Category Archives: Open Access

Open Access Books

Leave a reply

The Jisc OAPEN-UK project has produced a new Guide on Open Access Books for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Guide-to-open-access-monograph-publishing-for-researchers-final

The Guide to open access monograph publishing for arts, humanities and social science researchers is available online and as a pdf download.

I’ve had a quick browse and it’s looks a really useful introduction to the state of play of Open Access book publishing.

The premise of the guide is that publishing books Open Access is some way behind publishing journal articles Open Access, and that is undoubtedly true.

Nevertheless, several publishers mentioned in the guide have been used by OU researchers to make their books Open Access. Martin Weller recently published “The Battle for Open” using ubiquity press, Ruth Finnegan has published both”Oral Literature in Africa” and “Why do we Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation” using OpenBook Publishers, and Alexander Mikroyannidis has recently co-edited an Open Access collection Responsive Open Learning Environments published by Springer.

So, it seems, OU researchers are taking the leap when it comes to publishing Open Access books.

Article Processing Charges

Leave a reply

Stuart Lawson (@lawsonstu) has produced a nice chart showing the current average price of an APC, based on data from 27 UK HEIs during the first half of 2015.

No surprises but what a range!

average_APC_2015

 

Lawson, Stuart (2015): Average APC price 2015. figshare.

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1509861

Retrieved 08:16, Aug 13, 2015 (GMT)

Data available from http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1509860.  

 

 

 

 

 

Open Access research in Open Access courses

Leave a reply

Recently a FutureLearn MOOC  linked to a full text research article archived in ORO.  The paper was “New directions for early literacy in a digital age: the iPad. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2014  (Early View) by Rosie Flewitt, David Messer and Natalia Kucirkova.” and it featured in the “Childhood in the digital age” MOOC.

A short extract from the paper appeared in the body of the course and the full text ORO item was linked to as a “See Also” option.  The full text was used free of charge with no need to worry about licenses as all full text content in ORO is made available with a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Using ORO is a cost effective and increasingly popular way of getting OU research publications into module materials.  Astrid Wissenburg gave a great presentation outlining some of these opportunities at the Inspiring Content event last year.  The presentation is available to watch again here: “Sprinkling Gold Dust: challenging students with cutting edge research“.

The ORO item “New directions for early literacy in a digital age…” was the most visited item page in ORO immediately after it was used in the MOOC and showed a marked spike in both site visits and downloads.

moocstats

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in using ORO items in an OU module or MOOC.

The OU supporting research

Leave a reply

This morning, Chris, Nadine from RSQ and I delivered a session to research managers and administrators on Open Access publishing and Research Data Management. This is a particularly important audience for us, as these are the people who work day-to-day with OU researchers and can really help us to spread the word about policies and services.

The session was very well-attended and I hope that those who came along will have gone back to their desks with a better understanding of the work we are doing in Library Services  to support researchers with managing their research outputs- be they publications or data.

The slides from the session are available here:

Top 5 reasons to use ORO

Leave a reply

Inspired by Isabel’s “Share and share alike: Top 5 reasons to share your research data” post I’ve come up with my own “Top 5 reasons to use ORO”.  As is the custom, in reverse order…

5. Maintain your academic profile.

The ORO author view page is a page that lists all your research publications. Rather than re-list all your publications on your personal webpage or a page on a research networking site – you can use the ORO list.

Additionally, ORO is used to feed the publications page on your OU People Profile.  Making sure all your publications are in ORO keeps these pages up to date.

4. Comply with Open Access Policies.

HEFCE

The policies are coming thick and fast!  The new OU Open Access  Policy and HEFCE Open Access policy for the next REF shift the emphasis from Gold Open Access to Green Open Access.

Both require the deposit of Author Accepted Manuscript versions of journal articles and conference items (with an ISSN) at point of acceptance by the publisher.  HEFCEs visual (right) is a nice simple way to see what is required and when.

Making ORO part of you publication workflow means you will be eligible for future REF exercises.

