Category Archives: Open Access

Launch of a New Open Access Journals Toolkit

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by Rebecca Wojturska, Open Access Publishing Officer, The University of Edinburgh

On Tuesday 27th June, the OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) announced the release of a new Open Access Journals Toolkit. I was fortunate enough to be asked to join the editorial board in my capacity as Open Access Publishing Officer within Edinburgh University Library, and would love to share my experience of helping to write the guide!

The aim of the toolkit was to “promote transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity in scholarly publishing.” As these values align with Edinburgh Diamond (the library’s journal and book hosting service), I very quickly said yes at the opportunity to get involved.

Firstly, I was very pleased to see the board was extensive and included a range of subject experts in Open Access and journal publishing. Having so many board members helped split the workload and meant there were many eyes on each section. The fact that board members are from all around the world ensured that the toolkit wasn’t just from a Global North point of view, and would be useful for anyone, no matter where they are based. It was also great to meet so many of my peers!

The journal toolkit has many topics and provides an overview of the subject, as well as references and further reading for more detailed information. Each board member was each assigned three topics to lead, involving conducting research in this area and writing a section containing everything a reader might need to know about the topic. We were under instruction not to bulk it out too much as the guide was meant to be easy to digest and not too overwhelming for a beginner. The sections then went into peer review, where another board member would look over your contributions and provide as much feedback as they could, giving you scope to revise and strengthen them. Then, a third member would give it a final look-over to catch any last minute errors or omissions. Finally, Research Consulting, who were the consultants pulling it all together, tidied up everything and ensured the toolkit read consistently throughout. Overall, the toolkit was really well-crafted and extensively peer-reviewed.

Library publishing is a growing area, and most if not all of the services and presses within libraries focus on Open Access. However, there isn’t as much guidance or resources available that are tailored specifically to Open Access, especially for under-resourced journals and initiatives, who are the core target users for the toolkit. This is extra important when you consider most teams in this area are new to it and consist of a very small amount of staff. Knowing how to even get started is incredibly daunting, and the toolkit means all those starting steps are laid out for users to follow, making the process more manageable and smooth. Also, having an easy-to-access toolkit means that everyone with an internet connection can find out all the basics they need to consider, and at no cost to them. Even better, most of the content in the toolkit is openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License!

Our Edinburgh Diamond service will be using the toolkit for when we have a new editor looking to launch a journal or flip to Open Access. I’ll also be recommending it to our shared service partners, many of whom run their own Open Access initiatives, as the toolkit is a great way to ensure journals hit the ground running, are of a high standard, and are an attractive option for authors. For us, it helps strengthen the reputation and prestige of our service, helping cement the sustainability and viability of Diamond Open Access in the library.

The toolkit has a very sleek and user-friendly interface, so why not check it out and find out how it could be useful for you too?

The Open Access Journals Toolkit

Some thoughts of the UKRI Open Access Policy on it’s 1st Birthday

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Multicoloured lit candles spelling HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Happy Birthday (from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Birthday_candles.jpg) CC BY-SA 3.0

Do you think UKRI’s’ open access policy for journal articles has made a significant impact on the scholarly publishing landscape in the past year? How has the policy changed things and impacted the shift to open access?

From our point of view we have seen that the UKRI policy and the associated Open Access Block Grants funding has been one of the more significant driving factors in shifting the academic publishing landscape in the UK towards open access as the standard approach for many academics when publishing their research outputs. To illustrate this, in 2022 there were 32,478 articles published by lead authors from the UK with a Creative Commons licence which represents around 45.7% of the total UK output. In 2021 this figure was 34.1% and slightly lower at 25.2% in 2020 (OA figures provided by the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard: https://subugoe.github.io/hoaddash).

This significant rise in openly licenced material is a direct consequence of publishers offering the UK academic sector Transitional Agreements (TAs), sometimes known as ‘Read & Publish’ deals. Transitional agreements are contracts between a university and publisher which gradually shift the basis of payments from subscription-based reading to open access publishing services in a controlled manner. (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/working-with-transitional-agreements). Research intensive universities have struggled to meet the additional costs of open access on top of journal subscription expenditure and the UKRI Open Access Block Grants have enabled this transition to start to take place. Without this critical investment by UKRI in the publishing landscape this transformation would not be possible.

