Helen Muir's "UKSG 2010, Librarians and Open Access"

I promised you more snapshots of UKSG conference summaries, and here's one from Helen Muir, Research Support Librarian at Queen Margaret University (excerpted from Helen's post here). Helen's piece adds further useful examples from experience to some of the issues discussed at the conference.

I attended UKSG on Tuesday 13th April, and the first 3 speakers (Dorothea Salo, Eelco Ferwerda and Jill Russell) were all keen advocates of open access, and from what I could gather, open access had been discussed during the previous day also. Jill's presentation included details of the pilot project that she has been involved with at the University of Birmingham where three colleges have been allocated funding to publish their research findings following a gold open access publishing model. At my own institution, following the gold route has already been disregarded - we simply do not have the funds to both pay for journals subscriptions and pay for researchers to publish with journals as well, and despite funder mandates to make research publicly available, I know that researchers here are not as yet keeping money aside to pay an open access publication fee. I imagine that this is the case for most other institutions, indeed Jill was quick to point out that her institution could not afford to pay these fees for the majority of researchers there, leaving some of those not taking part in the pilot somewhat disgruntled.

All of this has lead to me looking at open access from a different angle. In my own role, I am actively encouraging researchers at my institution to both publish their research following an open access model, and to deposit their work in our repository. I've been doing this for about a year and a half now, we have our open access mandate in place, and I thought that encouraging researchers to make their paper open access would eventually lead to the tipping point where open access journal publishing would overtake subscription based. It's a lot more complicated than that though, isn't it? As well as the researchers being convinced, there is also the much less talked about hurdle (and from what I've seen it's a big one) of librarians who are still happy to follow the subscription based journal publishing model. I don't mean this to be a criticism of library budget holders and serials librarians who are working very hard to negotiate with publishers to retain access to as many journal titles as they can with their ever-decreasing budgets. Academic libraries have students who are paying for their education, and expect to have access to journal articles, and academics who expect access to current research to do their jobs - the idea of just stopping paying subscriptions as an individual institution, or even as part of a consortium is unthinkable at present, when the backlash from students and academics at losing access to journals would be so great.

Discussion of open access does have to be opened up further to the whole academic and research library community, and not just remain mostly within the world of repository practitioners and developers. I also wonder about the effects of CILIP's reporting on open access to the wider library community, with another less-than-positive review in this month's Update entitled Open access could cost some universities dear, says Jisc report. (I'm not putting the link to this in here as CILIP members will know where to look, and for the rest of you CILIP Update is not open access - sorry.) Hopefully the more positive coverage that open access has received at UKSG10 will help to redress the balance of this.

Helen's post was commented on by Stevan Harnad, who concluded that "Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. ... Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible [via green, not gold, OA] to a university's users." Helen's response adds further useful experience to this discssion (emphasis is mine):

I understand and support your argument fully, but also witness some drawbacks as well. Queen Margaret was a very early mandate adopter, but unfortunately this has not meant a dramatic increase in deposits in our repository. Indeed, most of the material that finds its way in gets there because I've actively searched for it, then chased researchers up for the papers. Only if I'm very lucky do I find a researcher who has kept a draft that the publishers copyright policies will allow me to put up following the green model. I do believe that the message is slowly getting through to some of our researchers however, and think that this is encouraging (I was sent a green OA paper today that I can deposit, but I have to honour a 6 month embargo first. The embargo is quite off-putting for some researchers and was a key reason for Birmingham piloting a gold model, according to Jill Russell at UKSG10).

One of my main concerns is my perception that librarians in academic libraries are not directing students and academics towards OA resources e.g. when the institution does not subscribe to a particular journal - it is not within our culture yet to explore databases of institutional repositories such as OAIster yet (I've not had a chance to have more than a quick glance at http://mimas.ac.uk/irs/demonstrator/ yet , but was very pleased to hear of its existence earlier today). It seem to me that I am contradicting myself when I recommend to students that they use the bibliographic databases for the best journal results, but then tell researchers that search engines such as Google will index their articles in the repository, thus making the accessible to a much wider audience. Searching for open access resources has to become an integral part of information search strategies.

Helen's posting and the resulting discussion add some additional nuances to the paper given at UKSG by Jill Russell, and the wider open access debate. Can readers of this blog add comments from their own experience? (And in this context I propose that we stick to experience / evidence-based comment since discussions elsewhere are giving sufficient focus to the theoretical aspects.)

(Syndicated with permission from http://libraryresearchsupport.blogspot.com/2010/04/uksg-2010-librarians-and-open-access.html.)

Evolving role of the institutional repository breakout

I attended an interesting breakout session on the evolving role of the institutional repository in promoting library research support. Garret McMahon provided background about the Research Support System developed at Trinity College Dublin. The RSS is a web-based service allowing research staff to generate CVs and a researcher’s profile from information provided about their research activity. It is fully integrated with complementary systems in the university such as human resources and pushes information out to other services and systems including the institutional repository TARA. The research staff need only enter their publication and research activities once and the information is pushed out internally and externally.

