delve into this further, a pilot was run with the Faculty of Education who submitted a
disproportionately high number of responses to the survey, suggesting a strong
interest in open research. The pilot, run earlier this year, encompassed six
face-to-face training sessions on topics around open research, such as managing
digital information, copyright, and publishing. These sessions were well
received by both PhD students and postdocs.
In tandem to this, work is also being
carried out to make the provision of open research related training more
strategic, sustainable and efficient. For example, some of the courses the Office of Scholarly Communication run have
already been embedded into existing PhD programmes, such as Doctoral Training Centres or
the centrally run Researcher Development
Programme but we could
still increase the opportunities to work more closely with other parts of the
University. With so many other pressures on time, it is essential
we work together with all stakeholders involved to ensure we get the balance of
training offered correct, so that we maximise the time benefits/costs of both
the trainer and the student.
Finally, the question of sustainability for open research training is also being investigated. How can we ensure open research training reaches the 9,000 or so academics and postgraduate students we have at Cambridge? One answer to this question is online training. We are currently developing a digital course which will introduce the basics of open research, complementary to the soon-to-be-launched online research integrity training. However, we know that researchers value face-to-face sessions too, and intend to continue to develop our face-to-face offer, where we can provide deeper knowledge and discuss issues in more detail. Within the libraries at Cambridge we are also starting to work more closely with research support librarians and others in department libraries who can offer expertise and guidance that is tailored to the discipline.
Infrastructure
The University
Position Statement on Open Research says “University support
is important to make Open Research simple, effective and appropriate” and a key
part of that support is in the form of infrastructure. This is a complicated
area because it involves a number of service providers at the University who
all have different priorities as well as the large body of researchers, who
have a huge variety of needs and technical abilities. Finding common solutions
or tools will always be difficult in a large, research intensive institution
like Cambridge, which has Schools spread across the spectrum of arts, humanities,
social sciences and STEMM subjects.
The Open Research
Steering Committee is made up of representatives from across the
University both from different academic Schools and University services. This
is key to ensure that the drive towards open research infrastructure is
holistic and proportional in the context of other University agendas. A
landscape review of the services already provided has been carried out as has a
‘wish list’ of IT infrastructure that researchers would like. Whilst the ‘wish
list’ has been carried out in a context wider than open research, it is really
heartening to see many ‘wishes’ relate to systems that would improve open
research practices.
There is also work underway to look at how
research notebooks (or electronic lab notebooks if you prefer) are being used
across the University. A trial
of notebooks run in 2017 resulted in the decision not to provide an
institution-wide research notebook platform, but guidance
instead. This new work under the auspices of the Open Research Steering
Committee aims to build on this work by extending the guidelines to include
principles around data security, data export and procurement.
Plan S
Plan
S looms large on our horizon and will present a challenge when it comes
into force in 2021. Whilst we are waiting to see to what extent UKRI’s updated
open access policy will reflect Plan S principles, we are busy contributing to
the Transparent
Pricing Working Group. This group was convened by the Wellcome Trust in partnership with UKRI and on behalf of cOAlition S to bring together
publishers, funders and universities to develop a framework to guide publishers
on how to communicate about the price of the services in a practical and
transparent manner. The University is also looking into how we can implement
the principles of DORA, which are supported
by cOAlition S. This work is being led by Professor Steve Russell, an academic
advocate for open research, and the work will very much be done in consultation
with our academic community.
Summary
Cambridge is showing its commitment to enabling open research by taking seriously its role in providing infrastructure, training and the right culture for our academics. These areas need to be tackled holistically and the oversight of the Open Research Steering Committee should allow this to happen. It is important that we are collaborative with our research community and we hope that we have got that balance right with the inclusion of academics in the main Committee and working groups. Ensuring open research is embedded in everyday practice at the University will, of course, take time but we think we are making a good start.
At the heart of the University of Cambridge’s Open
Access Policy is the commitment “to disseminating its research and scholarship
as widely as possible to contribute to society”.
Behind this aim is the benefit to researchers worldwide, as the OA2020 vision has it, to “gain immediate, free and unrestricted access to all of the latest, peer-reviewed research”. It’s some irony indeed that the growth of the availability of research as open access does not automatically result, without further community investment, in a corresponding improvement in discoverability.
Key stakeholders met at the British Library to discuss the issue at the end of 2018 and produced an Open Access Discovery Roadmap , to identify areas of work in this space and encourage collaboration in the scholarly communications community.[1] A major theme included the dependence on reliable article licence metadata, but the main message was finding the open infrastructure/interoperability solutions for long-term sustainability “ensuring that the content remains accessible for future generations”.
