I’ve been back in the office a couple of days since Friday’s excellent workshop on implementing HEFCE’s policy and have finally had time to look at my notes and gather my thoughts.  A number of good points were raised on the day, some of which I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post.  Today I would like to think more specifically about what I would like to do here at the University of Edinburgh, to help prepare us for April 2016:

Firstly, it is clear that we need a detailed plan.  I’m happy to start writing this up, but it will need plenty of input from other stakeholders within the University.  The plan will need to identify a number of milestones and identify the pathway to achieving our goal of 100% of research publications being eligible for inclusion in the next REF.  We need to think of this whole exercise as a project deliver it as such.  We need to plan the work and then work the plan.

We will need to think carefully about the support needed to deliver the implementation of these requirements, and what the implications will be for staffing.  We know from our experience with the University of Edinburgh’s Open Access Implementation Project that providing adequate administrative support (even at a junior level) can make a world of difference to the number of research publications added to a repository.

Marketing will be key.  We are currently working on a design for a website which is aimed at delivering a simple message to academics regarding the new requirements and what they will need to do to ensure their work is eligible for inclusion in the REF.  We plan to highlight that the task is an easy one (upload takes a couple of minutes) but that it is essential to make the upload at the right time and not put it off until later.  Once the design is finalised, we are considering a campaign to send postcards all academics detailing the new policy and directing them to the new website.  We hope to licence the text and design as CC-BY as part of the LOCH project to enable other universities to replicate it.

The Scholarly Communications Team is in the process of planning an advocacy campaign for the next two semesters and will aim to contact all Schools over the course of this academic year.  We will write more about our experiences as these meetings take place.

Dominic Tate, University of Edinburgh

Interested in learning more about conservation activity at the University? Come along to our Pop-Up Library Session at the Main Library tomorrow, Tuesday 30^th at 10am and take the opportunity to talk to Emma (Conservation Officer) and Ruth (LHSA Manager) about their work at the University and the techniques involved in conserving and caring for our many collections.

Based in our studio within the Centre for Research Collections, our remit is to guide and support conservation and preservation activity across the many and diverse rare and unique collections held by the University. This work can include undertaking practical conservation treatment of paper-based items, as well as the preventive care of the wider collections.

We hope to see you tomorrow. There may even be the chance to have a go at some conservation techniques yourselves….

The end of September is rapidly approaching and things are moving forward quickly with the LOCH Project. All three partners have been thinking about workflows and are starting to make plans about how to handle the Open Access requirements for REF in each institution.

September has been a busy month for all the project partners. On Friday 19th September, Jackie Proven and I attended the a Jisc Monitor workshop in London, aimed at supporting the development of Jisc Monitor into something that will help to support Open Access processes in HEIs across the UK.

On September 22nd and 23rd, Janet Aucock, Jackie Proven and Linda Kerr and I attended the Pure UK User Group which was hosted at the University of Edinburgh. LOCH Project partners have all been influential in the development of a new Open Access specification for Pure, which will enable customers to better manage OA compliance and reporting for the next REF, with the side-effect of improving compliance for RCUK and Wellcome Trust requirements too. The specification is ready to be agreed, pending the disclosure of the final metadata and audit requirements by HEFCE. A final face-to-face meeting is being planned for the second half of October. All being well, the specification will be passed to Elsevier for development by the end of October, and the new functionality will be released in June 2015.

On Friday 26th Janet Aucock and I presented at the joint Jisc/Sconul/RLUK event in London, looking at how best to implement the Open Access policy in the next REF. This was an interesting and productive meeting, and it was great to see the approaches taken by different universities. Key points which came up included

• The need to engage with the policy early on
• The need to ensure adequate staffing is in place
• Advocacy and engagement are key to gaining high levels of compliance
• You could consider writing the policy into researcher annual appraisal documents
• It would be advisable to treat this as a project and write a plan
• You might want to consider a mock exercise next year to test compliance rates

As we move into October, partners are hoping to publish initial baseline reports and to finalise the functional specification for Pure.

Dominic Tate, University of Edinburgh