Written by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Tim Fellows, Dr Agustina Martínez-García
Researchers at universities across the country are constantly being reminded that when they publish work in journals (or elsewhere) they have to deposit the accepted version of their article in their university’s repository as well. It ensures that this version of the article can be made freely available to the world (so-called ‘Green Open Access’) but also allows the university to keep track of their researchers’ outputs, including reporting to the all-important REF (Research Excellence Framework) exercise that takes place every few years and helps determine future government funding to each institution. It’s important that researchers deposit their works, but time-consuming for everyone involved.
In order to help automate this process, a service called Publications Router takes information from journals and other traditional academic content providers and automatically passes it along to current research information systems (CRISs), repositories, and other relevant institutional systems based upon the affiliations of each article’s authors. But Publications Router did not serve the needs of more innovative alternative publishing platforms, meaning that universities were not automatically being notified of works published on these platforms. Given that these tend to be Open Access publications, their loss to the REF assessment exercise (which counts the proportion of Open Access publications from each institution), is vital.
Thanks to the support of the Arcadia fund, the open research platform Octopus.ac is now the first alternative publishing platform integrated with Publications Router.
Octopus is designed to sit alongside journals as the place where researchers share their work in full detail. Instead of publishing a ‘paper’, Octopus allows researchers to share their work as a series of small, interconnected publications that each represent a different stage of the research process. This allows researchers to follow best practice in research, such as publishing a method before it is carried out, and to allow others to carry out linked research (such as an alternative analysis of data, or a replication of a method).
The institution that drove forward the integration was the University of Cambridge. When a Cambridge-affiliated researcher publishes their work on Octopus, a copy of the publication – along with key metadata – is now directed to Cambridge’s institutional repository, Apollo, via Publications Router.
As the structure of Octopus’ publications is different from that of a traditional research paper, one of the key challenges has been how Octopus can integrate with existing research systems designed around the traditional formats. With that issue now solved, Octopus publications can much more easily be formally recognised as part of a researcher’s academic record.
Whilst the integration has been developed by Octopus and Cambridge, it has been built to allow other institutions who use Publications Router to take advantage of it, meaning the feature is now available to numerous institutions across the UK. The integration reuses and adapts existing infrastructure, i.e. Publications Router, and increases interoperability between innovative research publishing tools like Octopus, while at the same time, it removes barriers to depositing research outputs into research repositories. More so, it provides key benefits to researchers and institutions:
- By depositing Octopus outputs into repositories, we add redundancy to ensure that additional copies will be accessible and preserved long-term.
- The integration helps institutions tracking the impact of their research and keeping an accurate scholarly record.
- The integration facilitates funder compliance and institutional reporting as information about Octopus outputs is made available to institutional research information systems in an automated manner.
Find out more about this integration at https://research.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/01/16/octopus-is-now-delivering-records-via-publications-router/