New web pages on Open Access discovery
Recognizing where we are now, and responding to the present, (probably) partial awareness of the insufficiencies in the OA discovery landscape, Cambridge University Library has added pages to its e-resources website to highlight OA discovery tools and important websites indexing OA content. The motivations for highlighting the options for OA discovery on the new pages is described in this blog post. Our main aim is to bring to light search and discovery of OA as a live topic and prevent it “languishing in undiscoverable places rather than being in plain sight for everyone to find.”[2]
Recently, data from Unpaywall for July 2019 has been used to forecast for growth in availability of articles published as OA by 2025, predicting on the basis of current trends, but conservatively – without even taking full account of the impact of Plan S, for example. This forecast for 2025 predicts
44% of all journal articles will be available as OA
Unpaywall’s estimate for availability OA right now is 31%. A third (growing soon to a half) is a significant proportion for anyone’s money, and wanting to signal the shift we have used that statistic as our headline on the page summarizing the most well-known and commonly-used Open Access browser plugins.
Screenshot of Open Access browser plugins webpage
We want the Cambridge researcher to know about these plugins and to be using them, and aim to give minimal but salient information for a selection of one, or several, to be made. Our recommendation is for the Lean Library extension “Library Access” but we have been in touch with Kopernio and QxMD and ensured that members of the University registering to use these plugins will also pick up the connection to our proxy server for seamless off campus access to subscription content where it exists, before the plugin offers an alternative OA version.
Once installed in the user’s browser, the plugin will use the DOI and/or a combination of article metadata elements to search the plugin’s database and multiple other data sources. A discreet, clickable pop-up icon will become live (change colour), on finding an OA article and will deliver the link or the PDF direct to the user’s desktop. Most plugins are compatible with most browsers, Lean’s Library Access adding compatibility with Safari last month.
Each plugin has a different history of development and certain features that distinguish it from others, and we’ve attempted to bring these out on the page. For example noting Unpaywall’s trustworthiness in the library space thanks to its exclusion of ResearchGate and Academia.edu; its harvesting and showing of licence metadata; and its reach with integrating search of its data via library discovery systems. Features we think are relevant for potential users looking for a quick overview of what’s out there are also mentioned, such as Kopernio’s Dropbox file storage benefits and integration with Web of Science and QxMD’s special applications for medical researchers and professionals.
In an adjacent page, Search Open Access, there is coverage of search engines focused on discovering OA content (Google Scholar; 1findr; Dimensions; CORE), a range of sites indexing OA content in different disciplines, both publisher- and community-based, and a selection of repositories and preprint servers, including OpenDOAR.
Screenshot of Search Open Access webpage
We hope the site design, based on the very cool Judge Business School Toolbox pages, gets across the basics about the OA plugins available and encourages their take-up. The plugins will definitely bring to the researcher OA alternative versions when subscription access puts the article behind a paywall and, regardless, will expose OA articles in search results that will otherwise be hard to find. The pages’ positioning top-left on the e-resources site is deliberately intended to grab attention, at least for reading left-to-right. It is interesting to see the approach other Universities have taken, using the LibGuide format for example at Queen’s University Belfast and at the University of Southampton.
Experiences with Lean Library’s Library Access plugin
Cambridge has had just over a year of experience implementing Lean Library’s Library Access plugin, and it’s been positive. The impetus for the institutional subscription to this product was as much to take action on the problem for the searcher of landing on publisher websites and struggling with Shibboleth federated sign-on. This problem is well documented (“spending hours of time to retrieve a minimal number of sources”) and most recently is being addressed by the RA21 project.[4] Equally though we wanted to promote OA content in the discovery process, and Lean Library’s latest development of its plugin to favour the delivery of the OA alternative before the default of the subscription version, is aligned with our values (considerations of versioning aside).
So we’re aiming to bring Lean to Cambridge researchers’ attention by recommending it as the plugin of choice for the period we’re in the transition to “immediate, free and unrestricted access” for all. It is only Lean that is providing the 24-hour updated and context-sensitive linking to our EZproxy server for off campus delivery of subscription content plus promoting OA alternative versions via the deployment of the Unpaywall database. The feedback from the Office of Scholarly Communication is favourable and the statistics support the positivity that we hear from our users (for the last year 66,731 for Google Scholar enhanced links; 49,556 article alternative views; a rough estimate against our EZproxy logs showing a probable 2/5 of off campus users are accessing the proxy via Lean).
