Best practices for university OA policies: Difference between revisions

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== Drafting a policy ==
== Drafting a policy ==
=== Goal of a policy ===
///include some bullets here before jumping in to details


=== Decide the type of policy ===
=== Decide the type of policy ===
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* We recommend type #1 in this guide. Most of the best practices collected here are about that sort of policy.
* We recommend type #1 in this guide. Most of the best practices collected here 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 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.
** When #1 and #3 are both politically unattainable on a certain campus, we recommend either a type #5 policy or waiting until the community is ready for a type #1 or #3 policy.
** 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 #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 #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.
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* 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.
* 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.


* Faculty who want waivers for separate publications should obtain separate waivers. "Standing waivers" would defeat the purpose of shifting the default to permission for OA.  
* Faculty who want waivers for separate publications should obtain separate waivers. Institutions should not offer "standing waivers" that apply to all future publications from a given faculty member. Standing waivers would defeat the purpose of shifting the default to permission for OA.  


* 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 might say that the university will make faculty work OA whenever it has permission to do so.
* 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 might say that the university will make faculty work OA whenever it has permission to do so.
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=== Licensing ===
=== 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.
* Institutions with Harvard-style policies have the rights needed to put open licenses 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 ===
=== Transferring rights back to the author ===
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* 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.  
* 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.  


* Some publishers may require faculty to obtain a waiver as a condition of publication. Institutions need 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.
* Some publishers may require faculty to obtain a waiver as a condition of publication. Institutions need 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.  


=== Author addenda ===
=== Author addenda ===
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* If a publisher sends a reasonable take-down request to the repository, the repository should always comply.  
* If a publisher sends a reasonable take-down request to the repository, the repository should always comply.  
* 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 the repository should withdraw the article. The author can always obtain a waiver, and then the university would no longer have the rights to distribute it. That's a reason why repositories should always follow author wishes on distribution. In any case, experience shows that authors seldom ask to withdraw their own articles.


=== Content beyond the policy ===
=== Content beyond the policy ===

Revision as of 09:18, 6 August 2012

  • Last revised August 5, 2012. Version 0.8.

Preface

  • This is a guide to best practices for university open access (OA) policies. It's based on the type of policies at Harvard and MIT, but includes recommendations that should be useful to institutions with other sorts of OA policy as well.
  • Over time we hope to incorporate the suggestions and gather the endorsements of other institutions that find the guide useful. The present version is only being shared with likely partners. When we have a critical mass of supporting organizations, we will make make it public.
  • This version doesn't cover every point on which "best practices" might be discernible or would be desirable. It doesn't cover points still under discussion by the participating authors, or points on which best practices have not yet emerged. We plan to revise and enlarge the guide over time, and to mark each edition with a version number and date.
  • The guide is in wiki format for easy revision and updating. But editing is limited to invited participants. Please contact us to suggest revisions or discuss participation.
  • For a PDF version of this guide, click the "printable version" link in the left sidebar.

Drafting a policy

Goal of a policy

///include some bullets here before jumping in to details

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 best practices collected here 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 either a type #5 policy or waiting until the community is ready for a type #1 or #3 policy.
    • 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 is the same as the act of granting the university certain non-exclusive rights. It should not merely ask, encourage, or require faculty to retain certain rights in the future, when they sign publishing agreements. For example, it should say "Each faculty member grants...", not "Each faculty member will grant...."
  • 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. It 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 deposit in the institutional repository.
  • The waiver option should apply only to the grant of rights, not to deposit in the repository. (More under waivers below.)
  • The policy 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.
    • For simplicity in what follows, we will refer to depositors as faculty, but will mean to include others acting on behalf of faculty.

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 need 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, or no later than the date of publication.
  • If the policy respects an embargo decision (from the author or publisher), the deposit should still be made between the time of acceptance and the time of publication. But in that case, it will be a dark deposit until the embargo period expires.

Waiver option

  • The policy should make clear that the institution will always 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.
  • Faculty who want waivers for separate publications should obtain separate waivers. Institutions should not offer "standing waivers" that apply to all future publications from a given faculty member. Standing waivers would defeat the purpose of shifting the default to permission for OA.
  • 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 might 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 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.

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").

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. Faculty at schools without policies may always opt in to the practice of making their work (green or gold) OA.
  • 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 publishing authors bound by an OA policy is too risky, or 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 bound by OA policies. Hence, faculty who worry about the policy's effect on certain favorite publishers, such as society publishers, needn't paternalize those publishers by voting down a proposed policy. Instead they should understand that the policy already gives those publishers the means to protect themselves, if they feel the need to do so. (Few, by the way, feel the need to do so; the number is in the low single digits at Harvard and MIT.)
    • 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. Some publishers may not understand that. In our experience, publishers who object to university OA policies either assume that all such policies are unwaivable, or do not take the waiver option into account.

