Best practices for university OA policies

• This is a guide to best practices for university OA policies.

• The doc is far from complete. All the entries to date are tentative. Some are very unpolished. Undecided questions are marked with three slashes (///).

• Currently the doc is private in the sense that no web pages deliberately link to it. However, I believe that some pages automatically created by the wiki software will link to it. Is that private enough for our purposes?

• Incorporate ideas and language from these docs:
  • Harvard's annotated Model OA Policy
  • Harvard's guidelines and FAQs
    • for authors
    • for publishers
  • the DASH terms of use, which make DASH deposits libre OA
  • PS article on OA policy options for funding agencies and universities
  • Alma Swan's Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access, UNESCO, March 2012.
  • the recommendations in the BOAI-10 doc
  • SPARC guide for campus action
  • Emily Kilcer is researching recommendations for encouraging or incentivizing repository deposits; see the section below on filling a repository

• To do list
  • Delete these notes to ourselves. Replace them with a preface for the public.
  • Find and remove all cases of the three slashes (///).
  • Elaborate each entry with some rationale, including (as far as possible) links to literature and evidence.
  • Decide whether to make all or some of it public.
  • Decide whether it's too large for one page. Should we break it into separate wiki pages, e.g. on drafting, adopting, implementing, and talking? It would help to decide this soon so that we can cross-link from one section to another without breaking all the links later.
  • Decide how to indicate the growth and evolution of our recommendations. (I suggest version numbers and release dates.)
  • Decide whether to launch a discussion forum (other than the wiki page discussion tab) for public discussion once we make a version public.
    • If we make the wiki version public, we'll protect it from random edits. Will that have the effect of closing the wiki discussion tab as well? Probably. That's a reason for a separate discussion forum.
  • Decide who is authorized to revise this doc. (At the moment, it's just the HOAP principals.)
  • Try *not* to make recommendations on points where there is no "best practice" yet, and say so; that will explain some of our omissions; it will also show that we're open to new ideas; decide whether we should omit any current recommendations until support or evidence for them solidifies further
  • Before release, get other key partners to make their own suggestions and sign on to the result, e.g. SPARC, EOS, EIFL, MIT.
    • Make offer to COAPI, for courtesy; but don't expect sign-on since it (deliberately) wants to be hospitable to institutions with any kind of policy, strong or weak
  • Consider writing an executive summary of the guide, for rapid orientation or busy committees. Or consider making two editions, a short one for busy committees and a full-length version for everyone else.
  • Consider including a (dynamic) section on frequently asked questions and frequently heard objections and misunderstandings
  • Investigate tools for making nice printouts of wiki pages, or tools for translating wikis into other formats (e.g. PDF) for printing; if possible, built those tools into the best-practices guide so that users can have a handsome, one-click printout of the latest version
  • Eventually make a second guide for funder policies. It could be a separate doc, or it could be a new section of this doc ("Follow all the recommendations above but with these subtractions and additions based on the different circumstances of universities and funders").
  • Add a glossary, especially useful for abbreviations: OA, TA, and terms like gold, green, etc.

Drafting a policy

Decide the type of policy

• There are several ways for university OA policies to avoid copyright infringement:
  1. The policy grants the institution certain non-exclusive rights to future research articles published by faculty. This sort of policy typically offers a waiver option or opt-out for authors. It also requires deposit in the repository.
  2. The policy requires faculty to retain certain non-exclusive rights when they publish future research articles. It also requires deposit in the repository.
  3. The policy seeks no rights at all. It requires dark deposit in the repository until the institution can obtain permission to make the work OA, for example, from a publisher policy to allow green OA after an embargo.
  4. The policy seeks no rights at all and does not require dark deposits. It requires repository deposit and OA, but only when the author's publisher permits them.
  5. The policy does not require OA in any sense, but merely requests or encourages it.
  6. The policy does not require OA in any sense, but asks faculty to "opt in" to a policy under which they are expected to deposit their work in the repository and authorize it to be OA.

• We recommend type #1 in this guide. Most of the remaining best practices are about that sort of policy.
  • When type #1 policies are politically unattainable on a certain campus, then we recommend #3. We put #1 ahead of #3 because it actually provides permission to make articles OA through the repository.
  • When #1 and #3 are both politically unattainable on a certain campus, we recommend #5.
  • We do not recommend #2 because it requires faculty to negotiate with publishers. That is difficult to do. Many faculty are intimidated by the prospect and will not to do it. And even if all tried it, some will succeed and some will fail.
  • We do not recommend #4 because it allows publishers to opt out at will. Some institutions incorrectly believe that it's the only way to avoid copyright infringement. But all the policy types listed above avoid infringement.
  • We do not recommend #6 because it is equivalent to no policy at all. Faculty may already opt in to the practice of self-archiving and OA. This sort of policy differs little from #5 except by leaving the impression that asking faculty to opt in to an OA policy is somehow different from requesting or encouraging OA itself.

Grant of rights to the institution

• The policy should be worded so that the the act of adopting it thereby grants the university certain non-exclusive rights. It should not merely ask, encourage, or require faculty to retain certain rights when they sign future publishing contracts.

• By granting the rights at the time the policy is adopted, in advance of future publications, the policy makes it unnecessary for faculty to negotiate with publishers. It secures the rights even when faculty fail to request them, and secures the same rights for every faculty member, not just the rights that a given faculty member may succeed in obtaining from a given publisher.

Deposit in the repository

• The policy should require faculty to deposit a certain version of their future scholarly articles in the institutional repository. But it needn't require faculty to make deposits themselves. The deposits may be made by others (such as student workers) on behalf of faculty, provided that faculty make the appropriate versions of their articles available for deposit.

Deposited version

• The policy should apply to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition. The final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript contains the text approved by peer review. It should also include all the charts, graphics, and illustrations which the author has permission to deposit. It does not include any post-review copy editing done by the journal, the journal's pagination, or the journal's look and feel.

• The policy should encourage deposit of the published version when the author has permission. All OA journals should give permission for this, although some will not. Few TA journals will give permission for this.

• The policy should allow journals, at their choice, to replace the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript with the published version. Some journals will make this substitution to prevent multiple versions from circulating.

Deposit timing

• Faculty should deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts at the time of acceptance for publication.

• If the policy respects an embargo decision (from the author or publisher), the deposit should still be made at the time of acceptance. But it will be a dark deposit until the embargo period runs.

Waiver option

• The policy should make clear that the institution will grant waivers no questions asked. Faculty needn't meet a burden of proof or offer a justification which might be accepted or rejected. To prevent needless fear or confusion on this point, the policy should refer to "obtaining" a waiver rather than "requesting" a waiver.

• The waiver option should apply only to the grant of rights to the institution (also called the license or the permission), not to the deposit in the repository. Faculty should deposit their articles even if they obtain waivers; these would be dark deposits.

• A given waiver should apply to a given publication. The policy should not allow standing waivers; that would defeat the purpose of shifting the default to permission for OA. Faculty who want waivers for separate publications should obtain separate waivers.

