One of the biggest issues facing the Open Access Team has been keeping up with the constant stream of accepted manuscripts that need to be processed. In many cases we receive notification of an accepted manuscript well before formal publication. This has presented a significant challenge over the last five years because although we know there is a publication forthcoming (or at least we trust that there this), we have no idea as to when an article may actually be published.
This means that we have many thousands of publication records in Apollo which have ‘placeholder’ embargoes because we simply did not know the publication date at the point of archiving and therefore could not set an accurate embargo. After archiving, many of the records in Apollo may have been supplemented with a publication date thanks to metadata supplied via Symplectic Elements, but we still need to set an accurate embargo.
In other cases we might be waiting for an article to be published gold open access so that we can update Apollo with the published version of record.
While we are now very adept at archiving manuscripts in Apollo (thanks in large part to Fast Track and Orpheus) it remains a challenge to properly and accurately update Apollo records with either correct embargoes for accepted manuscripts, or the open access version of record. It is a futile task to be constantly checking whether a manuscript has been published. While the Open Access Team keeps a list of every publication that requires updating, this is a thankless job that should be highly automatable.
To that end, we have recently leveraged Orpheus to do at lot of the heavy lifting for us. By interrogating every journal article in Apollo and comparing its metadata against Orpheus we can now quickly determine which items can be updated and take the necessary next steps, changing embargoes where appropriate or identifying opportunities to archive the published version of record.
To do this we created a DSpace curation task to check every “Article” type in Apollo that had at least one file that was currently under embargo. We then compared the publication metadata against the information held in Orpheus to determine what steps needed to be taken. In total we found 9,164 items in need of some attention. The results are displayed below in a Tableau Public visual and summarised in Table 1.
Of these items, 3,864 had a published open access version archived alongside the embargoed manuscript, so we skipped any further updating of these records. This is actually a very good sign, and indicates that the Open Access Team has been going back to records and supplementing them with the open access version of record.
Amongst the remaining items, 2,794 were successfully matched against Orpheus and had their embargoes verified: 1,862 records were updated with shorter embargoes and 412 had longer embargoes applied, leaving 520 items which were unchanged because they already had the correct embargo period.
The final 2,506 items were primarily composed of records with no publication date (1,132 items), publications that could potentially be supplemented by the open access version of record (537 items) or had no embargo information in Orpheus (434 items).
Table 1. Summary of outcomes after comparing Apollo records against Orpheus.
Date archived in Apollo
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Total
The item has an open VoR version
7
105
1200
1019
1300
226
7
3864
Accepted version – embargo updated
2
145
76
132
2305
134
2794
No publication date available
10
159
32
714
217
1132
Orpheus VoR embargo: 0
1
4
51
18
5
451
7
537
No AAM embargo information available
3
6
64
39
33
264
25
434
Other outcome
8
37
114
47
23
162
12
403
Total
19
154
1584
1358
1525
4122
402
9164
We plan to run this curation task on a regular basis and periodically check the outcomes. Any items that continually fail to update will be processed manually by the Open Access Team, but our intention and desire is to move away from manual processing wherever possible.
This is our traditional yearly blog about what we have been doing at the OSC in Cambridge. We are publishing it a little later than intended, but this is an indication of how busy the beginning of 2020 has been here in the Office of Scholarly Communication.
2019 saw us more in a ‘business as usual’ phase as we knuckled down and got on with supporting researchers in Cambridge. That aside, we still had some major developments in Open Research and this work will continue into 2020 and beyond.
Policy changes
2019 saw a number of happenings in the policy space at Cambridge. Most excitingly, the University’s Position Statement on Open Research was announced in February, making it one of the first UK universities to have such a statement. This demonstrates the University’s commitment to making open research a reality at Cambridge.
Following on from this, in July 2019, the University together with Cambridge University Press announced that they have signed up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). The newly created Open Research Steering Committee, headed by the University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, will have oversight over the open research direction and the implementation of DORA. The Steering Committee and their working groups are currently looking into open research training, open research infrastructure (such as electronic research notebooks), Plan S and DORA.
