December 2019 open access update now available – Jisc scholarly communications

Welcome to the December 2019 issue

Dec 2019 Jisc OA update - image of first page — Download the December Jisc OA update as a PDF

A range of enhancement reports in this issue. To pick a couple: we are delighted to report that Publications Router is now receiving feeds from 11 publishers and feedback from users suggests that the service is increasing in importance to institutional workflows. We are also very pleased to have added nearly 900 new repositories to OpenDOAR after working with CORE colleagues and carrying out some extensive QA work to resolve previously unlisted repositories. As the dust from the general election settles and policies are announced, we are looking forward to using the capabilities we have built into our new Romeo infrastructure to respond to national policy compliance. We talked a little about this at our recent event on “Planning for Plan-S”, which was well received by attendees with some good conversations and thinking about the challenge, and all this in the midst of REF preparations. The event has given us some very useful feedback for future institutional needs. As we go forward into REF and Plan S next year, we will all face challenges and changes, but we are here to support you throughout. As ever, get in touch with us and tell us about the way you use our services: what you like, what you don’t like and anything you would like to see improved.

I hope you all have a good Christmas break!

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

Since the last issue, SAGE Publishing has started its live feed to Router, starting with content from its 180+ wholly OA journals. They’ve said they’ll add subscription content to the feed when their workflows are ready. This means 11 publishers are now contributing directly – see the complete list here – and we’re pressing on with our discussions to add more. Things are also moving forward with the vendors of the key research information management systems and CRISs. Meanwhile, there’s now a new plugin that reduces the need for manual editing if you take feeds from Router into a RIOXX-enabled EPrints repository. It ensures that Router’s rich metadata lands in the right RIOXX fields, as well as into the extra fields provided by the “Dates, Dates, Dates” plugin.

Sherpa services

OpenDOAR has gained a further 885 repository records (and counting) over the past 2 months. This is the result of a large record import made possible by CORE, our partner at the OU. CORE was able to discover repositories that were not yet registered in OpenDOAR, giving us a wealth of data to work on. The editorial team worked hard to individually review and process each record to ensure our service positively serves the global open access community. We are also continuing to work on redeveloping Romeo and Fact to prepare our services to support the implementation of Plan S principles. Sherpa Romeo is currently available as a developer’s pre-release here. A Sherpa Fact Beta will be available in early 2020.

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

On 4^th Dec 2019, after some vital user acceptance testing, version 1.22 of Monitor Local was successfully deployed, which followed on from some work to fix several bugs in the system, namely the “Export All” and “What’s Listed” functions. Release notes for v1.22 are available. The changes made are primarily to the back-end system to address performance issues, with no changes to front-end user interface or functionality. The next Jisc Monitor User Group virtual meeting is scheduled for 14^th Jan 2020. If you’d like to join the call, please get in touch via help@jisc.ac.uk.

Jisc Collections

Over the last 18 months, we have intensified our efforts to secure agreements that accelerate a transition to open access. Like other consortia, we require that the OA transition be funded using existing expenditure only, with no additional commitment. In each case we have received significantly improved offers. We have gone out to consultation with offers for Wiley, IOP, RSC, Annual Reviews and secured agreements with a range of smaller and society publishers.

We are in the final stages of negotiation for SAGE, Brill and OUP and will send consultation documents before the end of the year. We are conscious that these are complex and substantive proposals so we have ensured extended grace access will be provided to allow you more time to consult and discuss the implications with colleagues. We also plan to consult on revisions to existing agreements including CUP and ACS agreements ahead of Wellcome Trust’s new OA policy coming into force. As arrangements are already in place for these publishers we will provide institutions with more time to review and provide feedback.

Discovery, usage, and impact

Supporting you to improve the visibility of your repository and demonstrate the reach and impact of your research

IRUS-UK

Enhancements scheduled for delivery from 2020 Q1 include support for research data repositories and for COUNTER Release 5 which enables recording of information about metadata views in addition to downloads of full text items. With the introduction of these service enhancements in 2020, it’s intended to remove the current Shibboleth authorisation mechanism, thereby supporting access to open data. The recent IRUS-UK survey aimed to explore how the service is being used and to understand overall service satisfaction. A report summarising feedback from the survey is available, together with a response from the IRUS-UK team about work to address suggested improvements.

CORE aggregation

The Open University held the Research Excellence Awards 2019 Ceremony at the occasion of the OU celebrating 50 years of opening up education for all. CORE was presented with the award for “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity.” This important award reflects the clear value CORE represents to its millions of users. CORE is the largest repository of open access scientific knowledge globally. La Referencia have recently integrated the CORE recommender into their service. A new version of CORE discovery is now improved by providing suggestions for similar research papers both within the collection of the hosting repository and the CORE collection. Via CORE Discovery, users can automate the process of finding a free full text of a paywalled research article with only one-click. CORE have also announced a new feature to improve the reading experience of users: CORE Reader.

The Jisc ORCID national consortium

We released the first of a series of Case Studies: Doing more with ORCID for the UK ORCID consortium. It looks at a workflow showing how the University of Cambridge takes advantage of ORCID IDs in their CRIS, their data repository and using external services such as DataCite and the ORCID registry to increase visibility of outputs. These case studies will help other ORCID members think strategically about the implementation of ORCID at their own institutions, learn from the experiences of others and achieve benefits for institutions and researchers using ORCID IDs. We published a blog post about the PID landscape that sets out the wider context in which the ORCID personal persistent identifier sits. It looks at some of the initiatives in which Jisc has driven the environment and policy forward, giving an overview of key engagements and identifiers. We are starting to plan and pilot regional events to support our members.

OpenAIRE

From Sept 16-18, 2019, more than 300 participants convened in Porto for the second instalment of the OpenScienceFAIR. One of the major themes of this year’s conference revolved around all things EOSC – focusing on the European Open Science Cloud and corresponding questions around its future shape and form, and two joint workshops were organized by OpenAIRE and EOSC-hub. The workshop “The Journey to EOSC – preparing at national level“, held on Sept 17, 2019 (chaired by Najla Rettberg – OpenAIRE), was designed to showcase the variety of initiatives already in motion in many member states of the EU that work towards making EOSC a reality, and included representatives from EOSCsecretariat, NI4OS, EOSC-Pillar, EOSC-Nordic and SSHOC. Its goal was to foster exchange between these initiatives and to generate cross-sector insights. It also aimed to produce recommendations and good practice examples that might help to establish coordinated implementation efforts and use cases for others interested in following up on questions of governance, such as the formulation of national plans, and raising awareness towards EOSC within communities.

European Open Science Cloud

We are part of a new 2.5 year project called EOSC Synergy, which started in September. The project involves nine European countries and aims to extend EOSC coordination within those countries, building capacity and capability. Our main involvement is in the development of an open online learning platform to support skills development to better use EOSC and its services. Jisc is leading on a task to develop and deliver a ‘train the trainer’ programme to enable users of the learning platform to create high quality learning material and courses for teaching open science online. For more information contact Helen.Clare@jisc.ac.uk.

Maintaining OA good practice

Community events

We are planning an event in Spring 2020 around repositories and practice research, a follow-up to last year’s popular event.

ORCID members day

Save the date for 13^th May 2020.

Blog post round up

Links to blog posts from the last 3 months which you may have missed

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.

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