• A waiver for a particular article means that the institution does not receive the policy's usual bundle of non-exclusive rights for that article. Hence, for that article the university will not have permission from the policy to make a copy OA. But the university may have permission from another source, such as the publisher, to make a copy OA. For example, if the publisher allows green OA six months after publication, then the university will eventually have OA permission from the publisher even if it doesn't have OA permission under the policy. If the university has a copy of the article on dark deposit in the repository, then it may make the repository copy OA as soon as the publisher allows. Hence, the waiver provision of the policy should not promise that the university will never make a copy OA. On the contrary, the policy may say that the university will make faculty work OA whenever it has permission to do so.

Scope of coverage, by content category

• The policy can require deposit for some kinds of content (e.g. manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals) and encourage deposit of other kinds (e.g. conference presentations, books or book chapters, datasets, theses and dissertations).

Scope of coverage, by time

• Neither the grant of rights nor the deposit requirement should be retroactive. But the policy might encourage deposit of works published prior to the adoption of the policy.

Licensing

• Institutions with Harvard-style policies have the rights needed to put open licenses (such as CC-BY) on faculty works deposited under the policy. But they need not take advantage of those rights, or need not do so right away.

Transferring rights back to the author

• The Harvard policy not only transfers rights to the institution, but allows the institution to transfer rights to others. Here's the key language: "More specifically, each Faculty member grants to [university name] a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles...provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same."

• The primary purpose of this language is to allow the institution to transfer rights back to the author. The effect is that authors retain (or regain) rights to their work, including rights that they transferred away in their publishing contracts.

• ///Have I understood this correctly? Is it fair to say that authors retain/regain all rights to their work, or all rights except the right to allow commercial use?

Implementation

• The policy should include a provision giving a certain committee or unit responsibility for implementing the policy.

• A policy is more likely to pass if it only says what it has to say. Other details can be left to the committee charged with implementing the policy.

Separating the issues

• A university with a green OA policy may (and we think, should) also launch a fund to help faculty pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. But the green OA policy should make clear that it is separate from the journal fund. Otherwise faculty may think that the policy itself requires faculty to submit new work to OA journals (a common and harmful misunderstanding).

• A university requiring green OA may also encourage gold OA. But it should be careful about doing both the same document. Where it has been tried, faculty too easily come to believe that the policy requires gold OA.

• Some other recommendations on separating the issues are included below under Adopting a policy ("Educating faculty about the policy before the vote"). But certain explanations belong in the policy itself, to help deter misunderstandings.

Adopting a policy

Adopting authority

• The policy should be adopted by the faculty, not the administration.

• Campus entrepreneurs leading the campaign for a policy should be faculty. If the idea and initial momentum came from librarians or administrators, they should find faculty members willing to lead the effort.

• Because the policy will apply to faculty more than others, it should be a faculty initiative and should be perceived to be a faculty initiative. Otherwise, many faculty will suspect or object that they are being coerced. The question should be what do faculty want for themselves, and what expectations are faculty willing to impose on themselves.

Educating faculty about the policy before the vote

• Make clear that the policy requires deposit in an OA repository, not submission to an OA journal. (It's about green OA, not gold OA.) It does not limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice.

• Make clear that the waiver option guarantees that faculty are free to decide for or against OA for every one of their publications. The policy merely shifts the default from non-deposit and non-OA to deposit and OA.

• Make clear that "softening" the policy to opt-in is pointless. All institutions without opt-out policies already have opt-in policies.

• Make clear that the waiver option also gives publishers the right to require a waiver as a condition of publication. Hence, publishers who decide that the costs exceed the benefits may protect themselves at will simply by requiring waivers. Moreover, they may protect themselves without refusing to publish faculty at institutions with OA policies. Hence, faculty who worry about the policy's effect on certain favorite publishers, such as society publishers, should understand that the policy already gives those publishers the means to protect themselves, if they see the need to do so. Faculty needn't paternalize those publishers by voting down the policy. Those publishers are in the best position to decide whether publishing authors without waivers causes them harm, and whether require waivers as a condition of publication.
  • Faculty who want to take an extra step to protect certain publishers should explain to them how the waiver option enables them to protect themselves. Many publishers do not understand that. In our experience, publisher objections to university OA policies either assume that all such policies are unwaivable, or do not take the waiver option into account.

• Also see the recommendations on Talking about a policy.

Other tips for the adoption process

• Toward the end of the drafting process, and during the whole of the campus education process, the drafting committee should host a series of face-to-face meetings to answer questions and objections. Don't rush the vote. Keep holding these meetings until faculty stop coming.

• Where it would help (and only where it would help), point out how a draft policy uses language successfully adopted and implemented elsewhere. Some faculty are not aware of the number of successful policies elsewhere. Some may think the institution is sailing in uncharted waters. Some may fortify their OA motivation with their motivation to play catch-up with certain rival institutions.
  • ///if we leave this recommendation in, and if we continue to recommend harvard-style policies, then incorporate our list of institutions with harvard-style policies into this doc; and decide how to deal with institutions that started with harvard-style language and then botched it in revision

Implementing a policy

Launching a repository

• The institution must have an institutional repository. Most schools launch a repository before adopting a policy to fill it, but some do it the other way around.

Individualized writing

• Under US copyright law (17 USC 205.e) a "nonexclusive license...prevails over a conflicting transfer of copyright ownership if the license is evidenced by a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed or such owner's duly authorized agent." Hence, universities implementing the kind of policy recommended here --granting non-exclusive rights to the institution-- should ask authors to sign a "written instrument" affirming the policy. When authors sign such a statement, the grant of rights embodied in the policy will prevail over a later publishing contract inconsistent with the policy.

• This provision doesn't say that in the absence of a written instrument, the nonexclusive license will not prevail over a later contract inconsistent with the policy. A university may take the position that the nonexclusive license in the policy will prevail in any case, and probably never have to test its position in court. But to be safe, it's best to get a written affirmation of the grant of rights (or license) as specified by 17 USC 205.e.

• At Harvard, articles enter the repository by two paths: a faculty member may deposit articles directly or an assistant may deposit an article on behalf of a faculty member. In the former case, one dialog box in the deposit process asks the faculty member to affirm the grant of rights (the license) in the policy. In the latter case, Harvard asks the faculty member to sign an assistance authorization form containing an affirmation of the grant of rights. When new faculty are hired, they are asked to sign a form affirming the grant of rights as well. These forms count as a written instrument for the purpose of 17 USC 205.e.

Facilitating deposits

• If the budget permits, the institution should train student workers to make deposits on behalf of faculty.

• The repository should make traffic data available to authors. Evidence suggests that this encourages deposits.

• The repository should publicize the "most viewed" or "most downloadaded" articles, and the "most viewed" departments, e.g. on the repository front page or in a regular column in the school newspaper.

• ///replace this section with the new and growing section on incentivizing deposits.

Facilitating waivers

• The institution should create a web form through which faculty can obtain waivers. This not only streamlines bookkeeping, but proves to faculty that the process is easy and automatic. Harvard can share code for such a web form (true?///).

• Some publishers may require faculty to obtain a waiver as a condition of publication. Institutions should not try to prevent this. Accommodating these publisher policies proves that publishers have the means to protect themselves, if they choose to use them; and that fact makes it unnecessary for faculty to protect or "paternalize" their favorite publishers (e.g. society publishers) by refusing to vote for a policy. On the other hand, the institution may want to talk with publishers who take this position, to see whether they can work out an accommodation. For example, it is better for the institutional to provide OA under an embargo than for the author to obtain a waiver.

