Jisc Monitor is a one-year project starting in May 2014, exploring how Jisc managed shared services might support institutions in meeting and reporting on funder OA policies. The core of the project is helping institutions have the information they need, and so much of the work is on data sources, data models and systems that exploit them to produce reports for university managers and others.
In this post, Frank Manista from the project gives us a summary of its plans for the final phase of the project, which are detailed in this PDF excerpt from the workplan: 150116 Jisc Monitor Sprint 3 Work Plan – v2 public.
Since just before Christmas, Jisc Monitor has been working toward its 3rd and final sprint in its development and exploratory work for the pilot. Given that the overall ethos of the pilot has been investigative, it isn’t surprising that some aspects of its original use-cases have shifted, while others have been added; it all adds up to the nature of such enterprises but it does underscore the inherent value of listening to the wants and requirements of the key stakeholders as they get identified, while also working to determine what can be sustained and promoted.
APC Aggregation
Starting from the spreadsheets developed in the Jisc Collections’ Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) project, which aimed to identify and collect key Article Processing Charge (APC) information, we have been working to create a generalised data model which would allow us to build a coherent aggregation upon which to build useful analytics. These spreadsheets are focussed on an individual institution’s knowledge of the APCs they have paid or contributed to, the funds they paid from (e.g., RCUK, Charity OA Fund, COAF), the funders of the work, and some basic bibliographic information. This work could allow for informal and formal identification regarding publication information For example, authors may be identified by name, email address, or ORCID; similarly institutions may have organisational identifiers in Ringgold or ISNI. We have made a preliminary ranking of particular points of identification and will be going on to work on the following:
• Expenditure, Average, High and Low per publisher.
• Number of APCs paid vs Total Cost per institution.
• Gold publication for which Green was possible.
A Systems Specification
We have also been working on producing a Systems Specification for managing Open Access Publication. The outcome of this work was a document describing a system that could help UK HE institutions manage administrative data in relation to the OA Academic publications. While we will be using this document as our starting point, what we actually build will be influenced by a number of factors including time available and continued input from the UK HE community.
Open Access Compliance Checking
Compliance checking is currently a task carried out manually, but there is no one single place to look for the relevant information. This means that it can be very time consuming, and therefore a prime candidate for total or partial automation. Being able to quickly and easily check compliance of an article or a set of articles will be of benefit to both institutions and funders. This work has the added advantage that the APC aggregation could actually become the APC+Compliance Aggregation, and we would be able to construct reports over both aspects of the data (2 for 1 shopping!)
To follow news from the Jisc Monitor project in more detail, check out the Jisc Monitor blog. We will post summaries here though.