In December, an updated version of the Research Data Management Policy Framework was released. This update brings the policy framework in alignment with funder requirements and acknowledges the important roles that Principal Investigators, research staff and students, and University support staff play in good data management practices. It sits beneath the Position Statement on Open Research, with the documents being closely aligned.
Open access news
The Open Access Service made great strides towards automating many of its processes this year, headlined by the introduction of Orpheus and Fast Track. Orpheus is a custom database of publisher open access policies, and when combined with Fast Track for manuscript processing, it allows the Open Access Service to reduce the number of steps required to archive a manuscript in Apollo. In 2019, 8325 manuscript submissions were processed through Fast Track. In total, the Open Access Service responded to 13,609 submissions or enquiries in 2019, equal to 37 requests per day.
Our Request a Copy service received 7,626 requests in 2019. One of the most requested items was “HIV-1 remission following CCR5Δ32/Δ32 haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation” (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1027-4), which received 77 requests. The authors of the paper responded to and fulfilled each request, enabling the readers to obtain free access to the publication, and well ahead of Nature’s six-month embargo. However, since the accepted manuscript is now out of embargo, it has received a further 326 downloads to date in Apollo. The success of the Request a Copy service once again demonstrates the need for access to scholarly research at the earliest opportunity. Embargoes, even ‘short’ 6 month embargoes, are a needless barrier to the University’s research outputs.
Data news
Aside from the update to the Research Data Management Policy Framework (see above), the most significant development from 2019 has been the continued evolution of the Data Champion Programme.
We welcomed 40 new Data Champions (DCs) from across several Schools increasing the size of our network to 86. With such a large cohort of Champions a new idea of creating departmental hubs was initiated to increase collaboration and the sharing of practices by Data Champions from the same areas. This has proved really successful in both Chemistry and Engineering, with a more coordinated approach having the effect of greater productivity from the Champions in those areas in engaging others with data management.
In 2019, the Data Champions also tried out a mentoring scheme for the first time whereby established Champions support new Champions in finding their feet and give them ideas about how to provide support to their own community. This has proved to be a great success and the scheme is being run for a second year for the new cohort of Champions joining in early 2020.
The requirement to deposit an electronic copy of a PhD thesis in order to graduate has become normal business now. In 2019, 1197 of theses were deposited with 47% being made fully open access. In addition, around 100 requests to digitise historical theses were received from their authors and 1015 requests for scans of historical theses were received from requesters.
Training
In 2019 we took a broad perspective and examined how training was contributing to promoting and supporting Open Research at Cambridge. The Task Group on Open Research Training, comprised of representatives of several libraries and colleagues from other areas of the University, conducted a number projects to understand where we are at the moment and plan a strategy for the future. The details of that work will be presented at the RLUK 2020 conference in March but, as a ‘sneak peek’, here are some of the conclusions we drew:
We’re stronger together: researchers will benefit if we build stronger communication between training providers.
Open Research training should not be seen in isolation to the rest of research, rather it should be a key component of the way students learn to do research.
Postdocs and senior researchers want to learn independently, we can support them with better-presented information online and by facilitating events and dialogue.
We want to be able to constantly improve our training and demonstrate impact by exploring ways to evaluate ourselves, while also being aware of the lurking danger of irresponsible metrics in our own evaluation.
Alongside the strategy work, we continued to expand the training we offer on Open Access, Research Data Management, publishing, copyright and more. A growing number of departments have requested sessions and we have partnered with PLOS and the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs to deliver a regular session on peer review. We delivered 56 sessions, reaching over 800 researchers and librarians. In addition, we have offered a session about complying with the REF Open Access requirements to departments; the Open Access team outdid themselves by delivering 20 sessions to individual departments in just over three months.
Outreach activities
In 2019 we hosted several events, from workshops to a one-day symposium dealing with open access monographs, FAIR data, preprints, reproducibility in social sciences, Plan S developments in the USA and open research in STEMM.