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 strengthen their original OA motivation with the desire to cooperate or compete with certain peer institutions.

Implementing a policy

Launching a repository

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

Individualized writing

  • Institutions implementing the kind of policy recommended here will want the policy to prevail over a later publishing contract inconsistent with the policy. To ensure that, US institutions should ask authors to sign a "written instrument" affirming the policy.
    • Here's why: 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."
    • 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 might take the position that the nonexclusive license in the policy will prevail in any case, and will 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.
  • Harvard uses several methods to get the written affirmation of the policy. When faculty deposit their own articles, a dialog box in the deposit process asks them to affirm the grant of rights (the license) in the policy. When an assistant deposits articles on their behalf, 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.

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.
  • Some publishers may require faculty to obtain a waiver as a condition of publication. Institutions need 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.

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 unnecessary for the same reason that individual author-publisher negotiations are unnecessary.
  • However, author addenda may be desirable anyway. An 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.
  • 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 the repository should withdraw the article. The author can always obtain a waiver, and then the university would no longer have the rights to distribute it. That's a reason why repositories should always follow author wishes on distribution. In any case, experience shows that authors seldom ask to withdraw their own articles.

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.

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, explores 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 concerns were reported: "the risks associated with third party copyright infringement in electronic theses (89 HEIs)...plagiarism (76 HEIs)...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. COAR. 2012. Researcher advocacy. Preliminary report – Sustainable best practices for populating repositories, COAR.
    • The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has released a preliminary report on their efforts "to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories." Included in these initial results are the advocacy efforts undertaken by the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) in Japan, including building relationships, "always [being] visible," and creating a tailored message (find the full report here); and the Universität Konstanz, which relies heavily on building personal connections to both recruit content and develop allegiances (find more information here).
  • Example. EIFL. 2012. EIFL open access advocacy grants deliver big results. EIFL-OA.
    • This work reports on the fruits of EIFL's grant awardees' efforts to improve "awareness-raising and advocacy activities" locally, the result of which was that "1700 national policy makers, research administrators, researchers, students, journal editors and publishers, and librarians attended workshops or other outreach events; educational materials in seven languages have been developed, including six short videos; 30 new OA repositories were set up and there was an increase in research output deposited in existing OA repositories; and three Universities launched new OA publishing initiatives." Four case studies are presented at the close of the work, which explore the advocacy efforts of the University of Zimbabwe, Kamuzu College of Nursing, the University of Latvia, and the University of Khartoum.
  • Example. Evans, Jill. 2011. University of Exeter Advocacy Plan available. RePosit: Positing a new kind of repository deposit, JISC.
    • Evans provides the detailed advocacy plan for all of the constituents that the University of Exeter hopes to reach to encourage use of RePosit. Methods are tailored to each audience, and she notes that social media will be used "as much as possible" because it is quick, easy, and has a wide reach.
  • Example. Gramstadt, Marie-Therese. 2011. Two new toolkits to ‘Kultivate’ artistic research deposit. JISC Repositories Support Project.
    • Funded by JISC, the Kultivate project works "to increase the rate of arts research deposit." As such, it has developed a toolkit to support repository managers and staff in the development of an advocacy plan to encourage deposit of visual arts researchers.
  • Example. Gray, Keith, and Helen Cooper. 2010. CLoK - Central Lancashire Online Knowledge - UCLan Institutional Repository. JISC Final Report.
    • Gray and Cooper report on the steps taken to ensure a successful launch of the University of Central Lancashire's institutional repository. Central to the launch was the partnership that was established with the research community at the outset to not only gather content for the repository, but "[embed] the Repository within the University strategic goals and operational workflows at a high level to ensure its sustainability through ongoing population by research, teaching and learning and other project output". The outreach for this partnership started early in the process and included continual representation of and engagement with the research community.
  • Example. Harjuniemi, Marja-Leena, and Sinikka Lehto. 2012. Open access survey: The results. Survey of academic attitudes towards open access and institutional repositories. Jyväskylä University Library.
    • A library survey conducted at University of Jyväskylä revealed that while "Open Access is received very positively among the researchers...OA thinking is not, however, reflected as strongly in researchers’ own publishing activity." The participating faculty had several common misconceptions about the deposit process, permissions, and the repository's function, in general. Armed with this understanding of their faculty's concerns, the library aims to clarify the deposit process and the role of researchers therein.
  • 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. 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. Koelen, M. Th., Rosemary M. Shafack, and Harry Ngum. 2009. Think big start small: Institutional repositories: Policies, strategies, technological options, standards and best practices. The case of the University of Bue. In First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives (ICADLA-1): July 1-3, 2009, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
