Welcome to the June 2019 issue
The release of further guidance from cOAlition S on Plan S implementation has answered many concerns from sector groups and has confirmed repositories’ key place and role in the envisaged “Plan S World”.
As in the UK we await the outcome of the UKRI policy review and prepare our services to meet its implementation requirements, there is a growing international awareness of the need for a self-supporting global infrastructure to support OA under Plan S.
Let us know where support should be built and where you have needs. Jisc is already providing many OA services for the UK, but we will continue to represent UK need in the global conversations and help bring back support wherever it is to be found.
Bill Hubbard, Head of scholarly communications support
Policy compliance
Helping you to meet and demonstrate compliance with the range of different funders’ and publishers’ requirements
Publications Router
We’ve added feeds from two new publishers. Future Science Group supplies full text including subscription content, firstly at “ahead of print” stage, and then with updated metadata upon publication in a journal issue. Subscription content is subject to a 12-month embargo indicated in the metadata. Elsevier’s metadata feed went live in June. This supplies advance notification of articles usually within 4 weeks of acceptance followed by an update upon final publication, including full licensing and embargo details geared to UK needs. Promising work with further major publishers continues, all of whom have said they will supply full text. There is now also good progress with several CRIS vendors in developing interoperability
Sherpa services
Work continued on our service improvement programme and we are pleased to announce that a developer preview of the new version of Sherpa Romeo has been released at http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo. We hope that you will take a look at this version, and we would welcome any feedback. We continued with the review work on the Sherpa RoMEO dataset and have made great progress towards transferring this data to the new version of Sherpa RoMEO. This data transfer work is nearly complete. In addition, we continue to upgrade our infrastructure to assist the implementation of Plan S-compliant policies. The implementation of Plan S principles is influencing the development of our services as both RoMEO and OpenDOAR have been identified by cOAlitionS as essential support services.
Cost management
Support with improving your processes and systems, providing shared services and negotiations agreements, in order to manage the costs of OA and subscriptions
Monitor services
In May we held our one-day user group meeting in Manchester, at which representatives from all user institutions were invited to attend. This was a very productive meeting in which we discussed users’ needs and requirements for both Monitor Local and UK, and possible improvements we can make. Topics raised included improved reporting functionality and APIs / integrations. We will continue to update users on these over the coming months.
The next incremental update to Monitor Local will be released this month (v1.20), which includes the new ‘person upload’ functionality, allowing user institutions to import their own lists of person details – we hope this will make updating and maintaining your records easier.
Jisc Collections
Jisc Collections’ priority for 2019 is to negotiate affordable and truly transitional open access journal proposals which meet our requirements for open access agreements. Cost remains critical to institutions and in consultation with members we will be issuing a series of counter proposals to publishers which reduce spend and provide UK researchers with compliant publishing routes well in advance of the revised Plan S implementation deadline. We are working with priority learned society publishers to establish a series of pilot open access agreements, guidance documents and candidate pricing models ahead of 2020.
Discovery, usage, and impact
Supporting you to improve the visibility of your repository and demonstrate the reach and impact of your research
IRUS-UK
The number of repositories represented in IRUS-UK currently stands at 154 (137 active participating repositories and 17 retired following a move to a new platform). A widget released in June 19 enables IRUS-UK statistics to be embedded into institutional repository pages. This user requested development offers greater flexibility to access and use statistics. The widget provides summary level download statistics for a repository, broken down by item type, with options to configure according to date and item type. A further requirement to display item statistics in addition to summary level statistics will be progressed this year.
CORE aggregation
CORE is the world’s largest aggregation of OA content: 135 million metadata items, 13 million full text (recently 1.5million more full texts were added). CORE now have a collaboration with the Turnitin service, supplying full text for plagiarism detection. CORE discovery is now available to use. It helps users to discover freely accessible copies of research papers. This comes as a browser extension and repository plug-in. It is backed by our huge dataset of millions of full text open access papers as well as content from widely used external services beyond CORE. REF Audit Guidance states Research England will use CORE in REF2021 to verify compliance to deposition policy.
Text and data mining – CORE/Journal archives
The Gateway to text and data mining project continues to explore how Jisc can support the growth of scholarly text and data activity across a range of content types. Testing with paper prototypes prompted enthusiastic feedback from research participants and, from its original focus on CORE and Journals Archive, the views of potential users within the research community have led us to focus (in the first instance) on the requirements of the methodological approach known as ‘Digital Humanities’. However, since this project began, there have also been developments in the provision of TDM support, in terms of both new services that have launched and others that are in-development. We are currently examining this altered landscape to understand how well the various pieces fit together to meet researcher needs, and whether it would be more effective for Jisc to partner with other organisations. We are also conducting further research to re-evaluate user priorities and desired outcomes.