One area of concern is the ownership of Lean by SAGE Publications, in contrast to the ownership say of Unpaywall as a project of the open-source ImpactStory, and what this means for users’ privacy. The concerns are shared by other libraries implementing Lean.[5] Our approach has been to make the extension’s privacy policy as prominent as possible on our page dedicated to promoting Lean, and to engage with Lean in depth over users’ concerns. We are satisfied with the answers to our questions from Lean and that our users’ data is adequately protected. Even in a rapidly changing arena for OA discovery tools the balance is not so fine when it comes to recommending installation of the Library Access plugin over a preference for the illegitimate and risk-prone SciHub.
Libraries’ discovery servicesare geared for subscription content
Allowing for influence of searchers’ discipline on choice of discovery service, it’s little surprise that the traditional library catalogue, even when upgraded to a web scale discovery service, prejudices inclusion of subscription over OA content. Of course it does, because this is the content the libraries pay for in the traditional subscription model and the discovery system is pretty much built around that. iDiscover is Cambridge’s discovery space for institutional subscriptions and print holdings of the University’s libraries and within iDiscover Open Access repository content has been enabled for search. Further, the pipe for the institutional repository content (Apollo) is established.
Nonetheless Cambridge will be looking to take advantage of the forthcoming link resolver service for Unpaywall. This is due for release in November 2019 and will surface a link to search Unpaywall from iDiscover when subscription content is unavailable. This link should kick in usually when the search in iDiscover is expanded beyond subscription content, and a form of which has been enabled already by at least one university by including the oadoi.org lookup in the Alma configuration.
The righting moment in the angle of list is that point a ship must find to keep it from capsizing, and Library discovery system providers’ integration with OA feels a bit like that – the OA indication was included in the May 2018 iDiscover release and suppliers have been working with CORE for inclusion of CORE content since 2017. That righting moment may be just over the horizon as integration with Unpaywall arrives, and the “competition” element dissipates, as the consultancy JISC used to review the OA discovery tools commented: “As the OA discovery landscape is crowded, OA discovery products compete for space and efficacy against established public infrastructure, library discovery services and commercial services”.[6]
A diffuse but developing landscape
Easy-to-install and effective to use, the OA discovery tools we are promoting are still widely thought of as at best providing a patch, a sticking-plaster, to the problem. A plethora of plugins is not necessarily what the researcher wants, or is attracted by, however necessary the plugin may be to saving time and exposing content in discovery. Possibly the really telling use case has yet to be tried wherein the plugin comes into its own in a big deal cancellation scenario.
Usage statistics for the Lean Library Access plugin are probably a reflection of the fact that the provision of most article content that is required by the University is available via IP access as subscription, and the need for the plugin is almost entirely limited to the off campus user. The Lean plugin’s relatively modest totals are though consistent with reports of plugin adoption by institutions that have cancelled big deals. The poll of the Bibsam Consortium members revealed 75% of researchers did not have any plug-in installed; the percentage for the University of Vienna in particular was 71%; the KTH Royal Institute of Technology authors “rarely used” a plugin.[7]
Another conjecture is that there is an antipathy to any plugin that could be collecting browsing history data and however “dumb” and programmatically-erased, the concern over privacy is such that the universal adoption libraries may hope for is unachievable. The likeliest explanation is possibly around the tipping-point from subscription to OA, and despite the Apollo repository’s usage being one of the highest in the country (1.1 million article downloads from July 2018 to July 2019), Cambridge’s reading of Gold OA is c. 13% of total subscription content, including journal archives. A comparison with the proportions of percentage views by OA types in Unpaywall’s recently published data (cited above) suggests this is on the low side in terms of worldwide trends, but it must be emphasized this is a subset of OA reading and excludes green, hybrid, and bronze. Just consider for instance the 1.5 billion downloads from arXiv globally to date.[8] Similarly, the stats from Unpaywall are overwhelmingly persuasive of the success of the plugin, as of February 2019 it delivered a million papers a day, 10 papers a second.