3.  Increased citations.

But some of the best reasons to use ORO are that you benefit from it directly

One big benefit is that making your research Open Access means more people read it and more people will cite it.  A recent study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has shown that papers self-archived in their Institutional Repository are cited 22% more than articles that hadn’t been self-archived.

2. Increased dissemination

downloads

Similarly, ORO has a statistics package that records all the downloads of full text items archived in ORO.

Did you know that in 2014 ORO recorded over 1 million downloads of full text papers from ORO? Some individual papers are downloaded 1,000s of times annually.

You can access your personal download counts from the IRStats2 webpage and then filter by author.

Download counts can be used to aid grant applications, report research dissemination back to funders and can support career progression.

…and top this week…

1.Open Access is a good thing

wall

Using ORO to make research outputs Open Access means that everyone, inside and outside the academy, has access to research publications.

In a 2013 Taylor and Francis survey of T&F Authors 36% disagreed or strongly disagreed that they had access to “most of the articles they need” – remember these are published authors so this is the information gap inside academia.

Reaching a paywall to research outputs for readers outside the academy is the norm and has led to innovations like the Open Access button which identifies publications behind paywalls and attempts to locate Open Access copies.                                                                                           Curiosity by simonas gutautas

But of course using ORO is an intervention in itself; use ORO to remove the paywall.

New metadata fields in ORO

Leave a reply

We’ve made 2 new metadata fields live in ORO; Date of Acceptance & Date of First Availability. These fields are available for Journal Articles and Conference Items.  We’ve built these new fields so that we can comply with HEFCE’s requirements for future REF exercises.

HEFCEFrom April 2016 articles and conference items (with an ISSN) submitted to the REF need to have been deposited in a repository at point of acceptance with the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM).  In order for us to record that an output complies with this requirement we need to capture the Date of Acceptance.

Additionally, we need to record the length of publisher embargoes.  HEFCE requires maximum embargo periods of 12 months for REF Main Panels A & B, and 24 months for REF Main Panels C & D.  So the Date of First Availability will be the date a publisher’s embargo starts.  In ORO we’ll set embargo end dates in accordance with listings on Sherpa Romeo.

To make your publications “REFable” please deposit them in ORO at point of acceptance with the AAM and complete these new pieces of metadata.  Any questions please contact lib-oro-team@open.ac.uk.

 

Open Access Again

Leave a reply

Yesterday, Nicola and I facilitated an Open Access Publishing seminar here in the Library at Milton Keynes.  We’ve done these for a few years now but I think this one was the most successful.  I’m going to bullet point some things that stuck with me.

  • The enormous difference between Article Processing Charges (APCs) in pure Open Access journals and hybrid Open Access journals i.e. from £0 to £3K.
  • The link between publishing in prestige journals and career progression for researchers.
  • The potential of bargaining with publishers to get an equitable deal when publishing Gold.
  • The issue of predatory Open Access publishers.
  • Things differ between disciplines!!!
  • Should pure Open Access journals utilize APCs for a sustainable business model?
  • The potential difficulties of archiving Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) at point of acceptance. (e.g. do co-authors have access to these versions and how do repository staff identify these versions?)
  • Using Social Networking sites to archive research papers.
  • The implications of archiving Author Accepted Manuscripts at point of acceptance (e.g. harvesting of AAM metadata from repositories by Google Scholar).
  • Using Open Access materials (and materials from library subscriptions) in Open University Modules.

There were lots of other really important points raised and as ever I worried that we confused some issues rather than clarify them.  But then that’s part of it really, it can be confusing!

Optical Illusion by Aaron Fulkerson https://www.flickr.com/photos/roebot/1461507866

Optical Illusion by Aaron Fulkerson (https://www.flickr.com/photos/roebot/1461507866)

What we need to try and do is identify the key points about Open Access publishing and get them across clearly, without forgetting that Open Access can be complex.

Thanks to everyone who attended.