Author addenda

• Because the policy already grants the institution the rights needed for OA, faculty need not obtain those rights from publishers.

• An author addendum is one way for authors to request rights that a standard publishing contract does not otherwise allow. Hence, for policies of the kind we recommend, author addenda are as unnecessary for the same reason that individual author-publisher negotiations are unnecessary.

• However, author addenda may be desirable anyway. An author addendum can alert the publisher that the author's institution already possesses certain non-exclusive rights. This can prevent misunderstandings on each side. It can also prevent authors from signing publisher contracts which (without the addendum) are inconsistent with the university's OA policy.

• See the section on "individualized writing" above for the reasons why a well-implemented institutional OA policy would take priority over a later publishing contracts inconsistent with the policy. Because the policy takes priority, authors who sign publishing contracts inconsistent with the policy may be unable to live up to those contracts and may expose themselves to liability for breach of contract. This risk is entirely eliminated by an addendum modifying the contract to conform to the terms of the institutional policy.

Multiple deposits

• If a faculty member deposits a paper in a non-institutional repository (e.g. arXiv, PubMed Central, SSRN), the repository should harvest a copy. To avoid diluting the traffic numbers at the several repositories, all should comply with the (evolving) PIRUS standards for sharing traffic data.

• If a faculty member is subject to two OA policies (e.g. one from the institution and one from the funder), the institution should offer to make the deposit required by the funder. For example, most faculty at Harvard Medical School are subject to the NIH policy; if they deposit in the HMS repository, then HMS will insure that a copy is deposited in PubMed Central. If faculty think that an institutional policy will double their administrative burden, they will vote against it; the institution should make clear that a local policy will actually reduce their burden.

Dark deposits

• If a deposit is dark (not yet OA), at least the metadata should be OA.

• If the repository software will support it, dark deposits should be set to open up automatically at the future date determined by the author decision or embargo period.

• If an author deposited a manuscript and obtained a waiver, then the institution does not have permission to make it OA under the policy. But the repository should make the manuscript OA if it can obtain permission from another source, such as a standing policy of the publisher's to allow OA after a certain embargo period.

Deposited versions

• Some authors will deposit the published version. (Sometimes they will mistakenly believe it is the version they ought to deposit; sometimes they will simply prefer it and demand to make it the OA version.) In this case, ask the author for the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript. If the author can't find the right version or insists on depositing the published edition, make it a dark deposit and open it up in the future when you have permission from another source, such as the publisher.

Repository indexing

• The repository should be configured to support crawling by search engines.

• Repository managers should check to see whether the contents are discoverable through major search engines, and follow-up any indexing failures.

Repository withdrawals

• If a publisher sends a reasonable take-down request to the repository, the repository should always comply. (///But should the article be removed or merely go dark?)

• If the author wishes to withdraw an article already on deposit (e.g. because it is mistaken, embarrassing, superseded by a newer version, etc.), then ///??

Content beyond the policy

• The institution should welcome the deposit of types of scholarly content, above and beyond the type covered by the policy. For example, if the policy focuses on peer-reviewed manuscripts of journal articles, the repository should welcome deposit of other categories of scholarship as well, such as electronic theses and dissertations, books or book chapters, datasets, and digitized work from other media for which it has permission to provide OA. If the policy covers peer-reviewed manuscripts published after a certain date, it should welcome the deposit of peer-reviewed manuscripts completed or published before that date.

• If the policy only gives the institution permission to make certain kinds of content OA, the repository should welcome dark deposits where it doesn't have permission for OA, and in those cases it should provide OA to the metadata.

Treaties with publishers

• Some publishers may request certain dispensations, for example, that manuscripts published in their journals include a complete citation and link to the published edition. If the institution is comfortable acceding to the request, then it may ask something in return, for example, that the faculty will never need to obtain waivers to publish in the publisher's journals. These agreements may contain any provisions consistent with the policy and agreeable to both sides. (At Harvard they are called "treaties".)

Learning the denominator

• An institution can easily tell how many articles are on deposit in its repository. But it cannot easily tell how many articles ought to be on deposit. If it wants to calculate the deposit rate (number deposited divided by number that ought to be deposited), then it must find a way to ascertain the denominator. This is a critical piece of information in measuring the effectiveness of the policy and its implementation.

• Some institutions ask faculty to submit an annual list of their publications. If so, the information should be shared with the repository managers. The raw list of publications is less helpful than one broken down by categories, such as books, journal articles, and so on. If the policy only covers journal articles (for example), then the relevant denominator is the number of journal articles.

Working with publishers

• See the entry on author addenda. A well-written author addendum can explain to publishers what rights the author has already assigned to the institution. Hence it can prevent authors from signing publishing contracts they cannot fulfill, prevent misunderstandings on all sides, and prevent needless antagonism. However there are some other ways to achieve some of the same goals.
  • Publishers who normally require transfer of exclusive rights, but who do not demand waivers from authors at your institution, can modify their publishing contracts to facilitate cooperation with the institution. For example, it would help both sides if publishers included a clause to this effect: "Where applicable, Publisher acknowledges that Author's assignment of copyright or Author's grant of exclusive rights in the Publication Agreement is subject to Author's prior grant of a non-exclusive copyright license to Author's employing institution and/or to a funding entity that financially supported the research reflected in the Article as part of an agreement between Author or Author's employing institution and such funding entity, such as an agency of the United States government." Such a clause would make addenda unnecessary for authors and publishers, and would cost the publisher nothing.
  • ///move section on "treaties" here? or cross-ref to that section?
  • ///add section on auto-deposit by publishers? on permission to deposit published editions? on permission to harvest published editions from the pub web site? on embargoes?

Filling the repository

• This section could be a subsection within Implementing a policy. But because it's large and still growing, we're making it a section to itself.

• This section covers incentives for authors to deposit their work themselves, as well as other methods, human and machine, for getting their work into the repository.

• This section is currently organized alphabetically by method and alphabetically by author within each method.

• This section makes note of software that can be used to facilitate the deposit of works and add value to repositories; mention of these tools are not intended as an endorsement, rather, they are noted as additional tools at the disposal of repository managers that may aid in efforts to populate a repository.

Advocacy and education

• Example. Brown, Josh, Kathy Sadler, and Martin Moyle. 2010. Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE: Report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access. University College London.
  • This JISC-funded study, led by the University College London, explored policies on, practices surrounding, and "barriers to the electronic deposit of e-theses" in the United Kingdom. Several of the identified concerns could be alleviated with education, and while there are limited examples of these being legitimate issues, the following were reported: "concern about the risks associated with third party copyright infringement in electronic theses (89 HEIs); about plagiarism (76 HEIs); about the inclusion of sensitive data within theses (75 HEIs); and that open e-thesis deposit might hinder an author's future publication prospects (72 HEIs)."

• Example. Hubbard, Bill. 2010. PEER Baseline – why don’t authors deposit? Research Communications.
  • Bill Hubbard from the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham discusses author concerns about depositing their work in institutional repositories. Foremost is that peer-reviewed work is listed alongside grey literature, but there are also concerns about "infringing copyright and infringing embargo periods;...the paper not having been 'properly edited by the publisher'; not knowing of a suitable repository; a concern about plagiarism or unknown reuse; then not knowing how to deposit material in a repository and not knowing what a repository was." In response, Hubbard notes that education and "continued, repetitive, hard slog advocacy of the basics" will ease these concerns.