IRUS-UK growth of open access items since January 2016 (The red bars indicate total items, orange bars number of articles and green bars number of articles with DOIs. The blue line indicates the number of institutional repositories)
The inspirational statistician and “data artist” Edward Tufte wrote:
We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvellous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorise, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats.[9]
There’s thriving and there’s too much effort already. Any self-respecting OA plugin user will want to winnow, and make their own decisions on the plugin(s). In a less than 100% OA world, that combination of subscription and OA connection separated from physical location (on/off campus) is a critical advantage of the Lean Library offering, combined as it is with the Unpaywall database. Libraries will find much to critique in the institutional dashboards or analytics tools now built on top of some plugins (e.g. distinction of the physical location when accessing the alternative access version in the Kopernio usage for instance).
From the OA plugin user’s perspective, the emerging cutting edge is currently with the CORE Discovery plugin, as reported at the Open Repositories 2019 conference, in the “first large scale quantitative comparison” of Unpaywall, OA Button, CORE OA Discovery and Kopernio. This report reveals important truths for OA plugin critical adopters, for instance showing less than expected overlap in comparison of the plugins’ returned results from the test sample of DOIs, and the assertion “we can improve hit rate by combining the outputs from multiple discovery tools”.[10]
It’s become popular for our present day Johnson to quote his namesake, so in that vogue we should expect the take-up of Lean Library and CORE Discovery to bring closer that “resistless Day” when researchers the world over get “immediate, free and unrestricted access to all of the latest, peer-reviewed research” and the “misty Doubt” over the OA discovery landscape will be lifted.[11]
[1]
Flanagan, D. (2018). Open Access Discovery Workshop at the British Library, Living Knowledge blog 18 December 2018.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.22020/v652-2876
[11] Johnson, S., In Eliot, T. S., Etchells, F., Macdonald, H., Johnson, S., & Chiswick Press,. (1930). London: a poem: And The vanity of human wishes. London: Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald. l. 146.
Published Monday 21 October 2019
Written by James Caudwell (Deputy Head of Periodicals & Electronic Subscriptions Manager, Cambridge University Library)
In the last two years, since the REF 2021 open access policy came into force, the Open Access Team has received an ever increasing number of manuscript submissions for archiving in Apollo, Cambridge’s institutional open access repository.
We have been thinking long and hard about ways to cope with the workload, by scrutinising existing practices and streamlining workflows, because we want to provide the best possible service to our researchers, commensurate with the University’s world leading research.
This blog introduces what is perhaps the greatest overhaul of our workflows since the service began: a new ‘Fast Track’ deposit system.
Work it harder
Before the start of the REF OA policy (2014-2016), the Open Access Team would process and manually curate every manuscript submission we received. Authors could expect an initial response within 1-2 working days, after which (usually within a month) we would archive their manuscript in Apollo.
A simplified workflow for a typical manuscript was:
Manuscript uploaded by submitter in Symplectic Elements.
Item created in Apollo (DSpace) workflow
Helpdesk ticket created (Zendesk).
Open Access Team reviews manuscript, advises submitter and makes a decision.
Open Access Team archives the manuscript in Apollo and informs submitter.
To archive a manuscript the process was broadly the following:
Review the helpdesk ticket (Zendesk) for the open access decision.
Enter as many publication details as possible in Symplectic Elements.
Retrieve the submission from the Apollo (DSpace) deposit workflow.
Add licence and metadata to the record.
Review the submission and approve for archiving.
Move the item to the relevant departmental collection and apply an appropriate embargo (if required).
Finally, update the helpdesk ticket and send the original submitter a link to their Apollo record.
Each manuscript took on average 18 minutes to archive, which, besides being manually tedious and prone to error, was extremely time-consuming. Add to this the time required to make the initial decision and each manuscript submission could easily take 30 minutes for the Open Access Team to fully process from start to finish, especially if an open access fee had to be paid.
Fast-forward two years and with the rate of new manuscript submissions now peaking at over 1,300 per month, simply processing manuscripts for the REF would require more than four full-time staff members. Whilst these manual processes were viable for a handful of submissions a day, they became unwieldy at scale.
Make it better
Our first attempt at speeding up our open access system began in August 2017. To start we made a number of operational changes to reduce the time spent processing manuscript submissions:
We would rely entirely on the metadata present in Symplectic Elements to populate the Apollo records (i.e. we would not curate manual records).
The Open Access Team would no longer update the helpdesk records, instead internal record keeping would be automated as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the number of steps in the Apollo workflow was still roughly the same as the previous process, but with one key difference: a new field to record what we call the ‘Fast Track’ decision. There were seven Fast Track options:
Submitted
Proof
Published (not open access)
Published (open access)
Accepted (published)
Accepted (not published)
Other
The first six options represent the vast bulk of all manuscripts received by the Open Access Team, and ‘Other’ option simply acts as a catch-all for anything else. By simply knowing what sort of manuscript has been uploaded much of the decision and archiving process can be automated. However, the agent still needed to retrieve the item from the Apollo workflow, check the version of the file and publication status of the paper, add some metadata fields, approve the item, and move it to an appropriate collection.