The Jisc ORCID national consortium
We are currently 95 members strong. We are exploring demand for a light weight ORCID tool for those institutions without existing infrastructure (e.g. CRIS/repositories). At our recent members day meeting there were presentations from across the community on subjects as diverse as advocacy, research data management and practice research. At the international consortia leads meeting, the UK consortium’s role was acknowledged with an award in supporting the development of integrations. We also presented at Open Repositories 2019 on the growth of the UK consortium.
OpenAIRE
All research coordinators from Horizon 2020-funded projects in the UK will be getting an email in July regarding their OA policy requirements; in some cases, projects are also participating in the research data pilot, which means that in addition to any research outputs, the research data also needs to be made openly available. These can be deposited into an open repository, but if there is not one available to you, you may use the CERN-built repository, Zenodo. UKRI also have a portal, where research outputs are required to be deposited.
Open research hub
The Jisc open research hub is a modular service providing repository, preservation and reporting functionality for HEIs to manage, share, store and preserve their digital research outputs. Since its launch in November, the development team have continued to release new features which are of the highest priority for the sector. Single sign-on with the institution’s authentication system is now incorporated, and authentication via ORCiD is expected later in the year. Other soon-to-be-released features include finalising the integration of the Jisc repository and preservation systems, and Jisc repository integration with discovery services and CRISs. During our recent engagement work, we received strong support for our continued development of the OA article functionality of the service from the OA community. Given this, we are now working on developing those repository features which will enable compliance with the requirements of Plan S, as well as post-2021 REF submissions and wider open research practices.
If your institution is interested in learning more about the Jisc open research hub, please contact your Jisc Account Manager or Tamsin Burland.
Maintaining OA good practice
OA monographs
We have a community event in York on 4th July focussing on policy and practice for supporting researchers. External speakers will include Helen Snaith, Research England, Kate Petherbridge from White Rose Libraries and Yvonne Budden, University of Warwick. See the programme for booking details.
Digital capabilities for research
We continue to explore our role in providing support in skills development for all those involved in the research process. Our research data management toolkit working group met in April and identified four rising areas of concern in RDM. We shared the findings of our February workshop in a blog post Developing a skilled workforce to support scholarly communication – event report and next steps.
Over the coming months we will be piloting a research insights survey as part of our digital experience insights service. The service enables institutions to survey the digital experience of their staff – this can inform decision making about the digital environment, improve digital provision and enable institutions to compare data over time and better target support and continuous professional development. The service also supports benchmarking against other institutions. The research insights survey will expand the current range of surveys available which cover students, teaching staff and a professional services survey, which is currently in pilot.
We will also be consulting over how best to incorporate support for research in our digital capabilities service, which has at its core an assessment tool and resources, in addition to a suite of resources to support strategy development and implementation. If you are interested in helping us develop either of these services, please contact helen.blanchett@jisc.ac.uk
Blog post round up
Links to blog posts from the last 3 months which you may have missed
- Jisc and Crossref issue guidance to publishers on better licensing metadata
- How do monographs fit with the open access agenda?
- Critical issues in open access and scholarly communications – event report
- Elsevier metadata feed via Publications Router now live
- Mixed access and licence values in repository records
- cOAlition S appoints Jisc expert to accelerate open access
- Research analytics service: Defining the problems and refining potential solutions
- Open access monographs and metrics: more than counting beans
- Are preprints paving the way to science in real time?
- Open access requirements for Horizon 2020-funded projects
- Four rising areas of concern in research data management
- Perspectives on the open access discovery landscape
- Future Science Group supplies full-text articles to Publications Router
- Developing a skilled workforce to support scholarly communication – event report and next steps
- All that is good and FAIR
Keeping up to date
In between our quarterly digest you can keep up to date with our activities on this scholarly communications blog or follow us at @JiscOpenAccess on Twitter.
Key dates
Events we’re running or where you’ll catch Jisc staff speaking
June
26-28: Liber Annual Conference
July
1: Jisc research analytics webinar, 10:00-11:30
4: Jisc community event – OA monographs: policy and practice for supporting researchers, York
September