Chris

Slides are here: Open Access Publishing Slides

Notes (with links to contacts) are here: Open Access Publishing Notes

Progress, promise and potholes

Leave a reply

I’ve missed the other Open Access events over the last week or so so I was pleased to get the time to listen to Alma Swan’s talk on Open Access earlier today. Alma spoke generally about the development of “the subversive proposal“and outlined an optimal Open Access policy that was very close to the current HEFCE Open Access policy (minus the license!).

Incentivising Open Access can be done 2 ways, firstly by demonstrating the benefits of it and secondly by writing policy and mandating it.  By demonstrating the increased dissemination of OA full text in ORO with download statistics I’ve always tried to do the former – and I think I’ve been partly successful here.  But ORO only contains 35% Open Access full text, so we’re not where we need to be.  The HEFCE policy mandates deposit with the big stick being submission to the future REF – it thereby links Open Access publishing to career progression.  This is important, because in the future it might not be so important where you publish, but as to how you publish.

Alma also used a lovely phrase an “overdose of misunderstanding” and that is exactly how I’ve often felt about Open Access in the time I’ve worked with ORO.  Firstly because there are so entrenched views about Open Access it can be hard to get a clear picture and secondly because we’ve seen the playing field shift fundamentally.  First with the publication of the (pro Gold) Finch Report and now with the aforementioned (pro Green) HEFCE policy – the goalposts for researchers (and those of us who support them) have changed.  One thing is for sure Open Access a long way from its endgame.

In her talk Alma highlighted the importance of Open Data rather than Open Access to scholarly publications.  Using a quote from Geofrey Boulton, Alma stated that access to the research data will have far greater implications than the access to the publications based on that research data. See Science in a data-intensive age. Thanks for the link Isabel :-).

Alma asked us to take individual responsiblilty for how Open Access might play out in the near future.  These included: ensuring we get good value from publishers, planning for sustainability (especially for the repository infrastructure) and innovating in the field of scholarly communications wherever we can.

Finally, and as is always the case when we have discussions about Open Access in The Open University, we were left to conclude, if not here, then where?

Slides available here: SwanOU2014

Chris

Faculty of Health and Social Care: Session on Open Access and Research Data Management

Leave a reply

Open Access (OA) week 2014 kicked off for me on Tuesday 21st October with a session for HSC researchers on Open Access and Research Data Management( (RDM). While this was not organised as an OA week event (it was merely a coincidence that the session fell during the same week) it was a great way to raise awareness of OA issues in this faculty. It was made apparent in the session that the open publication of research outputs is a particularly important issue in the field of health and social care as it allows practitioners on the front line to access the latest research without expensive journal subscriptions.

The session started with an interesting presentation by Nicola Dowson (Library Services Manager – Research Support) and Tony Coughlan. This covered options for (Gold or Green) OA publishing and was enhanced by examples from Tony’s own experiences of OA. A testament to the wide-reaching nature of articles published under open licences is the fact that a number of Tony’s articles have now been translated and read all over the world– he actually found out about this because people emailed him questions about his papers in their native languages! Click here to download the slides.

Next, I gave a short but informative presentation on Research Data Management, entitled “Top 10 things you need to know”. This was in the style of Top of the Pops (but without the awkward teenage dancing). In at number 1 on my chart was the fact that advice andguidance on RDM is available – in the form of the OU RDM intranet site, the Digital Curation Centre, the UK Data Service (highly recommended for researchers working with qualitative data) and MANTRA, the online training suite from University of Edinburgh. Click here to download the slides.

Finally Janet Fink gave a very engaging talk on her experiences of managing and sharing data for the Enduring Love project which ended in November 2013. A requirement of this ESRC funded project was the deposit of the underlying data in the UK Data Archive. Anonymising the data collected in this project was a complicated and lengthy task. The researchers interviewed 50 couples both together and separately, and in order to protect people’s identities (and their relationships) they had to ensure that the individual interviews could not be traced back to the couple interviews. Ultimately Janet’s advice was to make sure that you clean and catalogue your data as you go along, as this will save you a lot of time when you come to deposit it!

A great deal of insightful discussion was generated by these highly interesting and informative talks and the audience certainly seemed to take away a lot of food for thought.