Do you think UKRI’s open access policy is sufficient? Should UKRI do anything else to facilitate the shift to open access?

To date the focus of the UKRI policy has been on the final published journal article, with a sidenote that encourages authors to use preprints – particularly researchers funded by the MRC and BBSRC who have separate policies for preprints. During the COVID-19 pandemic we saw great use of preprints to rapidly disseminate research findings. One University of Edinburgh preprint reporting on the Omicron variant of concern was downloaded 21, 005 times in 10 days (See this blog post for a case study: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/openscholarship/2022/01/07/the-power-of-preprints-an-omicron-case-study/).

Other subject disciplines that have longer publication times would benefit greatly from rapid communication and we would like to see UKRI investing more in open infrastructure which will help enable this. Research England has invested significantly to support initiatives like Octopus – a new platform for the scientific community – but this focus on lab-based disciplines risks leaving innovation in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences trailing behind the traditional science subjects.

Another open question that UKRI could help answer is how can the value of preprints be more widely recognised and rewarded? This issue is closely related to the strong incentives for researchers to publish in glamour journals and the obsession with Journal Impact Factors.  UKRI is already doing some great work to reform research assessment – for example by promoting narrative CVs – and we would like to see this continue in more subject disciplines.

What else needs to be done by others (not UKRI) for a full shift to open access?

The purview of UKRI is limited by national boundaries, which is why the Plan S initiative is extremely important. Co-ordination between national research funders is required to ensure that progress towards open access is a controlled and managed so that it works for everyone involved in the process – authors, publishers, institutions and research funders. The core of the access problem is that academia has outsourced the publishing component to commercial companies who are extracting maximum revenue – as is their wont and right to do so.  Libraries don’t currently have comprehensive answers, but we are engaging with publishers to let them know how they can help the academic community. Our favoured approach is to support smaller society publishers to adopt the “Subscribe to Open” (S2O) model which a pragmatic approach for converting subscription journals to open access. Using S2O, a publisher offers a journal’s current subscribers continued access. If all current subscribers participate in the S2O offer – simply by not opting out – the publisher opens the content covered by that year’s subscription. There is little risk to the publisher and there are no barriers or fees for authors to publish.

Have you or researchers at Edinburgh encountered any problems linked to UKRI’s open access policy for journal articles?

The shift to requiring immediate open access upon publication with a CC BY licence is hugely welcome, however it does create significant complexities for researchers who are trying to navigate their way through the various complex options offered by journal publishers. Some examples of current live issues that we routinely help authors with are:

  1. Authors publishing in non-standard journal that do not offer any compliant open access routes,
  2. Journals that incur extra page or colour charges that cannot be funded by block grants,
  3. Collaborating co-authors who are based at institutions without TAs meaning articles are not eligible in Read & Publish deals,
  4. Publishers not accepting Rights Retention Statements in submitted manuscripts.

The changes in the publishing landscape have provided libraries with new opportunities to support and engage with the academic community. The skills and knowledge of librarians are well suited to help manage this change.

Rights retention policy: an update after 9 months

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2022 has been a big year for open access at the University of Edinburgh. We started the year off with a bang by introducing a revised Research Publications & Copyright policy in January. This mandatory open access policy applies to all University staff members with a responsibility for research. Going forwards all authors automatically grant the University a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

We are proud that the University of Edinburgh was the first institution in the UK to adopt this type of progressive rights retention open access policy, and we are hugely encouraged to see that many other universities are adopting similar policies. In many ways the policy is just the starting point and most of the hard work actually happens afterwards when supporting members of staff with new publishing processes.  This post is intended to give an update of progress so far and to give an account of how the University of Edinburgh policy is having a positive effect on the number of open access publications being immediately available.

Contacting authors

During 2022 the Library in conjunction with Professional Service staff embedded within Schools and Colleges have held an ongoing series of internal seminars for Schools/Institutes. To date the recorded attendance has been 1700 researchers (21.5% of 7,900 total). During these sessions academic staff were informed about the new institutional policy and the support options that are available to them. A second approach was to send All-Staff emails circulated by local College and Schools with information about the new policy and guidelines. This co-ordination between the Library and Professional Service staff was essential in spreading the message about the new institutional policy and getting widespread buy-in from academic staff.