    • Cameroon's University of Buea serves as a case study for implementing an institutional repository in this conference work. Koelen et al. define the challenges facing libraries and note the benefits that are offered by IRs before discussing the hurdles that the University of Buea's library experienced while establishing their own repository, as well as their workarounds. Central to gathering content from the faculty was a "start small...to ensure functionality and effectiveness" plan: the IR was first populated with "postgraduate theses." Currently advocacy efforts are underway to ensure the larger university community supports deposits to the IR.
  • Example. Kristick, Laurel. 2009. Using journal citation reports and SHERPA RoMEO to facilitate conversations on institutional repositories. Oregon State University Library.
    • Kristick writes of a study at Oregon State University that involved surveying Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports and SHERPA RoMEO to determine whether "core journals in a discipline...allow[ed] pre- or post-print archiving in their copyright transfer agreements." With this list, library staff approached faculty with "scholarly communication issues such as author’s rights and open access" as a means of opening the discussion to encourage deposit to the institutional repository.
  • 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. Nowicki, Stacy. 2008. Best practices and policy in institutional repository development: Kalamazoo College’s experience. In NITLE Conference "Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age": January 11, 2008, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.
    • In a presentation that shares the "questions to answer" surrounding "workflow patterns, guidelines for selecting appropriate materials, [and] ideas for publicizing the project" that drove Kalamazoo College's institutional repository development, several slides are dedicated to the "people to involve" in IR projects. Nowicki indicates that these populations - library and IT staff, deans, faculty, and administrative assistants - require outreach for success, including fostering "a sense of community ownership" and "buy in."
  • 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. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." In her discussion, Pontika advises that gaining the support of the institution's "research office," because they are "the people who should urge the researchers to deposit their manuscripts to their institutional repositories," and "subject librarians," because "they can spread the word both on open access and the repository on their daily conversations with the library’s users" is critical to building a "team" that will help "improve the provided services and increase the submission rates."
  • Example. Porter, George S. 2006. Let's get it started! Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47.
    • Porter writes from his experience at the California Institute of Technology, noting that encouraging deposit is a "sociological and strategic" endeavor. To be successful in recruiting researcher support, Porter asserts, it is important to work toward securing senior faculty as early adopters, who "may view the proposition [of deposit] as a capstone/culmination/collected works project for their career." By illustrating one's case with data, a convincing argument may be made that "content in the IR is highly visible and read." These identified "opinion leaders" can become fruitful partners in the deposit of work to the institutional repository.
  • Example. Proven, Jackie, and Janet Aucock. 2011. Increasing uptake at St Andrews: Strategies for developing the research repository. ALISS Quarterly 6(3): 6-9.
    • Proven and Aucock sketch the development of the University of St Andrews repository, along with strategies that have been used successfully to encourage deposit. Simply put, they note "Actual staff on the ground devoting substantial time to interaction with researchers is crucial." In addition to added services that are headed by librarians, Proven and Aucock emphasize the importance of "[p]romotion of the repository [that] can raise awareness amongst our academics of the issues around copyright and full text dissemination, and influence attitudes towards open access."
  • Example. Rodrigues, Maria Eduarda, and António Moitinho Rodrigues. Forthcoming. Analyzing the performance of an institutional scientific repository – A case study. LIBER Quarterly.
    • This forthcoming work examines the Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco's institutional repository "with the aim of analyzing the performance of RCIPCB considering the evolution and growth in terms of users, archiving and self-archiving, the number of published documents (scientific) versus deposited documents in 2010 and the heterogeneity among communities/collections and its causes." Of the results presented, there is clear success (at "96.2%") in the "diffusion strategy," including conferences and newsletters, which is used to educate the community about the presence 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. Shieber, Stuart. 2011. The importance of dark deposit. The Occasional Pamphlet.
    • In his blog post listing seven benefits of dark deposits, articles for which metadata but not full text are available to users, Shieber notes, "Every time an author deposits an article dark is a learning moment reminding the author that distribution is important and distribution limitations are problematic"; as such, dark depositing serves as an educational tool.
  • 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. Smith, Ina. 2012. Marketing & getting buy-in. In DSpace Technical Workshop: September 7-11, 2009, Stellenbosch, South Africa. University of Stellenbosch.
    • In this workshop presentation, the University of Stellenbosch's Smith offers several suggestions for "internal" and "external" marketing efforts to garner support for an institution's repository. Included as examples are "presentations," "demonstrations," and "individual appointments" for marketing the repository and generating interest in deposit.
  • Example. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports on a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. It was clear that a more aggressive outreach and marketing campaign was needed, since many of the survey participants did not realize the university had a repository: "[t]he University Libraries need to develop a comprehensive campaign and targeted sales pitch."
  • 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. Hanlon, Ann, and Marisa Ramirez. 2011. Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories. portal: Libraries and the Academy 11(2): 683-702. [Note: This is a toll access article.]
      • In their 2009 survey of OpenDOAR-registered institutional repositories that studied copyright clearance activities, Hanlon and Ramirez note BibApp as an example of a tool that can be used to "formaliz[e] permissions workflows." That BibApp "automatically checks citations for deposit policy in SHERPA/RoMEO" reduces the individual effort of authors and library staff in copyright clearance associated with deposit.