Of notable interest is the Symposium on Open Monographs held in October at St Catharine’s College. This one-day event brought together researchers, funders, publishers and learned societies to discuss the benefits and challenges of an open landscape for academic books. The recordings are featured in the OSC YouTube channel and most of the presentations are available in our institutional repository, Apollo. A summary of the key themes that emerged from this symposium were later presented in Unlocking Research.
October would not have been complete without celebrating Open Access Week. During the week we shared various blogs and online resources and we were delighted to announce the launch of our popular Research Support Ambassador Programme as an open educational resource designed to give learners either an introduction or refresher on key elements of research support.
Systems
Apollo has participated in a joint pilot study with Jisc, Symplectic and Sheffield Hallam University to look best approaches to integrate the Jisc Publications Router and the research information system Symplectic Elements, via institutional repositories. This pilot has involved working together to look at how well Elements could capture details of articles that Router had sent to our repositories. Router currently works with EPrints and DSpace repositories, the platforms used by Sheffield Hallam and Cambridge respectively.
Symplectic’s Repository Tools 2 (RT2) integration module was used to harvest Apollo and de-duplicate them against any existing Elements records. We tested how well this worked for repository records deposited automatically by Router, looking in particular at the volume of duplicate publications and how early after acceptance notifications were received from Router. The study demonstrated that Router and Elements are technically compatible when used in this way. As a result of this pilot, Jisc and Symplectic are now happy to offer this solution to institutions more widely.
Some excellent work behind the scenes has resulted in Jisc publishing a series of blogs last November. Their third blog showcases the ORCID IDs in Research Data Management workflows at the University of Cambridge and how a workflow has been implemented in order to create seamless links between researchers and their works using identifiers and different services. Such solutions improve visibility and discoverability across systems, reduce duplication of effort in entering information and avoid identification errors.
This work was made possible by Agustina Martínez García of the Office of Scholarly Communication, Owen Roberson of the Research Office, and Dean Johnson of University Information Services (UIS) who were amongst the winners of the professional services recognition scheme two years ago for their effective collaborative work on the integration of Symplectic Elements and Apollo.
According to the blog, as of September 2019, 25,550 articles, 1,329 conference proceedings and 1,100 datasets in Apollo have ORCID IDs.
Saying a big thank you
2019 saw the departure of the University’s first Head of Scholarly Communication, Dr Danny Kingsley. Many of the achievements of 2019 were due to hard work Danny put in before her departure and for this we’d like to thank her for all she contributed.
Published 26 February
Compiled by: Maria Angelaki
Contributions from Agustina Martínez-García, Bea Gini, Maria Angelaki, Lauren Cadwallader, Sacha Jones and Arthur Smith.
Lorraine and Olivia started working as Scholarly Communication Support in the Open Access team at the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) in the University Library this summer. In this interview, they share their experience of starting a new role in the field of open access, from the perspective of their respective backgrounds in academia and publishing.
What does working in Scholarly Communication Support entail and what are your responsibilities in this role?
For the first few months joining the Open Access team we both started looking at “Fast Track deposits”, the simplest route of depositing author’s manuscripts into Apollo, the University of Cambridge institutional repository. This system allows the team to process items more quickly than the manual Apollo deposit. Since its launch in September 2018, it has considerably helped to reduce the workload as manuscript submission for archiving in Apollo continues to increase in view of the upcoming REF2021. On a daily basis, we also deal with queries from tickets created on the Open Access Helpdesk, contacting authors and publishers when further information is required and manually depositing manuscripts on Apollo while also updating their records on Symplectic Elements, the University’s research information management system.
Olivia and I are now being trained to respond to researchers’ funding queries and to process invoices for journals’ open access fees from the RCUK and COAF block grants. In order to do this we have had to learn more in depth about open access requirements and Research Councils’ funder requirements.
More recently, we have been working with Units of Assessment to support them with the open access component for REF (Research Excellence Framework) compliance, attending training sessions and reviewing Unit of Assessment outputs for eligibility. This has involved researching and interpreting the REF 2021 requirements for open access to disseminate effectively to academics and administrators. It has been illuminating to gain the perspective of different faculties, the way that they have to engage with REF, and their grapples with open access compliance.
