As part of Open Access week, we have a series of posts and announcements which highlight our ongoing work in supporting open access. Today, Azhar Hussain starts with news on one of our most well established services – Sherpa Juliet.
An updated Juliet service
As part of a continuing programme of improvements to the Sherpa services we are pleased to announce the release of an updated Sherpa Juliet service. Sherpa Juliet is a Jisc service that provides up-to-date information on research funders’ policies on open access, publication and data archiving.
What’s changed?
We’ve been working with Jisc user experience experts and our users to develop a simplified and streamlined website with a more modern, responsive design. The new interface has been designed to work just as well on your smartphone as on your computer.
We have reviewed and updated every record in Juliet to ensure our data is up-to-date and accurate, and with the addition of unique identifiers (FundREF DOIs), you can unambiguously match our funder records to an authoritative source.
Finally, our API has been completely rewritten to make it easier for other systems to harvest our data. Combined with our new standardised data model and unique identifiers, the data exposed by the system will enable everyone in the community (ourselves included) to develop services to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving sector. API users will need to check the new documentation for details.
What next?
This is the first deliverable in a programme of service improvements that we are currently working on. Over the coming months we will be releasing updated versions of all our services (RoMEO, FACT, REF and OpenDOAR). Our overall aim in completing this work is to move towards an API driven data infrastructure on which services are run, rather than a set of services that have APIs.
Future plans include integration with technologies like the Elastic Stack that will allow us to put state-of-the-art search, reporting and visualization tools on our service endpoints. We will also be developing new API endpoints for interfacing with repository and CRIS systems for data quality, automated compliance checking, auto completion and a host of other possible use-cases.
Sherpa services now have the world’s largest open access policy database, containing policy information on funders, journals, publishers and institutional repositories. Our improvement programme will allow us to continue to provide the community with a set of agile services better placed to respond to the increased complexity in today’s open access landscape.
For more information on Sherpa Juliet visit https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet, or contact us at help@jisc.ac.uk.