Figure 1. The Apollo workflow page of a typical manuscript submission, with the addition of the new ‘Fast Track’ field.
The choice of Fast Track decision leads to four possible outcomes which would ‘trigger’ actions in our Zendesk helpdesk:
Submitted, proof, published (not open access)
Email submitter, ask for accepted manuscript
Published (open access)
Archive in Apollo (no embargo) ⇒ Email submitter Apollo link
Accepted (published), accepted (not published)
Archive in Apollo (embargoed) ⇒ Email submitter Apollo link
Other
Refer to Open Access Team
Despite being a much faster process, it was still manually tedious. It could also require up to 33 actions from agents (29 mouse clicks) and 14 web pages to be loaded, still not very user friendly. However, the time to archive had decreased from 18 to 9 minutes – a 50% reduction from the previous fully manual system.
Do it faster
So what if all the steps involved in processing a manuscript submission could be reduced to the absolute minimum, and be actionable within a single webpage? After a short development sprint, the Open Access Team launched the ‘Fast Track Deposits’ interface last September. A snapshot of the user interface is shown below.
Figure 2. The Fast Track interface. Choosing one of the options in blue is enough to fully archive a manuscript, or process it for further action by the submitter or the Open Access Team.
At the top of the page, the agent can see a ‘publication summary’ including the item title, the journal title, and publisher DOI if available. Both the item title and publisher DOI are hyperlinked, so that the agent can Google-search the item or land on the publisher’s webpage with a single mouse click.
The agent must first inspect the file and check that it is a suitable version (i.e. either the accepted version or the open access published version). If wrongly labelled, they must relabel the file via a dropdown menu, and add/delete files as appropriate. The agent then ‘describes’ the manuscript (i.e. decides whether it is the accepted, published, submitted or proof version) and submits their decision. The decision determines the trigger behaviour in the automatically populated helpdesk ticket. The agent is then free to move on to the next item.
If the decision is ‘accepted’ or ‘published open access’, the item is deposited and the submitter is automatically notified via email. For submitted, proof, and non-OA published versions, the author receives an automatic email asking for the accepted manuscript. Items are archived in the repository under a generic collection, and any forthcoming publication details are added to the record via external source information in Elements.
To see just how efficient Fast Track is we’ve prepared a short demonstration video which captures some of the key features:
Video 1. Real-time demonstration of the Fast Track system.
Makes us stronger
Agents therefore need only make one decision: identify the file version. But the real ingenuity of the Fast Track system is that embargoes can be set automatically by:
Taking into account the decision made by the agent (e.g. no embargo if published open access);
Detecting publication status and publication dates from Elements; and
Retrieving journals’ embargo policies via Orpheus (you can learn more about Orpheus in our previous blog post).
In some cases, usually because we don’t know the publication date, we can’t determine the embargo length of an accepted manuscript. In such cases we apply a 36 month embargo from the date of the Fast Track decision. We know that this embargo won’t always be correct, however, we routinely check manuscripts in Apollo and update embargoes accordingly.
Figure 3. Simplified overview of the Fast Track process. The key decision is to determine the type of manuscript that has been submitted. Everything else is handled automatically.
Since launching Fast Track the average time to process a manuscript is 1-2 minutes. More than 8,000 items have been processed since launching the phase two Fast-Track interface. If items processed under the phase one effort are included, the number goes up to just over 14,000. And since a picture speaks a thousand words, Figure 4 below shows the effect produced by the new interface launched in September on our backlog of unprocessed submissions.
Figure 4. Historical change in the number of unprocessed open access manuscript submissions. The total number of outstanding manuscript submissions peaked at nearly 2,400 in September 2018. Immediately after launching the Fast Track website the backlog dropped dramatically and was completely eliminated by March 2019.
We will continue to develop Fast Track to further streamline our processing of manuscripts. We have already started to partner with librarians and administrators across the University to leverage the collective knowledge about open access which now exists within the University’s professional academic services.
Get in contact: If you are running a DSpace repository and would like to implement Fast Track to work alongside your existing workflows email us at support@repository.cam.ac.uk
Published 23 April 2019 Written by Dr Mélodie Garnier and Dr Arthur Smith