    • 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 are detailed.
  2. DepositMO
    • 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."
  3. Direct User Repository Access (DURA)
  4. 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.
  5. Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
    • Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2011. Technical standards in education, Part 3: Open repositories for scholarly communication. IBM developerWorks.
      • Lewis provides the history and foundations of institutional repositories and then introduces the importance of standards to repository interoperability to enable the "harvesting, searching, depositing, authentication, and describing [of] contents". Lewis then explains that "OAI-PMH allows search providers to harvest the raw structured metadata from repositories. This can yield more powerful search mechanisms as data is harvested in specific fields such as title, creator, abstract, and keywords."
  6. Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ)
    • Example. EDINA, 2010. OA-RJ API. Open Access Repository Junction.
    • 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."
  7. Open Depot
    • Example. JISC, 2010. Repositories: Take-up and embedding. Briefing paper for eResearch & IE call - 10/2010.
      • This JISC work is "intended to support bidders drafting proposals against the October 2010 JISC Grant Funding Call 15/10 for Infrastructure for Education and Research." Tools that had been in development are discussed, including "The Depot". The Depot was "one of the key projects of the JISC RepositoryNet...[that] provide[d] the UK academic community with an online deposit facility for eprints during the interim period while Institutional Repositories (IRs) were being set up." The tool proved useful to the UK community, so EDINA, one of the project developers, repurposed the tool for international use, and Open Depot was born.
  8. Organisation and Repository Identification (ORI)
    • Example. Dorward, Andrew David, Peter Burnhill, and Terry Sloan. 2012. The development of a socio-technical infrastructure to support open access publishing though institutional repositories. P1B: Shared Repository Services and Infrastructure LiveBlog, OR 2012: The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories: July 9-13, 2012, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
      • In their introduction of UK RepositoryNet+, an infrastructure that "will offer service support, helpdesk and technical support, and a service directory catalogue for anyone hoping to switch to [green] open access", Dorward et al. note that "[d]eposit tools" tools are in place currently. One of these tools is ORI, which will be "a standalone middleware tool for identifying academic organisations and associated repositories"; more information is available at the project website.
  9. 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.
  10. RePosit
  11. Repository Junction (RJ) Broker
    • Example. Dorward, Andrew David, Peter Burnhill, and Terry Sloan. 2012. The development of a socio-technical infrastructure to support open access publishing though institutional repositories. P1B: Shared Repository Services and Infrastructure LiveBlog, OR 2012: The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories: July 9-13, 2012, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
      • In their introduction of UK RepositoryNet+, an infrastructure that "will offer service support, helpdesk and technical support, and a service directory catalogue for anyone hoping to switch to [green] open access", Dorward et al. note that "[d]eposit tools" tools are in place currently. One of these tools is RJ Broker, which will be "a standalone middleware tool for handling the deposit of research articles from a provider to multiple repositories"; more information is available at the project website.
  12. Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) (find an introductory video on SWORD 2.0 from Cottage Labs)
    • Example. COAR. 2012. Direct deposit by publisher. Preliminary report – Sustainable best practices for populating repositories, COAR.
      • The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has released a preliminary report on their efforts "to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories." SWORD is identified in this report as a "deposit mechanism [that] offers a unified ingestion service and guarantees a robust transfer of manuscripts." Included in this discussion are PEER-created guidelines on "deposit, assisted deposit and self‐archiving" facilitated by 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, [and] Microsoft [has] 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. Lewis, Stuart. 2011a. Technical standards in education, Part 3: Open repositories for scholarly communication. IBM developerWorks.
      • Lewis provides the history and foundations of institutional repositories and then introduces the importance of standards to repository interoperability to enable the "harvesting, searching, depositing, authentication, and describing [of] contents". He mentions that SWORD is the "standardized way to perform deposits of resources into repositories," which works as the converse action to OAI-PMH.
    • Example. Lewis, Stuart. 2011b. Technical standards in education, Part 4: Interoperable resource deposit using SWORD. IBM developerWorks.
      • As a follow-on to his above-mentioned part 3, Lewis "describes the SWORD protocol, why it was developed, possible use cases, and an overview of how it works." The included SWORD uses are as an "[i]ntegrated desktop client," "[m]ultiple deposit tool," "[a]utomated data deposit by laboratory equipment," "[r]epository to repository deposit," and [p]ublisher to repository deposit."
    • Example. Lewis, Stuart, Pablo de Castro, and Richard Jones. 2012. SWORD: Facilitating deposit scenarios. D-Lib Magazine 18(1/2): doi:10.1045/january2012-lewis.
      • This article illustrates the flexibility of the SWORD protocol, which enables deposit to repositories from publishers, the researcher's desktop, and more, and "describes the different use cases, how they fit into the scholarly lifecycle, and how SWORD facilitates them." The cases studies that are provided include links "to show real-life examples of the use cases in action."
    • 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 stress 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. BioMed Central. 2010. BioMed Central partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries to deposit open access articles automatically using SWORD protocol. SPARC-OAForum Message 5456.
      • BioMed Central briefly describes its partnership with MIT's "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."