Contacting publishers

In parallel to informing academic staff the University undertook an exercise to formally write to and inform the most popular publishers that University staff submit their work to. Solicitors from our Legal Services department sent a Notice of Grant of Licence by recorded delivery and email to 170 publishers we identified. These publishers we selected covered in the region of 95% of the University’s publication outputs.

Many publishers have introduced restrictive publishing agreements which require embargo periods, and some publishers even assert that their licensing terms will supersede any other prior agreements. We dispute this and if challenged the University will be able to bring a legal claim against the publisher as they have willingly procured a breach of contract against our pre-existing rights.

For a claim of procuring a breach of contract to succeed it must be shown that the defendant knew about the prior contract and intended to encourage another person to break it. Our solicitors have prepared a sworn Affidavit confirming service on all the recipients which will be sufficient to confirm that all the named publishers were indeed advised of our position ahead of article publication and that they have subsequently asked an author to breach the terms of their employment contract by accepting a publishing licence. Most of the time these publishing agreements are click-thru licences that are impossible to edit or change.

With a prior licence granted and publishers contacted the University can now deposit the accepted manuscript of articles in our digital repository, with the article metadata usually available immediately upon deposit and the scholarly article made accessible to the public on the date of first online publication under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

A snapshot of open access statuses

So with the policy in place, and the majority of authors informed, how effective has the policy been over the first 9 months?

Using data from our Current Research Information System (CRIS) we can track progress on articles published and their open access status.  However, we have to be aware of some of the limitations about the health of the metadata extracted from the CRIS. Sadly around 5% of research output records do not have complete metadata allowing us to determine their status. Another point to note is that individual research outputs records in the CRIS commonly have information about both the accepted manuscript version and a final published version. Due to the data model of the CRIS it is not easy to disambiguate between the green versus gold OA statuses when running reports.

Bearing this in mind the table below shows the current open access status of 2022 journal articles:

Open status Count of OA status Percentage
Closed 219 5%
Embargoed 576 12%
Indeterminate 226 5%
Open 3519 78%
Grand Total 4540 100%

For the 2022 calendar to the present date (mid-Oct) University staff members have written and published 4737 journal articles, of which 197 are not yet published so we’ll discount those.  This table includes journal articles that are published via all types of OA route – including fully Gold OA journals and Gold OA via Transformative Agreements (Read & Publish deals). If we remove the journal articles that have been published under a Transformative Agreement or in a fully open access journal we will be left with the number of Green OA articles. We have determined that 958 journal articles have made open access via the repository (Green OA) route in the first 9 months of 2022. It is interesting to note that a Rights Retention Statement (RRS) was only included in 103 articles.

Timing of Open Access

By comparing the dates we have recorded for the official publication date and the date of earliest online access via the repository we can tell something about the timing of open access. The table below shows the available data for articles published in 2022.

Timing of OA # of Green OA articles
Before publication 157
Within 1 month of publication date 644
Between 1-3 months of publication date 58
Between 3-6 months of publication date 16
Greater than 6 months of publication date 83

The majority of articles released before official publication in the journals are preprints that have been deposited in arXiv (or similar) and share a single research output record for the preprint version and journal article.

Around two-thirds (67%) of the Green OA articles were deposited and made OA within 1 month of the date of publication. This time period is the one recommended by UKRI to comply with their 2022 Open Access policy. Around 16% of Green OA articles were made open access after this 1 month deadline so technically would not comply with research funders policies, like the UKRI. Looking at the data more closely reveals that the majority of these seemingly uncompliant articles were submitted before 2022 so actually would not need to follow the immediate OA requirements.

Progress: snapshot of licensing formats

Looking at the licence details on the open access research output records in the CRIS (which includes Gold OA and Transformative Agreements) show that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence is the most popular. It is worth noting that many scholars have opted to choose the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. The licence field is not mandatory in the CRIS which means that often is it not completed. This is reflected by the high ‘unspecified’ response recorded for 1311 records.

