Just wanted to share a bit of re-use and sharing activity with you. As a result of our ‘mini Pathfinder’ activities (working closely with 3 Schools) we were prompted to produce a set of minimum requirements to help the deposit process. Effectively the Schools said, ‘tell us the least we need to do to get this HEFCE thing working, and give us a checklist we can work to’! So, we adapted the great diagram and wording that Theo and Eugen produced, and created a checklist that fits on a single page. We took this to a School presentation on HEFCE OA policy yesterday as an A5 leaflet, which was snapped up as people left. They had started the session with complaints about how hard all this was going to be, but seemed to be persuaded by the simplicity of this approach combined with Library support to check things and add more metadata later. By the end of the afternoon we had 17 accepted manuscripts deposited by academics from that one session.
Of course we may now be regretting this approach as it proves to be pretty resource intensive for the OA support team to work on such basic records, but hopefully should provide some good evidence of what works in terms of basic compliance.
Jackie Proven – University of St Andrews
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