Copyright/author rights support

  • Example. COAR. 2012. Rights checking and submission services. Preliminary report – Sustainable best practices for populating repositories, COAR.
    • The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has released a preliminary report on their efforts "to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories." Included in these initial results are examples from five institutions, including Griffith University, of efforts to make deposit easier for authors. Most of the listed institutions offer support in clearing copyright concerns, the form of which ranges from advising authors to contacting publishers to secure clearance.
  • Example. Giannoulakis, Stamatios, Petros Artemi, and Alexia Dini Kounoudes. 2012. Scholar publications and open access policies: The Ktisis case. In 13th International Conference of International Society for the Study of European Ideas: July 2-6, 2012, Nicosia, Cyprus.
    • A survey was conducted by Giannoulakis et al., aimed at revamping the Cyprus University of Technology's institutional repository policies. In addition to revealing that 71% of the university researchers do not deposit work in the repository because the "community prefer[s] to publish in commercial publisher journals," the survey respondents indicated that they currently do not "negotiate the terms and conditions with the publishers" and "89% would like the university to develop an author addendum policy." As a result, forthcoming efforts will be made by the library to "[d]evelop [an] author addendum policy."
  • Example. Hanlon, Ann, and Marisa Ramirez. 2011. Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories. portal: Libraries and the Academy 11(2): 683-702. [Note: This is a toll access article.]
    • Hanlon and Ramirez's 2009 survey of OpenDOAR-registered institutional repositories revealed that, of the responding institutions, "librarians and library staff were the parties most likely to engage in copyright clearance activities for IRs." These activities include "contact[ing] publishers for permission to deposit" and "record[ing] publisher policies." While there are "many common copyright clearance practices" among institutions, the workflows are often informal and created locally, and Hanlon and Ramirez suggest "developing IR copyright clearance 'best practices'."
  • 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. Wirth, Andrea. 2010. Oregon State University Libraries’ policy. In ALA Annual Meeting: ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group, July 27, 2010, Washington, DC.
    • In her discussion of the creation of and support for the Oregon State University's Library faculty OA policy, and related OSU faculty policies, Wirth notes some challenges that were addressed. A particularly fruitful partnership has been with the "OSU Advancement News and Communication" office; by ensuring that the works profiled by the News and Communication group have been deposited in the repository, then a wider readership for the faculty member is secured. Wirth indicates that faculty "are reviewing their licenses and are becoming aware of the fact that through their research might be highlighted by OSU news (an honor in and of itself) the news staff have been unable to share the articles with other news outlets that pick up the stories." The copyright support the library provides ensures that "the appropriate research article [is] deposited."

