Earlier this year we published a report “A year in the life of Open Access support: continuous improvement at University of St Andrews” which described development of our OA support service. In our case study we mentioned email templates that were being used and in our “REF-monitoring” workflows (Appendix 2. p14) and to back up our simple messages about the HEFCE OA Policy for the next REF. We have recently amended the templates, simplifying the message further to avoid any confusion over dates, and because many of our researchers now have a reasonable awareness of the policy. We continue to use them as a way of encouraging early deposit of accepted manuscripts into our Research Information System, Pure – and to thank authors who have already deposited.
The email templates are at: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7506 (with a Creative Commons license)
We have now sent out well over 200 emails, and have been getting a great response. Naturally our inbox is bursting with additional enquiries and some concerns, but in general authors are happy that they are getting guidance on what/how/when to deposit. Our deposit rate for 2015 across the University is now around 69%, with one School (where we have been working closely to develop additional support) reaching 89%. Some Schools are yet to catch on, so we continue to use other forms of communication such as regular newsletters. Our favourite response to these is “Interesting… please do come and speak at our staff council to get us up to speed” – so the advocacy work continues!
Jackie, Mike & Kyle – OA Support Team, University of St Andrews Library
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