-
Open access: fringe or mainstream?
When I was just settling in to the world of open access and scholarly communication, I wrote about the need for open access to stop being a fringe activity and enter the mainstream of researcher behaviour: “Open access needs to stop being a ‘fringe’ activity and become part of the mainstream. It shouldn’t be an afterthought to the publication process. Whether the solution to academic inaction is better systems or, as I believe, greater engagement and reward, I feel that the scholarly communications and repository community can look forward to many interesting developments over the coming months and years.” While much has changed in the five years since I (somewhat…
-
Clearing the final hurdle – automating embargo setting
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…
-
A Fast-Track Route to Open Access
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),…
-
Blood: in short supply?
Two years ago (almost to the day) we called out Blood for their misleading open access options that they offered to Research Council and Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) authors. Unfortunately, little has changed since then: Blood continues to demand a $1000 ‘service fee’ to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central (PMC). Nature, for sake of comparison, will do this for free. Their ASH Author Choice option, which costs $2500, offers no form of Creative Commons licence in return. Neither of these routes is sufficient to comply with either Research Councils’ or COAF’s open access policies which require that the accepted text be made available in PMC within 6 months of…
-
Cambridge Open Access spend 2013-2018
Since 2013, the Open Access Team has been helping Cambridge researchers, funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the consortium of biomedical funders which make up the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), to meet their Open Access obligations. Both RCUK (now part of UKRI) and COAF have Open Access policies which have a preference for ‘gold’, i.e. the published work should be Open Access immediately at the time of publication. Implementing these policies has come at a significant cost. In this time, Cambridge has been awarded just over £10 million from RCUK and COAF to implement their Open Access policies, and the Open Access Team has diligently used this funding…
-
arXiv and REF – together at last?
New draft REF2021 guidance was released for consultation on Monday morning. Buried half-way through this daunting 139 page document was an update to the REF Open Access policy. This revised policy comes on the back of Research England’s report Monitoring sector progress towards compliance with funder open access policies which was released in June, and on which we have already commented. From an Open Access perspective, additional flexibility for preprint servers has been added to the policy: The funding bodies recognise that many researchers derive value from sharing early versions of papers using a pre-print service. Institutions may submit pre-prints as eligible outputs to REF 2021 (see Annex K). Only…
-
Cambridge’s RCUK/COAF Open Access spend January 2017 – March 2018
It’s been reporting season for institutions in receipt of RCUK Open Access block grant awards, so we’ve been busy preparing data for both RCUK (now UKRI) and Jisc about how Cambridge has spent its funding allocation over the past 15 months (January 2017 – March 2018). In this blog post I’ll focus mainly on the Jisc Open Access article processing charge (APC) report as it includes both RCUK and COAF expenditure, which we’ve made available in Apollo (the RCUK report is available there too). We’ve had to make a few tweaks to the data to perform the analysis that follows, but that shouldn’t substantially affect the figures. Unless stated otherwise,…
-
Manuscript detectives – submitted, accepted or published?
In the blog post “It’s hard getting a date (of publication)”, Maria Angelaki discussed how a seemingly straightforward task may turn into a complicated and time-consuming affair for our Open Access Team. As it turns out, it isn’t the only one. The process of identifying the version of a manuscript (whether it is the submitted, accepted or published version) can also require observation and deduction skills on par with Sherlock Holmes’. Unfortunately, it is something we need to do all the time. We need to make sure that the manuscript we’re processing isn’t the submitted version, as only published or accepted versions are deposited in Apollo. And we need to…
-
How open is Cambridge? 2017 edition
Welcome to Open Access Week 2017. The Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge is celebrating with a series of blog posts, announcements and events. In today’s blog post we revisit the question about the openness of Cambridge. For Open Access week last year I looked at how open Cambridge was using the extremely useful Lantern tool, developed by Cottage Labs, and which is the basis of the Wellcome Trust’s compliance tool. If you haven’t used it before, Lantern takes a list of DOIs, PMIDs, or PMCIDs and runs these through a variety of sources to try and determine the Open Access status of the publication. I found that, for publications in 2015, 51.8% of all of…
-
Open Access policy, procedure & process at Cambridge
The Open Access policies developed and applied by the UK’s major research funders (HEFCE, RCUK and COAF) all aim to achieve one thing: freedom of knowledge for all. However, the specific mechanisms these funders have taken to achieve this goal varies considerably and requires careful implementation from higher education institutions (HEIs). In this blog post, I’ll describe the different workflows required to meet each funder’s expectations and then look at how these policies intersect with each other to form a tangled web of policy nightmare. Some of the decisions and processes will be peculiar to the University of Cambridge, especially when it comes to decisions around funding for article processing…