Row Labels Count of Licenses to electronic version documents
All Rights Reserved 56
Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY) 2433
Creative Commons: Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 10
Creative Commons: Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 244
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 551
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) 20
Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike  (CC-BY-SA) 1
GNU GPL 1
Other 55
Unspecified 1311
Grand Total 3519

Summary

During the first 9 months of this year professional service staff in conjunction with the Library have been rolling out a massive advocacy push to let authors know about the new research publications policy. This has led to widespread engagement with academic authors who have made 90% of their research outputs open access, mostly within one month of publication. So far we have been informed that only three academics have opted-out from the institutional policy. This relatively low drop-out rate when considered alongside the fact that only 10% of accepted manuscripts have included the rights retention language (RRS) may mean that more outreach activities are required.

We note that the majority of these outputs have been made open via a combination of Transformational Agreements and Gold Open Access journals. However, where this has not been possible, the open access policy has enabled the remaining 27% to be published via the repository Green OA route mostly without embargo. We believe the rights retention policy is an important mechanism to allow authors to publish their research immediately, regardless of whether they have research funders mandates or not.

The power of preprints: an omicron case study

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Much has been recently been written about the value of preprints which facilitate rapid and open dissemination of research findings to a global audience (if you’d like to read more about the rise of preprints in the life sciences I would recommend this editorial published in Nature Cancer). However, much of the discourse surrounding the benefits of preprints has been anecdotal. Of course sharing research findings early is a good thing, but what actual impact can a preprint have?

We present here a mini case study which highlights the initial effects of sharing a topical preprint during a pandemic. I plan to track the preprint over the next few months to see how this will translate into future publications.

Case Study: the EAVE II project

There were various headlines in the media on 22 and 23 December which reported the the discovery that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 appears to be much milder than Delta. This news was prompted by research from the EAVE II study carried out at the Usher Institute. The EAVE II team only finished their analysis on 22 December and were very keen to get their results out in a transparent manner as part of a media briefing they had agreed to do later that day.

Our Scholarly Communications Team helped the EAVE II project to post the results in the University of Edinburgh’s repository as a preprint. Subsequently, the University’s Press Office contacted us to say that this was initially beneficial when the world’s media contacted them to request the underlying data. The preprint is available here:

https://www.ed.ac.uk/usher/eave-ii/key-outputs/our-publications/severity-of-omicron-variant-of-concern-and-vaccine

The reaction was quick as the preprint was picked up and reported by the mainstream media like the BBC (this article in the BBC Science Focus Magazine is a good read), and also specialised services like the Science Media Centre:

expert reaction to preprint on the severity of the omicron variant and vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection in Scotland, from the EAVE II study

Various national advisory groups (e.g Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation) were then quickly able to read the research and fold it into their evolving guidance on boosters.

https://www.health.gov.au/news/atagi-statement-on-the-omicron-variant-and-the-timing-of-covid-19-booster-vaccination

To date the preprint has 22,535 downloads, of which the majority were within the final week of December 2021. 21, 005 downloads in 10 days – that sure is RAPID communication!

If the EAVE II project team had sat on their results and waited for publication in a traditional journal article then all of this activity would have been not possible. I’m extremely interested to see what happens next to the publication.

Questions….

At the moment I mainly have many questions that I don’t have the answer for. Will this piece of research be submitted for publication in a journal? Publication in a journal and the peer review process will add validation of the results and subsequent kudos from basking in the reflected glow of an esteemed journal title and possibly good citation metrics. But how can the value of preprints be more widely recognised and rewarded? For me, this is a missing part of the process. Or, perhaps the benefit of rapid communication is good enough?

 

 

 

Introducing Edinburgh Diamond: Library-supported Open Access Books and Journals

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Library and University Collections currently offer a journal hosting service, free of charge to staff and students, which you may already be familiar with.

Open Access Week is the perfect time to share that that we have rebranded as Edinburgh Diamond and added a book hosting service to our offering!

The book hosting service will offer much of what the journal hosting service offers: ISBN and DOI allocation, a hosting platform for textbooks, monographs and edited collections, metadata deposits, indexing arrangements, annual reporting, ongoing technical support, guidance on publishing best practice… and more!

Bringing our journal and book services under one umbrella allows us to promote our services as a whole. Edinburgh Diamond does what it says on the tin: promotes diamond open access, transparency, and high-quality research. If you know someone who may benefit from using our service, please put them in touch with Rebecca Wojturska: rebecca.wojturska@ed.ac.uk.