Customization/value-added tools

  • Example. COAR. 2012. Automated downloading of citation data. Preliminary report – Sustainable best practices for populating repositories, COAR.
    • The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has released a preliminary report on their efforts "to collect and disseminate sustainable, replicable best practices related to populating repositories." A grant-funded project aimed at "batch loading scholarly article citations" as a way "to efficiently load large numbers of faculty citations...as a means of growing the IR" was undertaken at Ohio Digital Resource Commons. Documentation of the project is available here.
  • 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. 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. Poynder, Richard. 2011. The OA interviews: Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège. Open and Shut?
    • Poynder interviews Rentier, of the University of Liege, who discusses the university's mandate, which has encouraged high researcher participation. Success of ORBi is aided by efforts to "demonstrate to our authors that the system has actually been designed for their own benefit." Speaking to the advantages of deposit for authors, beyond promotion, Rentier notes that ORBi "provides a single point of entry, but multiple output options, thereby allowing them to generate CVs and publication lists etc.; and it provides a tool to evaluate the quality of their research; and an efficient personal marketing tool."
  • Example. Proudman, Vanessa. 2008. Overview of services provided by six good practices populating repositories and services in Europe. Stimulating the population of repositories: A research project, Tilburg University.
    • In her work, Proudman examines the methods of six institutional repositories to encourage author deposit. Several "services" are noted that add value for users in all six case studies; for example, automated publication lists, data storage, and RSS feeds were employed, depending on the needs of the local environment. The included table illustrates the numerous value-added services that were available at the studied institutions.
  • 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. Sale, Arthur, Marc Couture, Eloy Rodrigues, Leslie Carr, and Stevan Harnad. Forthcoming. Open access mandates and the "fair dealing" button. In Dynamic fair dealing: Creating Canadian culture online, ed. Rosemary J. Coombe and Darren Wershler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
    • Sale et al. present the history of preprint and reprint sharing "by mail, even before the scholarly journal appeared" as the backdrop for the creation of a "‘Request-a-copy’...‘Email Eprint Request’...‘Fair Dealing’...[or] ‘Fair Use’ Button" in institutional repositories as a way to reestablish "would-be readers [with the ability] to request that the author email the eprint to them for individual research purposes under the provisions of fair dealing in the world’s Copyright Acts." EPrints and DSpace both have this functionality developed, which allows works that are either under embargo or restricted from OA distribution by publisher demand to still be deposited and shared in a limited fashion, so that "Researchers from all disciplines can be confident that the couple of clicks required to give a fellow researcher access to their Closed Access article is legal... and fair." Details of the functionality and uptake of the "button" at the University of Southampton, University of Stirling, and the University of Minho are provided.
  • 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."
  • Example. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports on a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. Of the several perceived impediments to deposit that were identified from the surveyed community, providing added value from deposit in the repository was essential, in particular, "a service or benefit they earnestly want but don’t currently have". Examples of such efforts that were raised in the focus groups include the following: integrated systems, so that updates to personal/lab websites would update the repository; citation generators for end-of-year reporting; data and media deposit, along with supplemental materials; etc.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Embedding

  • Example. COAR. 2012. SPARC Open Access Meeting notes. COAR Newsletter.
    • Brief highlights from the SPARC 2012 Open Access Meeting, a forum for discussion on "Open Access issues including policy issues, author rights, Open Access publishing, and repositories," are presented. Tyler Walters, from Virginia Tech, noted that by "automatically captur[ing] metadata as defined by the data producers and provid[ing] ways for researchers to mark up their data," institutional repositories "are increasingly being designed to support research groups 'from beginning to end.'" Additionally, "toolkits designed to support different ways to view and work with data..., support collaboration and communication by research teams, and provide general tools to support working groups" have embedded repositories into research "ecosystems".
  • 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. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. Of the several perceived impediments to deposit that were identified from the surveyed community, "'[c]ivic pride,' as one participant called it, usage reports, and long-term access were insufficient motivation" to participate in the local repository. It was noted that "if deposit was aligned with existing workflows such that it could be accomplished with little investment of time and effort," then the research community would be more inclined to actively deposit.

Funding allocation

  • 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. Baba, Kensuke, Masao Mori, Eisuke Ito, and Sachio Hirokawa. 2011. A feedback system on institutional repository. The Third International Conference on Resource Intensive Applications and Services (INTENSIVE 2011): May 22-27, 2011, Venice/Mestre, Italy.
    • Baba et al. note the potential to be found in usage metrics for encouraging researcher deposits. Citation counts and basic download numbers are available already through DSpace and Google Analytics, they note, but to further encourage deposit Baba et al. developed a nuanced feedback system that "analyzed co-occurrence on the accesses of the same reader," which was linked with Kyushu University's "researcher database" so the statistics would be available to each researcher with authentication.
  • Example. Bell, Suzanne, and Nathan Sarr. 2010. Case study: Re-engineering an institutional repository to engage users. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement 1): 77-89.
    • Bell and Sarr discuss the research project profiling user needs leading to the development of University of Rochester's IR+. Usage statistics prove to be very valuable to researchers and "counts provide quantifiable evidence, and a simple and effective way to show how the repository is providing a valuable outlet for their work."
  • 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. Dorward, Andrew David, Peter Burnhill, and Terry Sloan. 2012. The development of a socio-technical infrastructure to support open access publishing though institutional repositories. P1B: Shared Repository Services and Infrastructure LiveBlog, OR 2012: The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories: July 9-13, 2012, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
    • In their introduction of UK RepositoryNet+, an infrastructure that "will offer service support, helpdesk and technical support, and a service directory catalogue for anyone hoping to switch to [green] open access", Dorward et al. note that "benchmarking" tools are in place currently. See the website for more information on these "[t]ools that may be useful".
  • 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. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." Pontika posits that demonstrating "who visits your repository, from which part of the world, which material is being downloaded, how many times, etc." is a valuable way to "bring your staff closer to your repository."
  • 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.
  • Example. University of Manchester. 2012. Institutional Repositories and measuring research impact. Manchester eScholar blog.
    • In a University of Manchester eScholar blog post that opens with a quick discussion of research impact, the question is posed, "how can institutional repositories (IRs) capitalise on this broadening definition of research impact in order to benefit researchers?" In response, the university is making view metrics and citation metrics available to researchers (requiring authentication), and will begin offering "usage and deposit data as appropriate on public-facing web pages."

