Equity and inclusion in Jisc Sherpa Services
The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is taking action to build structural equity and inclusion. Jisc’s Sherpa services are accessible globally and have a key position in the world’s open research service infrastructure. In celebration of Open Access Week 2020, we highlight some of the editorial team’s recent activities to demonstrate how we are responding to the call for greater equity and inclusion in open services, as well as a changing policy environment, for our users across the globe.
This year we have been pleased to release a new and enhanced version of our Sherpa Romeo and Fact services (you can read further about their launch in June here) This marked a step-change in the way we model our data and means that all Sherpa services are now running on our new software platform, therefore expanding our capabilities to build and roll-out new features and tools for our international user community, and to respond to policy changes in an effective and agile manner.
Sherpa Romeo
Romeo service enhancement – Browse by Country
As part of Open Access week, we would like to take the opportunity to announce a Sherpa Romeo service enhancement that allows users to ‘Browse by Country’. You can find this new feature on our our ‘Search’ page alongside the ‘Browse by Publisher’ button. This function allows our users to select a country and view all publications from that country by title, using data based on the location of the publication’s publisher.
After selecting a country from the list, users can also select ‘Statistics’ to view a graph displaying the growth of publications listed in Romeo for a specific country over time.
Increase in the listing of publications from South America
Our new Browse by Country function makes it easy to identify trends in our listing of publications across the globe. From February 2020 to October 2020, the team has significantly increased the coverage of publications from countries in South America. In February 2020, Sherpa Romeo contained 582 publications from South American countries. The team has been busy with requests for new listings and the number has now increased by 8.78% to 633 publications in October 2020.
The biggest increases include Argentina (13 new titles), Colombia (11 new titles) and Brazil (10 new titles). This increase in the region could reflect the prominence of open access in Latin America – with public universities playing a key publishing role, as outlined by Rachel Maund for The Scholarly Kitchen.
Looking to the future
We are pleased to be working with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) in order to improve the representation of Canadian journals within Sherpa Romeo, and to be collaborating with them in their project to gather key information to add to the database. We will be working with CARL in the coming months to provide a local chapter of Sherpa Romeo allowing them to curate their own records and thus significantly improving the accuracy and availability of valuable data on Canadian journals within the database.
Repository Assessment Tool
In order to support our user community with the implementation of Plan S, and our UK members with UKRI policy, we are also currently working on a new Repository Assessment Tool. This will aid users with judging the compliance of their repository against the Plan S criteria – watch this space for further updates soon!
Supporting a global infrastructure
The above are just some examples of the ways in which Sherpa Services and the data we hold can support a global open research infrastructure – the data underpinning our services is freely available for non-commercial use via our open licence, and we want this to be used as part of the open research ecosystem. If you are using Sherpa data for any projects or initiatives, or would like to explore opportunities for collaboration, we would love to hear from you.
Get in touch
If you would like to find out more about our Sherpa services please get in touch with us via help@jisc.ac.uk.
Email us: help@jisc.ac.uk
Visit us: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk
Follow us: @JiscOpenAccess