Three Jisc development projects to help institutions meet their open access (OA) needs will move to full service status from August 2016.
Publications Router, Monitor Local and Monitor UK will join Jisc’s suite of OA support services, following a decision by Jisc’s management board in April 2016.
Publications Router helps institutions capture content to their open repositories by passing on feeds from publishers and other content providers. This helps institutions comply with funders’ open access policies.
Monitor Local enables institutions to record and report on data relating to the publication of open access outputs by their academics.
Monitor UK is a shared application aggregating and presenting data analytics, enabling institutions and funders to share and evaluate UK cost and compliance data relating to gold open access publications.
Publications Router
Publications Router alerts institutions to their researchers’ journal articles by passing notifications directly into institutions’ systems such as their repositories or current research information systems (CRISs). It does this by taking information feeds directly from publishers and other content providers.
As the Router moves to service, institutions will benefit from:
- Automated workflows integrating with their current systems
- Alerts to new articles by their researchers that they may not have known about otherwise
- Metadata, often with the full text, will be delivered straight into their review queues, avoiding the need to enter it manually
- For any full-text articles that are under embargo, actionable embargo end dates, saving the time and effort otherwise needed to investigate what these should be in each case.
Following the completion of an earlier prototype project that demonstrated this idea could work, Jisc has developed a pilot for service in development work starting in summer 2015.
Major publishers are now joining the service, and work continues to enable the outgoing feeds to interoperate with the systems of as many institutions as possible. A growing list of institutions have said they wish to sign up to the service.
Monitor Local
Monitor Local enables recording and reporting of OA publications, offering flexibility to meet requirements of institutions of varying size and staffing. It can capture any phase of publication between initial query and point of acceptance, any type of output whether journal article, conference proceeding or book chapter, or any level of detail concerning compliance and costs.
Monitor Local collects and consolidates data from multiple sources to support understanding and analysis of OA publication activity. Its benefits to UK HEIs include:
- Streamlined, efficient and consistent processes across HEIs to support greater integration and interoperability with complementary, commercial and non-commercial products and services
- Time, and therefore cost savings realised through more automated rather than manual processes
- A UK-specific focus to meet the unique needs of UK HEIs
- Automated data collection and validation wherever possible, especially for compliance checking and metadata enhancement.
Monitor UK
Monitor UK aggregates data about OA publications, enabling academic institutions to share and learn from cost and compliance data. The service supports monitoring, analysis, benchmarking and reporting of OA costs and volumes, primarily where an article processing charge (APC) has been paid to a publisher to enable an article or research output to be published open access. The data aggregation supports access to a national picture of OA publication activity, which can be sliced and diced by publisher or institution, and filtered by date range in an easy-to-use web interface. Data is presented via interactive, graphical reports and charts, providing a level of business intelligence not otherwise available in an easily accessible and digestible format.
Monitor UK’s primary benefits are to institutions wishing to benchmark against other HEIs nationally to support their individual negotiations with publishers, and potentially as a mechanism for reporting OA publication activity to funders. The service will inform UK negotiations with publishers concerning the total cost of ownership for UK HEIs, and it will support research funders by helping to inform policy.
Making the transition to full service
These initiatives have until now been development projects at Jisc. However, there is compelling evidence of their potential to offer cost-saving benefits by reducing the time institutions spend in meeting their OA requirements. They will therefore now become part of Jisc’s suite of OA services on a more permanent footing.
The move to service will enable institutions to rely on these services in their OA workflows and processes, confident in their ability to realise and monitor progress towards their open access obligations and aspirations.