• Example. JISC, 2010. Literature review: CTREP Cambridge TETRA Repositories Enhancement Project. RePosit Project blog.
  • This University of Cambridge and University of Highlands and Islands project aimed to increase deposits to, satisfaction in, and "institutionalisation" of the institutional repository with "a technical integration tool which connected the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to the IR." Communication and relationship building are described as "vital" to the program's success, because "the focus had to remain on the institutionalisation of the IR."

• Example. Kim, Jihyun. 2010. Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(9): 1909–1922. [Note: This is a toll access article, requiring subscription.]
  • Kim surveyed and interviewed 684 faculty members from 17 Carnegie institutions that use DSpace for their institutional repository, and found seven factors to be "significantly related" to deposit behavior: "copyright concerns, additional time and effort, and age...academic reward, altruism, self-archiving culture, and technical skills." Of these factors, several may be addressed with education. Kim concluded that training on and assistance with the deposit process can "encourage faculty who are less adept at computers to participate."

• Example. London School of Economics and Political Science. 2010. How LSE Research Online and an LSE Experts profile maximises your research visibility.
  • This Open Access Week poster from the London School of Economics and Political Science clearly illustrates the value added from depositing in the LSE Research Online institutional repository in several bullet points: high visibility, professional profiles with accurate and comprehensive content, and copyright compliance. These benefits serve as a counterpoint to common author practices for posting their work on "personal webpages." This simple advocacy tool highlights major talking points.

• Example. Miller, Jonathan. 2010. Creating change in scholarly communication. The Director's Blog.
  • Jonathan Miller of Rollins College got faculty involved with periodical reviews when canceling titles as a practical means of opening discussion on campus about scholarly communication; OA journals and repositories were then introduced as an alternative. Miller tailored his talking points toward different constituents; for example, "the provost was interested in institutional reputation, the Dean of Faculty by the idea of a stable repository of faculty publications, IT and the librarians in a hosted solution...which did not involve much staff time and expertise [and]...the faculty...in more visibility for their own research and a policy that was flexible." He also partnered with "faculty champions" to work on creating support for an OA policy.

• Example. Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau, and Mark P. Newman. 2008. Strategies for institutional repository development: A case study of three evolving initiatives. Library Trends, 57(2): 142-167.
  • Palmer et al. offer a case study of three libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content. While used to varying degrees, all three institutions employed advocacy for the institutional repository to acquire content, from faculty outreach with library liaisons to instructional presentations and branding and marketing of the repository.

• Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
  • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. Additionally, Russell and Day note the importance of crafting advocacy messages that resonate with different communities that use the repository: "advocacy needs to be tailored to scholarly contexts using language that is meaningful to individual or group cultures." By being sensitive to different user cultures, there is a greater likelihood of garnering early adopters who will "network" the repository to their peers.

• Example. Smith, Colin, Sheila Chudasama, and Christopher Yates, 2010. Open Research Online - A self-archiving success story. In The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories, 6-9 July 2010, Madrid, Spain.
  • This case study from the Open University identifies advocacy and development as the cornerstones for building an institutional repository collection without a mandate. The advocacy methods were varied, from using social media for promotional efforts to attending department meetings. The efforts have attracted "63% of the OU’s journal output published in 2008 and 2009" and the repository managers are "getting around 36 full-text deposits per week, compared to a low of 2 per week before the advocacy/development campaign."

• Example. Welsh Repository Network. 2010. Advocacy discussion: Barriers and solutions.
  • The Welsh Repository Network offers several solutions to common challenges for repository deposits. Education is highlighted as important for generating buy-in to the institutional repository across many fronts: from gaining high-level support, which will create an "integration with other [university] systems and processes" and can lay the foundation for an institution-wide mandate, to building an understanding across the community of users of the benefits of depositing their work into the repository (e.g., a wider readership, public funding issues, author rights and copyright, etc.). With an informed authorship, support may follow.

• Example. Yeomans, Joanne. 2006. CERN's Open Access E-print Coverage in 2006: Three Quarters Full and Counting. High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine.
  • Joanne Yeomans, of the CERN Library, discusses the CERN Document Server's (CDS) coverage. "Metadata harvesting is performed at such a level that the Library believes it retrieves bibliographic records for almost 100% of CERN's own documents." The high rate of full-text articles in CDS is attributable to a long-standing policy and digitization efforts by the library staff; additionally, the CERN Library staff introduces new staff to the deposit process and uses an internal bulletin to remind staff to deposit work. Future plans include following up with authors about specific works that have not yet been deposited.

