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.

We do not subscribe to the content you want?

Bangor University Library and Archives Service understand how frustrating it is when you cannot access the content you need to read. 

We aim to provide access to content that meets your research and teaching needs; every year we conduct a robust journals review in consultation with academic staff, library reps, college managers and deans to recommend cancellations (based on cost and usage data) and make requests for new resources.

In light of rising journal costs, it is increasingly important that researchers are aware of other avenues to obtaining full text content.

If the Library does not have the item you require, and it is essential to your research or study, we aim to obtain it as an inter-library request.  Please note the service is subsidised by the Library and Archives Service. For further details, please see here: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/library/using/docdel.php.en

Alternative sources of full text content include:

• Google Scholar provides links to full text where it is available freely online, they harvest from authors personal webpages and University repositories, but often the links take you to the publisher’s webpage requiring payment to access. 
• PubMed also has a LinkOut option for articles, which includes free versions available in institutional repositories.
• OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories which allows you to search across repository contents http://www.opendoar.org/search.php
• ScienceOpen works as an aggregator bringing together open access content from across a wide range of publishers and platforms including PubMed Central, arXiv and SciELO.  ScienceOpen also includes citation and usage data and encourages post-publication peer review of articles to eliminate bias. https://www.scienceopen.com/

Please also check out these new tools that might help you get free, legal access to pay-walled articles:

• Open Access Button – is a free, open source tool that can be used online via the website or as a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. At the Open Access Button website https://openaccessbutton.org/ enter an article URL, DOI, PMID ID, Title or Citation. If the article is available, you will be provided a link to where it can be accessed. Alternatively, if you have downloaded the extension for Chrome or Firefox, just visit the article page on the journal’s website and click the OA button in your browser, which will show its availability.  You might also be interested to read about a new JISC project that is exploring a new service, which would embed Open Access Button functionality in the discovery/interlibrary loan workflow.  This project aims to: prevent multiple interlibrary loan requests for the same article; improve the user experience of the interlibrary loan process; contribute to making more articles open access; offer cost and time efficiency by checking if requested material is already available under open access conditions. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/supporting-inter-library-loans-with-the-open-access-button
• Unpaywall - is a newly launched browser extension developed by Impactstory. The browser extension can be downloaded for Chrome and Firefox and allows you to find free, full text versions of articles, where they exist. Once installed in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, Unpaywall brings up a green or grey tab on the side of the screen.  A green ‘unlock’ sign means that a free version of the paper is available and a grey ‘lock’ icon means that the tool could not locate a free version. http://unpaywall.org/

Further reading:

• https://goldsmithslibraryblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/open-access-button-and-unpaywall/
• http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/04/04/announcing-unpaywall-unlocking-openaccess-versions-of-paywalled-research-articles-as-you-browse/?platform=hootsuite
• http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-Browser-Extension-Could/239714
• https://www.nature.com/news/unpaywall-finds-free-versions-of-paywalled-papers-1.21765

Problems accessing the full text of a journal article?

The most common cause of problems off-campus is following an external link or going directly to a publisher’s webpage.  You can access all of the Library's electronic books, journals and databases from computers off-campus, but the resource provider needs to know that you are a Bangor University member.  If you have arrived at the publisher’s webpage, look for an option to sign in via Institutional Sign In, Shibboleth, or UK Access Federation and then select Bangor University from the list. Please note that if you are browsing the publishers’ sites, they will also present content that is not included in our subscription.

The best way to ensure you get the full text content off-campus is to find the article or the journal in Library Search and follow the link to the full text content.  By default, Library Search will display only items for which there is full text access. (You can tick the box “Also show results without Full Text access” if you require). If you are off-campus, clicking on the link from the “View Online” box will prompt you for your Bangor University username and password before taking you to the full text. Some journals are available to us from a number of different providers, so you will see a number of options with different date ranges; ensure you choose the right link.

 

If you are searching on a bibliographic database such as Web of Science or ProQuest, you will need to follow the full text links to access the full text, we do not subscribe to all the content you will find in a bibliographic database. 

If you are searching on Google Scholar, we have enabled many of the full text links for our subscribed content; on campus, you will see the “full text at Bangor” links.  To enable this on your own computer off-campus, go to the Google Scholar homepage, select “library links”, then search for, and select Bangor University.  We have not enabled all content links, so it is wise to always double check Library Search for content; also, you never know we might also have it in print.

If you think we should have access to an article but it is not working, please contact us (details below) with full details of the article (author, title, journal, issue/volume, year, page numbers) so we can investigate for you.  All publisher websites look and behave slightly differently and our library links can get broken, please contact us any time you are stuck.