What are your respective backgrounds and how did you decide to start working in OA?
Lorraine: Prior to working in open access, I completed a PhD in History of Art in Cambridge, looking at specific intersections between early modern artworks, medicine, and theories of the imagination. I also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the arts, social sciences and humanities) for one year.
I first became interested in OA and Scholarly Communication during my studies as a PhD representative for my peers in History of Art between 2017 and2018, the year that electronic deposits of PhD theses via Apollo became a requirement. There were anxieties from my peers around this new requirement, especially in relation to the open access feature: what would this mean for publishing their first monographs from their PhD thesis as Early Career Researchers? Would publishers still be interested in their work after it had been made OA? And, especially, what about the hundreds of copyrighted images present in their theses? It would have taken months to obtain permission to reproduce all of those images. During this time, I liaised with the OSC, the head of the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership programme (as part of the RCUK, the AHRC also has its own open access requirements that apply to PhDs), communicated with faculty staff during meetings, and reported the advice I had gathered to my peers. I see this new position in the OSC Open Access team as an excellent opportunity to understand better what happens behind the scenes of an institutional repository and gain more knowledge about the broader picture of open access in academic research.
Olivia: I left academic publishing with a sense that the model was broken. Expensive paywalls restrict access to those seeking to access information and academics were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the publishing model. These issues particularly hit home following two separate instances. The first, a letter sent to the publisher by a prisoner seeking further information on a criminology text, one which was prohibitively expensive and inaccessible to such an individual. The second, a cuttingly written forward by an academic around monograph publishing and the ivory towers in which university elites and academic publishers co-exist.
Academic publishing very much feels like the other side of what I am doing with open access, making research as freely and widely available as possible.
How do you think your past experiences have helped you to have the necessary skills for working in OA?
Lorraine: As a Cambridge student, I acquired a good knowledge of Cambridge’s unique research and teaching landscape (Schools, Faculties, Departments, Colleges, Research centres, etc.). My academic background also meant that I had hands-on understanding about the process of research, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, and even submitting my outputs through Symplectic Elements. These were really helpful starting my new role: understanding how researchers work is crucial in scholarly communication and definitely helps me to advise and communicate with researchers better. I am, for instance, particularly interested in the relationship between open access and third-party copyright (especially images from cultural heritage institutions, i.e. galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and the challenges it brings to researchers in the Arts and Humanities.
Olivia: I have found my previous work in publishing an asset working in open access because of my knowledge of the editorial and production process as well as publishing revenue models. I am familiar with the time scales for journal articles and books production as well as publishers’copyright requirements which I have found I am using on a regular basis. Working extensively with academics in a production role, I am aware of the competing pressures placed on them and their need for clear and accessible information on fulfilling publishing commitments or REF compliance.
Now that you have started your new roles, what are the tips you would give to someone interested in starting a career in OA?
Picking up from last year’s blogpost, and from our own experience: keeping up to date with developments, attention to detail, supporting academics and seeking support from the open access community are four key areas when starting in a career in OA.
Keeping up to date with developments and attention to detail
Publisher’s and funders’ open access policies change very quickly, as do the methods we adopt within the team to cope with the workflow and with the challenges brought by REF 2021. Anyone starting a career in OA needs to keep up to date with changes, be capable of doing in-depth research about those, and be comfortable admitting not knowing everything! The landscape is constantly changing and having an awareness of new proposals and initiatives makes the big picture much clearer.
Supporting academics
Give academics a break. It will take you a while to feel confident with policy and guidance and for you, it is your whole job. For the academics submitting their papers and contacting the repository, this is one small part of their role; you need to guide them through it as painlessly as possible.
Seek support
You cannot and do not know everything about open access. Luckily, there are plenty of wonderful expert colleagues who can help, so it is really important to know how to work within a team and keep building the necessary knowledge as a group.
Published 25 October 2019
Written by Lorraine de la Verpilliere, Olivia Marsh