Automated deposit tools

1. BibApp
   • Example. Fenner, Martin. 2010. Self-motivated vs. mandated archiving. PLoS Blogs: Gobbledygook.
     • Fenner's list of motivators for self-deposit, from his perspective as an active researcher at Hannover Medical School, includes tools such as BibApp, which "showcases the scholarly work done by a particular researcher, research group, department or institution."
   • Example. Salo, Dorothea. 2010. Press release: BibApp 1.0 released. SPARC-OAForum Message 5518.
     • "BibApp allows researchers and research groups to promote research, find collaborators on campus, and make research more accessible. It also allows libraries to better understand research happening in local departments, facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers, and ease the population of the institutional repository. Finally, BibApp allows campus administrators to achieve a clearer picture of collaboration and scholarly publishing trends on campus." BibApp software also "push[es]" articles into the institutional repository.
   • Example. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2010. BibApp 1.0 released. BibApp News.
     • BibApp, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison acts as a "gateway," which "matches researchers on your campus or research center with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas." It works with "DSpace, EPrints, or Fedora," pushing publications into the institution's repository; features of are detailed.
2. EasyDeposit
   • Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2010. Deposit to multiple repositories. Stuart Lewis' Blog.
     • As a follow-on to the 2009 development of EasyDeposit, multiple-repository-deposit functionality has been added to this script. By ensuring that authors can deposit their work to several repositories with a single entry point, for example, "an institutional repository and a funder’s repository, and also perhaps a subject-based repository," then the likelihood of authors being comprehensive with their deposits is increased.
   • Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2009. EasyDeposit – SWORD deposit tool creator. Stuart Lewis' Blog.
     • EasyDeposit is introduced as "a toolkit for easily creating SWORD deposit web interfaces using PHP"; it was born out of a need to have "a generic SWORD deposit interface toolkit that allowed new deposit systems to be easily created." Two examples that were the impetus for EasyDeposit's development (from the University of Auckland Library) are given: Ph.D. candidates' thesis deposit and the archiving of a technical report series. The creation of such a workaround helps to make deposits easier for projects/constituents with specific, singular needs.
3. Open Access Repository Junction
   • Example. EDINA, 2010. OA-RJ API. Open Access Repository Junction.
     • EDINA has created an API for the Open Access Repository Junction that will "redirect and deposit...research outputs into multiple repositories."
   • Example. JISC, 2010. What’s in a name? OA-RJ Project Blog.
     • Open Access Repository Junction, funded by JISC, is a two-part tool. The first part identifies a depositable work (by location and metadata) and then offers a "list of possible targets to the client, and leaves the deposit process to the client". The second part deposits the works to relevant repositories. The project webpage indicates the aim is to "help assist the principal investigator to deposit in all the appropriate locations, and also make the whole deposit process as simple as possible."
4. PUMA
   • Example. Stumme, Gerd. 2009. PUMA - Project on Academic Publication Management started on August 1st. BibSonomy Blog.
     • PUMA aims to integrate deposit into an author's workflow and make explicit the benefits of deposit as follows: "the upload of a publication results automatically in an update of both the personal and institutional homepage, the creation of an entry in BibSonomy, an entry in the academic reporting system of the university, and its publication in the institutional repository." This output is in addition to PUMA's effort to "provide a publication management platform" to authors.
5. RePosit
   • Example. JISC, 2010. RePosit: Positing a new kind of repository deposit. RePosit Project blog.
     • The JISC led project, RePosit, "seeks to increase uptake of a web-based repository deposit tool embedded in a researcher-facing publications management system." The project's blog details the work of the group members, "University of Leeds (Chair), Keele University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Exeter and University of Plymouth, with Symplectic Ltd."
   • Example. JISC, 2010. Literature review: CTREP Cambridge TETRA Repositories Enhancement Project. RePosit Project blog.
     • This University of Cambridge and University of Highlands and Islands project aimed to increase deposits to, satisfaction in, and "institutionalisation" of the institutional repository with "a technical integration tool which connected the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to the IR." The tool was successfully developed and implemented, and deposits since have increased: "The number of IR communities has doubled and the number of collections has tripled."
6. Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD)
   • Example. Jones, Richard. 2010. SWORD v2.0: Deposit lifecycle. JISC.
     • A project funded by UKOLN, SWORD aims to "push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles...[which] will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases." SWORD v2.0 offers increased flexibility and interoperability that works with "DSpace, EPrints and Fedora, arXiv and a number of commercial systems"; additionally, there "is a Facebook deposit application, Microsoft have developed an add on to Word which will deposit your documents into your archive, and likewise the Open Journal System".
   • Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2009. The SWORD course videos now online. Stuart Lewis' Blog.
     • Videos from "The SWORD Course" introducing SWORD, highlighting use cases, enumerating clients, and offering a toolkit for users are posted.
   • Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
     • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. While discussing the importance of making deposit easy, they mention SWORD as a "protocol" that is in use today to "support the bulk transfer of content into repositories."
   • Example. Suber, Peter. 2010. BioMed Central partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries to deposit open access articles automatically using SWORD protocol. SPARC-OAForum Message 5456.
     • Peter Suber briefly notes MIT's partnership with BioMed Central "to set up an automatic feed of MIT articles...The SWORD protocol allows the institutional repository to receive newly published articles from any of BioMed Central's 200+ journals as soon as they are published, without the need for any effort on the part of the author and streamlining the deposit process for the repository administrator."

Customization/value-added tools

• Example. Fenner, Martin. 2010. Self-motivated vs. mandated archiving. PLoS Blogs: Gobbledygook.
  • Fenner's list of motivators for self-deposit, from his perspective as an active researcher at Hannover Medical School, includes institutional repositories hosting "primary research data" and integrating the repository content with journal submission. An example of such a tool that Fenner mentions is eSciDoc, which "include[s] storing, manipulating, enriching, disseminating, and publishing not only of the final results of the research process, but of all intermediate steps as well."

• Example. JISC, 2010. Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits.
  • Modus Operandi is a tool that offers authors a way to deposit "in-progress and completed works directly from authoring and content management applications." It works with DSpace and EPrints to create a "workflow connecting the user’s computer desktop, especially popular apps such as MS Office and Windows Explorer."

• Example. Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau, and Mark P. Newman. 2008. Strategies for institutional repository development: A case study of three evolving initiatives. Library Trends, 57(2): 142-167.
  • Palmer et al. offer a case study of three libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content. One of the institutions employes a "software specialist who leads repository design customizations and functionality enhancements," which are tailored to meet "the needs and interests of faculty."

• Example. Ponsati, Agnès, and Pablo de Castro. 2010. Repository increases visibility. Research Information.
  • Ponsati and de Castro discuss the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC) efforts to populate its institutional repository, which was launched with an "OA strategy [that] aims mainly to increase the visibility of its research output." A near-term goal for the CSIC is to create APIs that will enable publication lists from the institutional repository to be repackaged "as annual-report-building-applications, author or departmental web pages or standardised CV formats".

• Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
  • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. They also indicate there is value to be added by "integrating them [repositories] into a much wider context of diverse information systems." Cornell's VIVO and the University of Oxford's BRII projects are ntoed as examples of such "information integration."

• Example. Smith, Colin, Sheila Chudasama, and Christopher Yates, 2010. Open Research Online - A self-archiving success story. In The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories, 6-9 July 2010, Madrid, Spain.
  • This case study from the Open University identifies advocacy and development as the cornerstones for building an institutional repository collection without a mandate. The development methods were varied, ranging from creating "gatekeeper controlled groups" to offering embedded feeds. The efforts have attracted "63% of the OU’s journal output published in 2008 and 2009" and the repository managers are "getting around 36 full-text deposits per week, compared to a low of 2 per week before the advocacy/development campaign."

Ease of use

• Example. Harnad, Stevan. 2010. Simplify OA deposit but leave it in the mandatee's hands. Open Access Archivangelism.
  • Stevan Harnad cites MIT's brief metadata requirements for institutional repository submission as an exemplary author-friendly policy. Harnad notes "All the power of self-archiving (and of self-archiving mandates from institutions and funders) comes from the fact that it is the author and the author's institution (and funder) that does it, mandates it, and monitors compliance." As such, he does not support MIT's (and other institutions') moves to facilitate publisher deposit, and instead encourages a clear definition of responsibility and an ease of compliance for authors.

• Example. Kim, Jihyun. 2010. Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(9): 1909–1922. [Note: This is a toll access article, requiring subscription.]
  • Kim surveyed and interviewed 684 faculty members from 17 Carnegie institutions that use DSpace for their institutional repository, and found seven factors to be "significantly related" to deposit behavior: "copyright concerns, additional time and effort, and age...academic reward, altruism, self-archiving culture, and technical skills." She suggests that "confusion over copyright issues can be addressed by providing services for copyright management." By offering copyright support, the "legal ramifications of self-archiving their publications" would be clarified.

• Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2009. Email your repository. Stuart Lewis' Blog.
  • Stuart Lewis discusses a UKOLN-created Thunderbird plug-in that enables institutional repository deposit, and emphasizes that the strength of this deposit method is that email is a trusted, familiar tool with faculty/researchers. Lewis introduces a script that is a general version of the Thunderbird tool and is usable with other email clients, and discusses its potential for increasing repository deposit.

• Example. Ponsati, Agnès, and Pablo de Castro. 2010. Repository increases visibility. Research Information.
  • Ponsati and de Castro discuss the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC) efforts to populate its institutional repository, which was launched with an "OA strategy [that] aims mainly to increase the visibility of its research output." Informational sessions are delivered to each department, and deposits are "synchronized" in that metadata are pulled off of departmental websites and input to the repository by IT staff, leaving the researchers with the task of simply uploading the work at the appropriate time. A proposed project is to couple the CSIC's repository with subject repositories so that authors need to deposit their paper to only one location, with interoperability ensuring that the work appears in all relevant repositories.

• Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
  • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. They also note the potential to be found in "integrat[ing] deposit and other repository interactions into research practice and workflows" so that the institutional repository becomes "'intimately embedded' in the current practice of scientists."

• Example. Sale, Arthur. 2010. Advice on filling your repository. SPARC-OAForum Message 5427.
  • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, mentions the benefit of providing depositing authors the means to download the corpus of their work, even those titles that are "restricted," from anywhere. Doing so facilitates collaboration, "because it is like carrying a no-weight library of all your publications with you when you travel internationally."

• Example. Texas Digital Library, 2010. TDL releases Vireo ETD System as open-source software. News.
  • The Texas Digital Library created an open source electronic thesis and dissertation management system, Vireo, that offers an simple interface for students to submit their completed theses and dissertations. Partial funding for the project was made available through an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant.

• Example. Welsh Repository Network. 2010. Advocacy discussion: Barriers and solutions.
  • The Welsh Repository Network offers several solutions to common challenges for repository deposits. Providing instructional materials (e.g., a video showing the deposit process), drafting Ph.D. students and department administrative assistants to deposit work on behalf of authors, and offering self-deposit (along with a suggestion to solicit help from Ph.D. students and administrative assistants) are three suggested methods for streamlining the process of deposit. Also mentioned is using "SHERPA RoMEO/include API on repository front page" to help clarify copyright concerns at the point of need and providing an easily accessed FAQs page and collection policy.

Funding allocation

• Example. Oslo University College. 2010. Last inn i ODA: Publikasjoner som ikke lastes inn i HiOs digitale vitenarkiv, ODA, gir bare halv uttelling. HiO-nytt.
  • Oslo University College has employed a weighted system for encouraging deposits to its institutional repository since 2008. Researchers that deposit their work to the repository receive full points, which count toward the future receipt of internal research funding, while those who do not receive half credit.

• Example. Proudman, Vanessa. 2007. Minho University Institutional Repository. Minho University, Braga, Portugal: A university repository where a mandate to deposit, financial incentives and strong advocacy can transform an IR’s population. Stimulating the population of repositories: A research project, Tilburg University.
  • As one of six case studies comprising a larger research project, Proudman explored Minho University's efforts to encourage author deposit to the institutional repository. One of the methods was financial incentives that were awarded to each department and center as a whole by level of participation. A point system was derived in which documents were valued by type and age, where newly published, peer-reviewed work was the most "valuable"; preprints and older works also earned points, but to a lesser degree. The results were surprising: "As a result of the financial rewards and policy, from January to December 2005, 2813 documents were deposited in the IR (41% journal articles and 40% conference papers). This was an increase of about 800% on the previous year."

Metrics

• Example. Brown, Josh, Kathy Sadler, and Martin Moyle. 2010. Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE: Report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access. University College London.
  • This JISC-funded study explored policies on, practices surrounding, and "barriers to the electronic deposit of e-theses." The authors identify a powerful incentive that has not been used to its full potential: "[the] ability to demonstrate the impact of open access theses." Standard metrics, common plug-ins, and "the effective use of third-party resources" are mentioned as recommendations for improving the use of metrics in encouraging e-thesis deposit.

• Example. Kim, Jihyun. 2010. Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(9): 1909–1922. [Note: This is a toll access article, requiring subscription.]
  • Kim surveyed and interviewed 684 faculty members from 17 Carnegie institutions that use DSpace for their institutional repository, and found seven factors to be "significantly related" to deposit behavior: "copyright concerns, additional time and effort, and age...academic reward, altruism, self-archiving culture, and technical skills." Because altruism and self-archiving culture were noted as positive factors relating to deposit in institutional repositories, Kim explored whether the respondents felt that "self-archiving resulted in their research work being cited more frequently"; surprisingly, "the majority of faculty participants...were unaware of the evidence of a citation advantage." This suggests that a greater use of metrics may highlight the advantages of posting work to an institutional repository.

• Example. Ponsati, Agnès, and Pablo de Castro. 2010. Repository increases visibility. Research Information.
  • Ponsati and de Castro discuss the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas's (CSIC) efforts to populate its institutional repository, which was launched with an "OA strategy [that] aims mainly to increase the visibility of its research output." As such, the CSIC has added "a complete module of statistics...[that lets] the authors measure the effects of depositing their work in Digital.CSIC on its visibility."

• Example. Proudman, Vanessa. 2007. Minho University Institutional Repository. Minho University, Braga, Portugal: A university repository where a mandate to deposit, financial incentives and strong advocacy can transform an IR’s population. Stimulating the population of repositories: A research project, Tilburg University.
  • As one of six case studies comprising a larger research project, Proudman explored Minho University's efforts to encourage author deposit to the institutional repository. Statistical data on usage have been tracked and distributed to authors, the library board, and others. Included data are "logs views and downloads on the number of documents by type and date of publication and administrative statistics on the number of users, operations performed, etc." Additional metrics were slated to be added.

• Example. Sale, Arthur. 2010. Advice on filling your repository. SPARC-OAForum Message 5427.
  • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, discusses several methods for increasing deposits, with citation metrics being a successful means of advocating for deposit. He mentions Anne-Will Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool as a way to illustrate "how online access...can be used to develop sophisticated metrics of research impact." These metrics may be used to "deliver a research record summary" for each researcher, which may be used in performance evaluation (though Sale cautions against using institutional repository metrics for promotion). Download reports can be helpful for depositing authors.

• Example. Smith, Courtney. 2010. It’s Not Just About Citation Counts Anymore: Usage reports incentivize repository participation at Butler and Wollongong. Digital Commons.
  • Courtney Smith writes about Butler University's use of download metrics, which provide immediate and welcome feedback to authors (and deans) on usage, which appear to be popular: "Time and again, we hear from IR managers something like, 'Once our faculty members start to get those monthly download reports for their articles, they come back to me with more articles to post.'" Efforts by the University of Wollongong include "activity reports for every participating department [which include] number of items uploaded to the repository, number of downloads, most active authors, and 'fun facts.'" These reports offer authors "a sense of competition and accomplishment," and deans a measure of their department's output, which can aid in promotion decisions.

Personalization

• Example. Fenner, Martin. 2010. Self-motivated vs. mandated archiving. PLoS Blogs: Gobbledygook.
  • Fenner's list of motivators for self-deposit, from his perspective as an active researcher at Hannover Medical School, includes "unambiguously connect[ing content] to their creators" though the use of tools such as Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID).

• Example. Foster, Nancy Fried, and Susan Gibbons. 2005. Understanding faculty to improve content recruitment for institutional repositories. D-Lib Magazine 11(1): doi:10.1045/january2005-foster.
  • The University of Rochester’s “Researcher Page” offers faculty personalization within its institutional repository. This DSpace add-on enables the “collocation of the material into collections and the labeling of those collections” by each faculty member. Interested faculty build their personal research collection, which can list contact information, research interests, and a photo alongside their work. By doing so, the researcher creates an individualized space within the repository, branding work as her/his own.