Personalization

  • Example. Millard, David E., Hugh C. Davis, Yvonne Howard, Patrick McSweeney, Sebastien Francois, Debra Morris, Marcus Ramsden, and Su White. 2010. MePrints: Building user centred repositories. University of Southampton.
    • Millard et al. discuss the creation of MePrints, which serves to "give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit." This and other efforts to create personalized researcher spaces with repository add-ons ensure a dynamic "community space" that will ideally draw users in to engage with the repository and the larger community.
  • Example. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." Included in her discussion is the benefit of filling "staff directory webpages...by their institutional repository submissions." Doing so ensures "a complete publications list for each author," which helps to "increase both the staffs’ and the institution’s research visibility."
  • 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. University of Rochester
    • Example. Bell, Suzanne, and Nathan Sarr. 2010. Case study: Re-engineering an institutional repository to engage users. New Review of Academic Librarianship 16(Supplement 1): 77-89.
      • Bell and Sarr discuss the research project profiling user needs leading to the development of University of Rochester's IR+. Beyond the addition of the "contributor pages" to the repository, which included "statistics...download counts...[and] the most popular work" and gave faculty members the ability to "add and remove files and correct metadata," the University added a "user workspace" that gives researchers "their own web-based file system" to "download-modify-upload" and share works in progress, as well as a "portfolio page" that "gives users control over the presentation of their work." Reaction to the updates have been positive, with multidisciplinary uptake in "numbers [that] are unprecedented compared to our previous system."
    • 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.
    • 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'".
    • 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.

Promotion

  • Example. Armbruster, Chris. 2011. Open access policy implementation: First results compared. Learned Publishing 24(4): 311–324.
    • Armbruster's study explores "open access policy implementation and draws some conclusions about progress so far" at 10 institutions and funding agencies. Included in this discussion are the efforts undertaken at the University of Zurich, "an early policy adopter," which includes the university's decision that "only publications registered in the repository are included in the annual reports."
  • Example. Henderson, Ian. 2010. Open-access and institutional repositories in fire literature. Fire Technology: doi:10.1007/s10694-010-0198-1. [Note: This is a toll access article.]
    • Henderson discusses the benefits of Canada's National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction. Included in this article is a discussion of the library's role as the "technical and administrative" managers of the deposit of works to the repository. The researchers are "encouraged" to provide their work for deposit with the following incentive: "When a researcher is eligible for promotion, only official bibliographies generated from the NRC-IRC Publications Database are accepted for review by the promotion committee." By implementing this policy, the institutional repository "has become part of the research culture at NRC-IRC."
  • Example. Pontika, Nancy. 2012. Some thoughts on institutional repositories. Repositories Support Project blog.
    • Following a presentation at the University of Lincoln, Pontika offers her "thoughts concerning institutional repositories, their management and value." Included in this discussion is the opportunity to be found in the automated linking of repository deposits with annual research reporting. Doing so "saves a great amount of time of composing these reports yourself, and will also send a message to the institution’s staff that 'if you are not in our repository, you will not be in our report too'!"
  • Example. Standeford, Dugie. 2012. Changes coming for open access to research in Europe. Intellectual Property Watch.
    • Standeford primarily reports on the Wellcome Trust's recent "[crack] down on researchers who don’t comply with their policies." However, the University of Liege is mentioned as an institution that similarly "require[s] deposit and will only take into account deposited research for performance reviews." For more details, see the January 3, 2009 Open Access Newsletter article that points to an English version of the University's mandate, which indicates that "only those references introduced in ORBi ["Open Repository & Bibliography"] will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vitæ in all evaluation procedures."

