Open Access publishing at Bangor: Reflections on our progress by Dr Michelle Walker for Open Access Week 2017

As another International Open Access Week approaches, it seems to be an opportune point in the year to reflect on what has been achieved over the past year and to look forward to the next in Open Access here in Bangor. Our blog post for Open Access week in 2016 gave a detailed review of Bangor’s relationship with Open Access. Reflecting on this blog has highlighted the forward-thinking nature of some of our staff, although at points it felt like we were making slow progress. It does seem however, that great positive steps have been made this last year.

In April 2016 we began a cross-institutional project to implement PURE as our CRIS and repository. There is still some way to go until we reach full implementation as we have been proceeding with a phased roll-out since April 2016. In the interim we have imported all existing Research output information the institution held and made PURE our institutional repository. We have trained approximately 400 staff (Academic, central service, and Administrative staff), in 43 different training sessions, how to use PURE for updating and maintaining their profiles, and interacting with the functions of the repository.

At this point last year PURE still felt like a relatively new change and we have embedded not only the system, but also a new way of working. I had cause to revisit our old Publications database the other week and I could not believe how much things have changed. That is not to say that our installation of PURE is perfect yet, but it is so much better than what we had before.

The move to our PURE repository has contributed to changes we have seen in both the volume of items in our repository and the workflows associated with its maintenance. We have seen an increase in the numbers of full-text items being deposited by 147%. Prior to PURE all items in our repository were added and checked manually by repository staff. Since the switch, 68% of the records have been deposited Academic staff. We still check, supplement and validate all records (with our modest repository team) but this has been a positive step forwards. Not all of these changes can be attributed to the implementation of PURE alone. The REF Open Access requirements have focussed attention and effort and increased the need for central systems to monitor all these developments. We have also seen an increase in academic staff adding historical publication information. Historically, as a result of limited manpower, the institution only recorded the publication information of our academic staff from 2000 onwards. In the move to author-deposited metadata, we are seeing an expansion in the time-frame and volume of records we now hold.

The move to PURE has allowed us for the first time to start connecting all this data together. We our awaiting some exciting further developments with the delivery of our Advanced portal. This will allow us to visualise far more content to the outside world than we can currently and allow us to populate research content into School web pages with data harvested from PURE. It will also allow us to move our theses from their old home in our ePrints repository to PURE.

At various conferences, webinars and mailing lists over the last year it has become increasingly obvious the strides that institutions have been making in the arena of Open Access. It is heartening to hear the increasing volumes of open access content and repository deposits that some institutions are making, and also reassuring to raise awareness of the issues we are all grappling with. It is positive that such strides are being made towards open access, and it all adds to the collective development of the Open Access agenda.  These developments mean that Open Access in Bangor looks far more positive now than ever before.