• Example. Kolowich, Steve. 2010. Encouraging open access. Inside Higher Ed News.
  • The University of Rochester has created "an online 'workspace'...where [researchers] can upload and preserve different versions of an article they are working on" in an effort to "to make putting the piece into the repository a seamless part of the work flow." In addition to creating a designated space for researchers to share their works in process, the repository also gives faculty the ability to "archive and organize the articles they have published there on personal 'researcher pages'".

• Example. Royster, Paul. 2010. Paul Johnsgard’s Cranes of the World brings a lifetime of content to the IR: How the Nebraska-Lincoln repository developed a substantial, and sometimes unexpected, collection of digital works for one emeritus faculty. Digital Commons.
  • Paul Royster, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, discusses the potential for rich additions to institutional repositories to be found in the collection of archival material from emeritus professors. For example, Paul Johnsgard, a former biological sciences professor, offered many articles and several books to be digitized. The out-of-print titles were given a new life, and manuscripts that did not have a commercial market and were never published gained exposure. Johnsgard notes, "I also have been stimulated to undertake or complete some additional writing projects that I never would otherwise have finished [and] Digital Commons has allowed me to make unusually effective use of my time since my retirement...I can still make my contributions matter and my influence felt at a national and international level."

• Example. Sale, Arthur. 2010. Advice on filling your repository. SPARC-OAForum Message 5427.
  • Arthur Sale, of the University of Tasmania, suggests including a means for researchers to link to an up-to-date and comprehensive list of their deposited papers on their personal website, and provides an example of his own work.

• Example. Suber, Peter. 2006. Connecting authorship with self-archiving. Open Access News.
  • Peter Suber comments on the press release of the University of Rochester's grant reward from the Institute of Museum and Library Services; the award was used "to create a new type of authoring system for the next generation of academics, who will then link to our institutional repository for preservation and self-publishing of completed manuscripts." Prior research efforts drove the development efforts for the new system. Find the full press release here.

Proxy deposit/harvesting

• Example. Burnhill, Peter, Pablo de Castro, Jim Dowling, Richard Jones, and Mogens Sandfaer. Handling repository-related interoperability issues: The SONEX Workgroup. In Pre-Proceedings of the 2nd DL.org Workshop "Making Digital Libraries Interoperable: Challenges and Approaches": September 9-10, 2010, Glasgow, Scotland, ed. Donatella Castelli, Yannis Ioannidis, and Seamus Ross, 45-56.
  • Burnhill et al. report on the proceedings from the SONEX workshop, aiming to "describe, analyse and make recommendations on deposit opportunities". Automation and interoperability were highlighted, with an acknowledgment that "Whatever a repository manager holds is potentially of interest to another". Several case studies were highlighted as methods for increasing institutional repository deposit, including institutional/national-level "Current Research Information System...transfer of objects plus agreed metadata into all relevant IRs," publisher deposit on behalf of authors, and "[f]unders and subject repositories as use communities" that "share the work of establishing relationships and technical interfaces" to ensure that publications appear in all relevant repositories.

• Example. Harnad, Stevan. 2010. Funders Should Mandate Institutional Deposit (and, if desired, central harvest). Open Access Archivangelism.
  • In a policy article, Stevan Harnad posits that to increase deposits to institutional repositories, mandates need to be aimed at populating local institutional repositories rather than central repositories, like PubMed. Such a policy would be actionable with software, such as SWORD, that would "[ensure] central collections are harvested from distributed IRs, rather than being designated as the loci of direct deposit." Central repository collections would still be populated, but the onus on the author would be to deposit only once to their local institution's repository.

• Example. MIT Libraries, 2010. MIT’s Open Access policy, one year later. MIT News.
  • This MIT News article highlights MIT's efforts to work with cooperative publishers to support the deposit of MIT author-published work into the institutional repository by "[capturing] copies of the final published PDF for deposit, so that authors do not need to take any action in order to have their articles openly accessible."

• Example. Najko, Jahn, and Mathias Lösch. 2010. Projektbericht: Automatische Aggregation wissenschaftlicher Volltexte für die Anreicherung von OA-Repositorien. LIBREAS.Library Ideas. [Note: Translated from German by Google Translate.]
  • In light of two projects currently in process at the Bielefeld University, PubLister and Automatic enrichment of OAI metadata using computational methods and developing its services for content-based networking of repositories, Najko and Lösch use webometrics to examine whether with "the apparent wealth of personal data publication lists...commercial Web search engines are likely to aggregate in a relatively short time and with comparatively little effort, a critical body of scientific publications." Their results were positive, and they conclude that "by generating automatic extraction of full-text links and their automatic contextualization of using commercial search engines in a short time, a significant list of publications available...can [be found]. If this information is included as an incentive in the service of a university publication, perhaps even combined with the offer to the author, [that] his publications found to integrate semi-automatically in a repository, it could speed up the collection development of electronic documents significantly."

• Example. Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau, and Mark P. Newman. 2008. Strategies for institutional repository development: A case study of three evolving initiatives. Library Trends, 57(2): 142-167.
  • Palmer et al. offer a case study of three libraries and their approaches to filling their institutional repositories with content. One of the profiled institutions "brokered arrangements directly with publishers to acquire copyrighted, peer-reviewed journal papers written by their faculty" and "coordinated with departments for bulk ingests."

• Example. Russell, Rosemary, and Michael Day. 2010. Institutional repository interaction with research users: A review of current practice. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement1): 116-131.
  • In their literature review, Russell and Day impress the importance of engaging with one's local research community before launching a repository, so that services best mirror researcher needs at the outset. They also highlight the value of "flexible repository architectures" that enable metadata and content sharing, and harvesting. Russell and Day mention Economists Online as an example of a subject repository that is populated with content "from 22 institutional repositories across Europe."

• Example. Texas Digital Library, 2010. TDL releases Vireo ETD System as open-source software. News.
  • The Texas Digital Library created an open source electronic thesis and dissertation management system, Vireo, providing "an expert management interface that lets graduate offices and libraries move the ETD through the approval workflow and publish it in an institutional repository" once a student has submitted it for approval. Partial funding for the project was made available through an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant.

• Example. Yeomans, Joanne. 2006. CERN's Open Access E-print Coverage in 2006: Three Quarters Full and Counting. High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine.
  • Joanne Yeomans, of the CERN Library, discusses the CERN Document Server's (CDS) coverage. "Metadata harvesting is performed at such a level that the Library believes it retrieves bibliographic records for almost 100% of CERN's own documents." The high rate of full-text articles in CDS is attributable to a long-standing policy and digitization efforts by the library staff; additionally, CERN has permission from the American Physical Society to upload CERN-authored content to the CDS.