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. COAR. 2012b. SPARC Open Access Meeting notes. COAR Newsletter.
    • Brief highlights from the SPARC 2012 Open Access Meeting, a forum for discussion on "Open Access issues including policy issues, author rights, Open Access publishing, and repositories," are presented. Ellen Finnie Duranceau of MIT offered a "12-point strategy" for increasing deposit, with "one item of particular note: 'leverage all sources' for acquiring content." MIT's practice of using "automated ingest tools" and "'scrap[ing]' the MIT domain to see what other papers they find within their institutional domain" both increases the number of work in the institutional repository and "send[s] the message to faculty that the library is doing everything they can to get content into the repository before contacting faculty and asking them to find their papers."
  • Example. Frantsvåg, Jan Erik. 2012. The – Hopeless? – Quest for gold. ScieCom Info 8(1).
    • Frantsvåg, of the University of Tromsø, offers commentary on the challenges of securing deposits for the university's institutional repository. Included in his discussion is the process by which the library harvests work, from reviewing publications reports to consulting DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO.
  • 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. Henderson, Ian. 2010. Open-access and institutional repositories in fire literature. Fire Technology: doi:10.1007/s10694-010-0198-1. [Note: This is a toll access article.]
    • Henderson discusses the benefits of Canada's National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction. Included in this article is a discussion of the library's role as the "technical and administrative" managers of the deposit of works to the repository. As such, the "staff enters all bibliographic information, creates standardized PDFs for the Web, 'alerts' clients to new material available and verifies that new publications are indexed by Internet search engines."
  • 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. 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. Porter, George S. 2006. Let's get it started! Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47.
    • Porter writes from his experience at the California Institute of Technology, noting that encouraging deposit is a "sociological and strategic" endeavor. In addition to working with senior researchers, as noted above, Porter suggests harvesting "low-hanging fruit," which includes "the intellectual heritage of your institution from the material which presents the least difficulties with respect to publisher permissions." He also mentions "[o]ther rich sources of readily available content includ[ing]...technical report series, working paper collections, theses, and dissertations."
  • Example. Proudman, Vanessa. 2007b. CERN Document Server. Critical mass gained! Depositing and reclaiming particle physics content. Stimulating the population of repositories: A research project, Tilburg University.
    • As one of six case studies comprising a larger research project, Proudman explored CERN's efforts to encourage author deposit to the institutional repository. Several factors contribute CERN's high deposit rate, including the following: "Departments are responsible for depositing content into the system mainly on behalf of its authors" and "Content not deposited by CERN researchers is harvested by the library." Proxy deposit, therefore, is a key component to CERN's deposit strategy.
  • Example. Proven, Jackie, and Janet Aucock. 2011. Increasing uptake at St Andrews: Strategies for developing the research repository. ALISS Quarterly 6(3): 6-9.
    • Proven and Aucock sketch the development of the University of St Andrews repository, along with strategies that have been used successfully to encourage deposit. Proven and Aucock again mention the value of MERIT's metadata, which can be "easily searched and downloaded," along with the university's use of a new "Current Research Information System (CRIS)," which works together with the repository. With CRIS, "the library can monitor the research outputs added to Pure as researchers update their publication lists, contacting people who are engaging with the system."
  • 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. Seney, Lauren, and Jim Heller. 2012. Law scholarship repository scores millionth download. News and events, William & Mary.
    • A news release citing the 1 millionth download of a work, two years into the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository's existence, notes that at its inception, "under the oversight of librarian Lauren Seney who directed a small army of student assistants, almost 5,000 documents were added in the first six months of the repository's existence."
  • Example. Troll Covey, Denise. 2011. Recruiting content for the institutional repository: The barriers exceed the benefits. Journal of Digital Information, 12(3): 2068.
    • Troll Covey reports on a detailed study of Carnegie Mellon University researchers and their attitudes toward institutional repositories, both in general and that of the university. Of the several perceived impediments to deposit that were identified from the surveyed community, the time required to send the right version and check the publisher's copyright policy was enough of a deterrent that finding ways to make deposit less time intensive was important. In response, it was suggested that the annual publications reporting system be altered, requiring authors to include metadata and a copy of the final version of their work with each publication that would allow for harvest by library staff.
  • Example. Wordofa, Kebede Hundie, and Poloko Ntokwane-Oseafiana. 2009. Open access and institutional repositories in agricultural sciences: The case of Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA). Agricultural Information Worldwide 2(3): 120-128.
    • Wordofa and Ntokwane-Oseafiana define open access and institutional repositories and discuss their benefits, particularly as related to researchers in developing countries, before describing the institutional repository development process at the Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA). Included is the intensive work of the library staff on "content harvesting, digitization of print materials, and the creation of metadata," which populate the repository. [Note: BCA's institutional repository is not publicly released yet; currently it is being used as an internal resource, which will presumably change once the "development" stage is complete.]
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • For more detail, see Peter Suber, Open Access, MIT Press, 2012, Section 4.2, "Digression on the word 'Mandate'," pp. 86-90.

"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.