For further help, please contact the Academic Support team on libsupport@bangor.ac.uk

 

A recent history of Open Access publishing at Bangor University

On the theme of “Open in Action” for International Open Access Week 2016, we would like to give you a short recent history of Open Access publishing support at Bangor University.  If you would like to send us any comments about this blog post or if you would like to share your own reflections on Open Access publishing at Bangor please contact us at repository@bangor.ac.uk and we’ll get your comments up on the blog.

This blog post details what has been happening at Bangor, this [link] previous blog post will give you a very brief timeline of Open Access publishing in the UK.

In 2005, Claire Davis, Research Assessment Manager  (Research and Enterprise Office) started an internal closed access database to record all published outputs by Bangor University staff (this was later developed by the Research and Enterprise Office and IT Services as the internal CRIMS system).  The Publications Database was vital for external reporting and research assessment, and included detailed, validated and enriched bibliographic records, but no open access full text copies. A project was begun to feed the bibliographic records into a DSpace repository with the aim of adding full text copies where possible, however lack of staffing and investment meant this full-text linking was not achieved at that time.

In 2012, Bangor University’s Library and Archives Service established a cross-university working group on Open Access publishing; launched a new set of informative webpages on Open Access; and drafted a new publishing policy for the University which encouraged Bangor’s researchers to publish Open Access.   This work was led by Sue Hodges (Director of Library and Archives) and Tracey Middleton (Digital Services and Development Manager, at the time Electronic Resources Librarian).

In 2013, Graham Worley (Research Co-ordinator, IT Services) and Dr Beth Hall (Research Support Librarian, Library and Archive Services) did a thorough review of repository software and proposed that rather than trying to revive the original DSpace repository, that instead we move to using the E-Prints open source repository solution. (This decision was largely based on requirements for research data as driven by EPSRC expectations on research data management from the 1st May 2015).  We took a fresh import of data from the Research and Enterprise Office’s Publications database and fed this into E-Prints.

In 2013, the first year that we received RCUK block grant funding, we aimed to make all RCUK-funded outputs open access via the Gold route as the Green route was not available to Bangor researchers until 2014 when the new E-Prints Repository, eBangor was launched.  In 2014, Dr Michelle Walker joined the Library and Archives Service in a new post as Repository and Research Data Manager (Michelle was previously Publications Officer in the Research and Enterprise Office). Michelle, along with maternity cover provided by Marjan Baas-Harmsma, started the process of linking bibliographic records with full text copies in the new repository eBangor.

Promotion and awareness-raising amongst academic staff at Bangor University on open access publishing options and funder requirements has been vital.  Since 2012, we have visited University Schools and Colleges, provided training sessions via the staff training and doctoral school training programmes, briefed the University’s Research Strategy Task Group, and continued to advocate for open access at every opportunity.  We have also arranged annual events for International Open Access week with excellent guest speakers.

We have benefitted from agreements that JISC have reached with a number of publishers to off-set open access charges, particularly SAGE from 2012.  The Royal Society for Chemistry open access vouchers for their “Gold package” subscribers is also a scheme we have benefitted from. We continue to engage publishers in discussions about off-setting of open access costs during renewals of subscriptions. We make use of the excellent Springer open access agreement and we would like to see more publisher agreements like this one.

In direct response to the new REF requirements for Open Access applying to publications from April 2016, we have seen an increase in the number of items being sent to the Repository team. 

During 2016 we have also been implementing PURE, a cross-university research information management system.  Claire Davis (Research and Enterprise Office), Michelle Walker (Library and Archives Service) and Graham Worley (IT Services) are leading the implementation of this new system across the University. PURE draws together research information from both internal and external sources and facilitates an evidence-based approach to Bangor's research and collaboration strategies, assessment exercises RCUK and HEFCE open access compliance and real time visibility of current research activity. We have moved all research publications from eBangor into PURE.  Using PURE as the new Repository software has advantages of workflow management for the Repository team, and also allows researchers to self-deposit publications and manage their own public profile on the University’s Research Portal http://research.bangor.ac.uk. 

This year the University Publications Policy has been rewritten as an Open Access policy by Dr Michelle Walker and approved by the University Executive and we hope to see Open Access Publishing become the default at Bangor University for the publication of journal articles and conference papers.

We also look forward with interest to developments in open access book publishing; we already actively support the Knowledge Unlatched scheme, where many libraries from around the world share the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher to make the title Open Access. We are also actively exploring institutional “in-house” publishing options, and we want to ensure more of Bangor’s research data is published open access. 

If you are still not convinced of the benefits of open access publishing, then have a look at this report on the citation advantage of open access articles: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157  and watch these researchers talking about why they choose to publish open access: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2JT23E1bRE&feature=related 

References:

Eysenbach, G., 2006. Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biol, 4(5), p.e157. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157

Brief timeline of Open Access Publishing in the UK

This blog post will give you a very brief timeline of Open Access publishing in the UK, the next post in this series details what’s been happening with Open Access publishing at Bangor University.