Talking about a policy

Academic freedom

• Some faculty object that a draft OA policy infringes their academic freedom.
  • If they object that it will limit their freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice, then they are mistaking the green policy for a gold policy. They are mistaking a policy about depositing in an OA repository for a policy about submitting to OA journals. To avoid this mistake and the groundless objections it triggers, make sure that faculty understand the difference between requiring deposit in a certain kind of repository and requiring submission to a certain kind of journal, and make sure they understand that this policy does the former and not the latter. Be explicit in reassuring faculty that they remain free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.
  • If they object that some journals will not allow OA on the university's terms, and that faculty will be effectively barred from publishing in those journals, then they are forgetting about the waiver option. Faculty may submit their work to such a journal; if it is accepted, faculty may publish in that journal simply by obtaining a waiver, which the university will always grant, no questions asked. In fact, allowing this is the primary rationale for including the waiver option in the policy. Be explicit in reassuring faculty that they remain free to submit work to the journals of their choice and remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications.
  • If they object that it will diminish their rights or control over their work, then they don't understand the rights-retention aspect of the policy, the terms of standard publishing contracts, or both. Authors sign away most of their rights under standard publishing contracts. In fact, increasing author rights and control is the primary rationale of a rights-retention OA policy. Be explicit in reassuring them that they have more rights and control over their work under this policy than under a standard publishing agreement.
  • If they object that it will give the university ownership of their work, then they don't understand non-exclusive rights, the terms of standard publishing contracts, or both. The policy grants no exclusive rights to the institution, only non-exclusive rights. By contrast, faculty routinely grant exclusive rights to publishers through standard publishing agreements.
  • If they object that they will be subject to a new form of coercion, then they are overlooking the waiver option or misinterpreting the word "mandate", or both. If this kind of policy is called a "mandate", it's only because the policy is stronger than a request or encouragement. But it's not a mandate in any other sense, since faculty retain the freedom to decide for or against OA for every one of their publications. Where the word "mandate" may be a problem, don't use the word, and where the word is already causing problems, help faculty focus on the terms of the policy rather than the implications of a very imperfect label for the policy.
    • More under "Mandate" below.
  • These objections are especially common on campuses where faculty distrust of administrators runs high. Sometimes faculty do understand the green/gold distinction, the waiver option, rights-retention, and non-exclusive rights. But when they distrust administrators, they often see a draft OA policy as an attempted power grab by the administration. When this is a risk, be especially clear on the points above (the green/gold distinction, the waiver option, rights-retention, and non-exclusive rights), but also be clear on the fact that the policy is a faculty initiative. It is drafted by faculty and will be voted upon by faculty. Be clear that it enhances author prerogatives (control over their work and distribution channels for their work), while preserving their freedom to decide for or against OA and submit their work to the journals of their choice, and that is why so many OA policies have been approved by unanimous faculty votes.
  • At schools where faculty worry that administrators may claim control over faculty publications under the work-for-hire doctrine, the OA policy could be framed as a reaffirmation that these rights belong to faculty. The policy grants the (non-exclusive) rights to the institution, but this would not be possible if the rights did not belong to faculty. The policy could be construed as a way to deny work-for-hire and then to grant the institution non-exclusive rights for faculty benefit on faculty terms.

"Compliance"

• Harvard-style policies have three components: permission, waivers, and deposits. On the first component (permissions), compliance reaches 100% as soon as the policy is adopted. On the second component (waivers), campus leaders should acknowledge that faculty who obtain waivers are still complying with the policy. They are not violating the letter or spirit of the policy. The policy deliberately accommodates those who need or want waivers. The third component (deposits) often requires education, assistance, and incentives. But even though the deposit rate generally starts low and grows slowly, and occupies most of the attention of those charged with implementing a policy, it doesn't follow that the deposit rate is the only component of the compliance rate.

"Institutional repository"

• University OA policies generally require deposit in the institutional repository, and we recommend that practice. In this sense, an institutional repository tries to gather the research output of an institution, as opposed to a central, subject, or disciplinary repository, which tries to gather the research output of a field. When we're discussing different kinds of repository, "institutional repository" is unambiguous and unfrightening.

• However, many faculty do not realize that institutional repositories are indexed by major (academic and non-academic) search engines, and are interoperable with other repositories. Many faculty think that an institutional repository is a walled garden or a silo of content only visible to people who know the repository exists and take the trouble to make a special visit and run a special search. In addition, most faculty identify more with their field than their institution. Hence, when we're discussing the terms of a university OA policy, the term "institutional repository" may reinforce these false belief that the deposited works are institution-bound, invisible, and provincially identified with an institution more than with the author or topic. In discussing university OA policies, then, it may be better to emphasize the sense which institutional repositories are OA, open for indexing by any search engine, and interoperable with other repositories. They do not wall off content into institutional silos but openly distribute content using institutional resources. They are designed to expose content to searchers, and most readers will find the repository's content through cross-repository searches than through local searches or browsing.

"Mandate"

• If the word "mandate" suggests commands or coercion incompatible with academic freedom, then avoid the word "mandate". The policy recommended here is not implemented through commands or coercion. First, it is self-imposed by faculty vote. Second, it contains a waiver option and merely shifts the default. It would be a mistake to let the understandable desire to avoid the ugly implications of the word "mandate" lead faculty to defeat a policy that was not a mandate in the ugly sense. The kind of policy recommended here preserves faculty freedom to choose for or against OA for every publication.

• ///quote from parts of PS short book; we may still want to emphasize that this kind of policy is stronger than a mere request or encouragement.

"Opt-out" and "opt-in"

• A waiver option creates an "opt-out" policy. In that sense in "shifts the default" from lack of permission for OA to permission for OA. After a rights-retention policy is adopted, faculty who don't lift a finger are granting the institution permission to make their future work OA; if they want a different outcome, they must lift a finger and obtain a waiver. The fact that the policy merely shifts the default, and still allows an opt-out or waiver, means that it is not a "mandate" in at least one common sense of the term. The word "mandate" may suggest a kind of requirement deliberately omitted from the policy. (On the other side, the policy is considerably stronger than a mere request or encouragement, and English has few words other than "mandate" to describe such a policy.) The waiver option or opt-out means that faculty remain free to choose for or against OA for each of their publications. The default shift means that most faculty most of the time will choose for OA.

• Some institutions adopt what they call "opt-in" policies. But in effect the institution already had an opt-in policy and didn't need to adopt a policy to give the faculty the right to opt in to OA. In that sense, the opposite of an "opt-out" policy is not an "opt-in" policy, but a no-waiver policy (which is stronger) or a non-policy (which is weaker).

"Waivers"

• The university should make works in the repository OA whenever it has permission to do so. The policy is one source of permission. When a faculty member obtains a waiver for a given article, then the university does not have OA permission from the policy for that article. But if the university has permission from another source, such as the publisher, then it doesn't need permission from the policy. A waiver of the license or permission under the university policy doesn't waive the license or permission that the university may have from the publisher. Hence, no one should talk about waivers as if they flatly block OA permission for a given work. They only block OA permission from the policy, not from other sources such as the publisher. In fact, the policy proponents should be explicit that the institution will make deposited work OA whenever it has permission to do so.
  • Some faculty will overlook or misinterpret the waiver option and object that the policy limits their options and infringes their academic freedom. (We respond to this objection above.)
  • Some faculty who are strong proponents of OA will raise the opposite objection, and argue that the waiver option should be deleted. They worry that it will gut the policy. They believe the waiver rate will be high --say, 40% 60% or 80%-- when the experience at every school with a waiver option is that the waiver rate is low. At Harvard it is below 5% and at MIT it's below 2%. Moreover, removing the waiver option will make it impossible to answer certain objections based on academic freedom. Not only could an unwaivable policy infringe academic freedom, it could fail to muster the votes needed to pass. Those pushing too hard too fast for an unwaivable OA policy may get no policy at all and make the perfect an enemy of the good. Lesson: don't underestimate the ways in which shifting the default can change behavior on a large scale.