Find out more about Edinburgh Diamond: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/edinburgh-diamond

Take a look at our new book hosting site:
https://books.ed.ac.uk/

Unveiling the new Open Access policy at UoE

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For Open Access Week 2021 we are pleased to announce a brand new Research Publications & Copyright Policy that will make it even easier for researchers from the University of Edinburgh to make their publications open access.

Earlier this month the University Executive approved the Research Publications & Copyright Policy (2021) which details our approach to the new open access requirements of major research funders from 1 January 2022.

The Research Publications & Copyright Policy (2021) can be read in full on the Information Services web pages, but the key details are outlined below:

  • The University of Edinburgh confirms staff members retain the copyright to scholarly works they produce (which is the opposite of UK employment law which states that employers own the copyright to works produced in work time).
  • To help comply with funders and other open access requirements, members of staff grant the right for the University of Edinburgh to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence upon publication.
  • This policy will begin on 1st January 2022, and will apply to journal articles and conference proceedings.

This new policy is in line with major organisations including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust and will allow all researchers to make their work open access immediately regardless of their funding situation. Support for implementation of the new policy is available through library research support staff. Any questions or comments regarding the policy can be directed to the Scholarly Communications Team at openaccess@ed.ac.uk.

 

Edinburgh Research Archive: March 2021

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Edinburgh Research Archive: March 2021 • https://era.ed.ac.uk

March saw a record number of downloads for ERA, with a 10% increase on the previous best of May 2020 and a 27% increase on the then-record of March last year. It also saw a record number of unique items downloaded, albeit just 200 up on the previous best from January.

The total downloads so far this year has seen a 40,000 increase over last year, the number of unique items downloaded this year is 1.0% higher than 2020, and the percentage of the total stock that has been downloaded has passed the 50% mark within 3 months for the first time.

 

We follow-up to the November 2020 report looking at the three institutional repositories, as monitored by IRUS, with the most thesis downloads in 2020. Previously, we saw that the University of Edinburgh had the third most downloads but that it is likely to be overtaken by Oxford in the not too distant future. This time we’re breaking those downloads down imto percentiles, and seeing that the other two are significantly outperforming Edinburgh all the way through the 10% divides. White Rose sees significantly bigger multiples of its downloaded titles and Manchester fares better when the figures are adjusted for the size of the active collection. ERA works its tail a lot harder: it has both a bigger digital collection and gets a much higher proportion of unique titles downloaded at least once. Overall though, ERA seems to sell the facility to its users but not the contents.

Continue reading →

Edinburgh Research Explorer: March 2021

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Edinburgh Research Explorer: March 2021 • www.research.ed.ac.uk

The dip in download numbers which seemed to inflict Research Explorer from the last quarter of 2019 onwards, due to some heavy-handed filtration implemented in an upgrade at that time, appeared to have eased following another upgrade in August 2020. ERA, which was a year ahead in its upgrade schedule, recovered from its dip and has been booming with record numbers across the board, Research Explorer though, has been somewhat subdued. The period from Sept.-March did see an overall improvement of around 4.5% over the previous year, but Jan.-March has been further behind 2019, than it is ahead of 2020.

There was also some expectation of another boost to the numbers resulting from the launch of the new interface at the beginning of March, but that is not yet apparent. March’s figures continued the general trend since October of the quieter months over-performing compared to last year and the busier months to under-perform, with none of them comparing to 2019. This parallels what we saw with the filtration, the bigger numbers being suppressed and the long tail being largely unaffected.

Continue reading →

Edinburgh Research Downloads: December 2020

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Edinburgh Research Downloads: December 2020 • www.research.ed.ac.uk • www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk

• Looking at how Edinburgh Research Explorer and ERA have performed over the last year.
• Research Explorer hasn’t had the best of years, the numbers being shackled by the same filtration that had repressed ERA a year earlier, although they picked-up enough at the end to scrape past the million downloads for the second-year running; ERA on the other hand, has been somewhat unleashed.
• The usual snapshot of last month’s performances.
• A snapshot of the year that’s gone. Continue reading →