Jessica Eustace, one of 4 Research Support Librarians outlined the kinds of strategies she employed to embed herself into the research process. For postgraduates she offers:

• Specialist training days on database tips and tricks
• Going into labs and assisting researchers on a one-to-one basis
• Drop-in sessions for Endnote queries

For principal investigators she provides:
• Researcher profiling
• Assisted deposit into the IR
• One-to-one training on using the RSS and IR

Both the RSS and institutional repository are promoted by newsletters and bulletins but it is advocacy at the level of individual researchers that has paid the most dividends in that the Research Support Librarian is seen to actively to engage with researchers and their needs. Embedding herself into the workflow for research profiling adds value to the RSS and provides a fuller picture of research activity while promoting output via the institutional repository. Not all institutions have the benefit of the kind of integrated system available at Trinity but getting into schools, faculties and departments and improving dialogue with researchers is a vital first step to understanding their needs and working towards a more holistic approach to improve library support for research. Institutional repositories have created additional work but have enabled librarians to assist in promoting research at our institutions. By adapting our role to meet evolving needs we can help to prevent librarians from becoming irrelevant which in Joseph Janes’ view is the greatest threat to the profession.

How to make your IR effective as a publishing platform for grey literature

"I know nothing about IRs", admits Toby Green, "but I once wrote a paper about tidying up our grey literature at OECD, which seems to have garnered a lot of interest." Today he tells us he'll cover:

• Post-it-and-hope-Google-finds-it approaches to dissemination of content
• What does it take to satisfy the needs of various stakeholders
• What did the OECD do with its working papers

Post and hope
Out of 40 starters at this year's Grand National, 14 finished. Rank outsiders enter what is one of the country's hardest courses - perhaps hoping that everyone else will fall over and allow the rank outsider to win. Is "post it and hope" an equally unlikely strategy for success? It relies on a single discoverability system (search) which puts considerable pressure on metadata to be of sufficient quality to drive successful discovery. And it's a "survival of the fittest" environment: if you are not part of the "short head" (the blockbuster opposite of the long tail) your chances of discovery through major search engines are also limited. It's a passive strategy that is author-, rather than reader-centric. Ultimately, says Toby, it doesn't work. The OECD.org website is a platform for authors to upload their content - which they do - and 90% of it is *never* downloaded.

Stakeholder needs
What do the various stakeholder groups require from literature repositories? As a group - made up of representatives from libraries, publishers, agents, intermediaries - we brainstormed some of the things that different user groups require from a publishing system.

Authors

• need a channel for dissemination
• need visibility/recognition for career development
• need to be read
• need to claim ownership of ideas
• need to fulfil mandates (from funders, institutions)
• need an easy process, preferably with others doing as much as possible
• need reports on how the work has been used
• need archiving
• need links/dissemination to other platforms where they want to be visible/involved
  

Readers

• need full text but don't want to have to read it
  
• need integration with other workflow tools
• need easy discoverability - and access - for free
• need related data and inter-literature links
• need an indication that the content is authoritative
• need reliability/predictability of content's location
• need awareness and other contextual services

Institutional administrators; bosses

• need reports on usage, financial aspects (value for money), who has been published
• need prominent branding / enhancement of reputation
• need budget - and usage - a critical mass of deposits
  
• need quality to meet institution's standards and reduce later work

Librarians

• need more time, resource and better equipment
  
• need training
• need standards
• need tools to support processes
• need clearer legal guidelines from publishers
  

Funders

• need reports (on usage/what's been published) to show that grants are producing sufficient material
• need visibility, research profile
  
• need dissemination to expedite ongoing research

Intermediaries

• agents
• aggregators
• publishers need copyright and brand to be respected/protected; credit where due

What did the OECD do to meet these needs?
Originally, authors could post what they wanted, when they wanted. Readers, however, struggled to find this material. Administrators were concerned about quality control and reputation; funders were asking questions about impact and ROI. Librarians - were laughing - despairingly? Authors weren't asking for OECD's assistance; administrators didn't think it had anything to do with OECD. Papers were presented in a jumble on the OECD website

• no metadata standards
• no quality control
• no underlying database/workflow
• no common vision
• no knowledge of what readers need
• no understanding of discovery systems
  

OECD's solution was to get the publishing staff involved to

• establish metadata standards
• establish quality control steps
• create underlying database/workflow
• build common vision
• research readers'/librarian needs
• exploit discovery systems
• monitor results.

Metadata is key:

• analyse the papers to identify metadata fields
• add additional fields to meet industry standards
• sign off fields so database can be built
• QA existing metadata; fix numbering problems
• Fill and QA the database

OECD then created a workflow to minimise effort and create efficiencies - converting the paper to a PDF for hosting and onward dissemination. A single webpage now categorises the papers and links through to organised lists of papers within categories. Metadata is consistent and comprehensive (DOI, abstracts, keywords etc.), and is submitted to RePEc - vastly improving that database's coverage of this content, since authors had previously not been diligent in uploading their own content. And at the full text level, the workflow system adds a templated cover page with improved, consistent branding and clear, exportable citations.

Following this overhaul of the workflow, traffic to the working papers has more than doubled.

• authors needs are being met: data is more visible in more locations, the data is marketed within the OECD platform, reports are available from OECD and its partner platforms, and authors are not required to carry out any of the processes
• readers can access the full text and improved metadata helps them understand it without reading it, citations can be exported, content is discoverable, background data is linked, citation linking and "more like this" links are forthcoming, the content is clearly trustworthy and well serviced with awareness alerting
• administrators can download usage reports and assess financial value, branding has improved, quality is controlled (inappropriate content is rejected)
• librarians are not required to carry out any of the processes, legal guidance is clear
• funders are getting good value for money without additional expenditure.

In conclusion:

• QA - requires filtering to protect institution's reputation
• Distribute to disseminate - content needs to be widely discoverable with supporting capabilities such as MARC records
• Promotion - internal awareness-raising with authors so they understand why the process is valuable to them
• Reports and 'ego' tools (RePEc has good ones); reader tool
• Institutional repositories need to either outsource to a publisher, or employ people with publishing skills to manage the process effectively