In order to highlight how long sharing research openly has been the norm in some disciplines, let us go back to 1991 for the advent of the online archive of free pre-prints in physics: arXiv.org.  Since 1991, over a number of years the Open Access movement gained momentum and in 2001, 34,000 scholars around the world signed “An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers” calling for them to establish an online public library making research outputs in medicine and the life sciences freely accessible.  This resulted in the establishment of the Public Library of Science (PLOS).  In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was a gathering of scientists who signed an agreement to preferentially publish their findings in open access journals; and in 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was published.

Academic libraries have been at the forefront of promoting the Open Access movement; primarily due to ever-increasing subscription costs from publishers coupled with decreasing budgets from their academic institutions. But also driven by the role of libraries in facilitating the sharing of knowledge for the benefit of wider public good.

Since the early 2000s, we witnessed a steady increase in the number of research outputs being published open access by UK academics, and an increase in the number of institutional repositories giving researchers an option for “Green Open Access Publishing” (making an author-accepted manuscript live on the institutional repository after a publishers embargo period has lapsed). At the end of 2007, OpenDOAR (a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world as provided by SHERPA) had 1,009 repositories on the register, by July 2016 this number has risen to 3,201 repositories worldwide (this list includes subject-specific and institutional repositories).

In June 2012 the Finch Group (Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch) published their final report which supported the case for open access publishing through a balanced programme of action, and in particular recommended support for the “Gold route” to open access.  The UK Government accepted all recommendations in the Finch report and asked the UK higher education funding bodes and RCUK to put the recommendations into practice.  The RCUK policy supports both Gold and Green routes to open access, but promotes the gold route primarily with the allocation of a block grant of funding to each UK research institution starting in April 2013.

JISC have been successfully supporting the sector with Open Access publishing by reaching agreements with a number of publishers to off-set open access charges (article processing charges/APCs) with costly subscriptions to journal packages. From October 2015, JISC Collections and Springer reached an agreement to allow researchers in the UK to publish their articles open access in over 1,600 Springer journals without any costs or administrative barriers.

In April 2016 the HEFCE policy on open access came into force, requiring researchers to make open access any articles they want to submit to the next research assessment exercise. 

References:

1.       http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/open-access-week-2011-a-short-history-of-open-access

2.       http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/oa/whatis/

3.       https://www.jisc.ac.uk/content/open-access/our-role

October 24th – 30th 2016 is international Open Access Week.

The theme for Open Access Week this year is “Open in Action”.  You can read more at the International Open Access Week website: http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/theme-of-2016-international-open-access-week-to-be-open-in-action

We will be running a number of events at Bangor University during Open Access Week, as follows:

24th October 2-4pm: The Cledwyn Room 3/TCR3:  Open event on Sensitive Research Data

Guest speakers:

·         Professor Mark Elliot, Professor of Data Science, Manchester University and UK Anonymisation Network (via videoconference)

·         Dr Catrin Tudur Smith, Reader in Medical Statistics, Liverpool University, title of talk: Good practice principles for sharing individual participant data from publicly funded clinical trials

Email c.a.roberts@bangor.ac.uk to book a place

25th October 2-3pm Alun building A1.01: Postgraduate training session on Open Access Publishing

Covers the principles of open access publishing, funder requirements, and how to make your articles open access at Bangor. Register online at https://www.bangor.ac.uk/doctoral-school/training.php.en or email pgr@bangor.ac.uk

26th October The Cledwyn Room 3/TCR3: 2-3pm: Staff training session: REF and Open Access

This session will detail the requirements for Open Access and the next REF to ensure eligibility of outputs for submission using the University’s Research Information Management system, PURE.

Email c.a.roberts@bangor.ac.uk to book a place

Information about previous Open Access weeks:

In 2013 we hosted Phil Sykes (University librarian at Liverpool University and representing the Open Access Implementation Group/OAIG and Research Libraries UK/RLUK) and Ben Ryan (Senior Manager, Research Outcomes at EPSRC).

In 2014 for International Open Access week, we hosted Ben Johnson (Higher Education Policy Adviser at HEFCE), Roger Tritton (who talked about JISC Collections’ work in exploring potential business models for humanities and social sciences (HSS) open access monographs), and invited three publishers to talk about their options for open access publishing (PLOS, Wiley and BioMed Central). 

Welcome to the new Library and Archives Service Research Support blog

We aim to publish regular blog posts keeping you up to date with significant news on trends and policies in Open Access Publishing, in Research Data Management, and detailing support available from Bangor University’s Library and Archives Service.

This blog complements our primary Library and Archives Service blog: Y Llechen: http://bangoruniversitylibrary.blogspot.co.uk/