Attendees at this year’s UKSG conference heard details about Jisc’s collection of open access (OA) services, including an update on the Publications Router.
When moving to OA, the main challenges universities and researchers face are achieving compliance, managing costs, and realising the benefits of OA. An overview of how Jisc’s OA services can help institutions in these areas – from submission of an article, through to acceptance stage, and to publication and use – was provided by Neil Jacobs, Steve Byford, and Hannah DeGroff in the breakout sessions. Delegates also saw how these services build on existing infrastructure and, while tailored to UK circumstances, could provide solutions that are more widely applicable. The presentation is available here.
At various points throughout the conference, speakers highlighted the implications of different groups working together under the banner of OA. In her plenary talk “Managing relationships between libraries and publishers for greater impact”, for example, Ann Rossiter (SCONUL) called for institutions and publishers to effectively unite and embrace OA because so far uptake has been too slow and too expensive. Cameron Neylon (Curtin University) ended the conference with his paper “Investing in scholarly futures: communities, funding and the reimagining of research communications” in which he suggested that key groups in the sector struggle when working together on OA because their investment in the movement stems from different starting points.
The Jisc Publications Router provides a technical solution to such challenges by gathering article information from publishers and content providers and passing it to institutional repositories, while respecting the publishers’ licensing terms. A satellite session was held by Jisc on the first evening of the conference to update the community on the development of the service. Attendees heard a presentation from Steve Byford (Jisc), and Ruth Harrison (Imperial College) and Graham Stone (University of Huddersfield) provided short talks about the benefits of using the Router from an institutional perspective. Ben Johnson (HEFCE) was also present and spoke about how publishers can help institutions comply with the REF OA policy by providing feeds at point of acceptance.
Several publishers including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Wiley, and Dove Medical Press were in attendance providing an opportunity for different stakeholders to discuss the benefits of engaging in this initiative. Richard Hewitt from PLOS – which is now supplying feeds to the Router – spoke to the audience about his experience of working with the service.
If you are interested in participating in the Router please email pubrouter@jisc.ac.uk.
For general OA enquiries contact us at oasupport@jisc.ac.uk.