Goldsmiths Open Access Statement:

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1 Review of RCUK Open Access Policy, Goldsmiths, University of London Background: Value Goldsmiths, RCUK Block Grant, first instalment: 20,878 Reporting period: 1 st April st July 2014 Goldsmiths Open Access Statement: Goldsmiths Decision Tree: Goldsmiths Research Online: Goldsmiths is a specialist institution focussing predominantly on research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. It also includes a large cohort of practice-based researchers whose outputs are not text-based. As an organisation it is therefore less likely to publish as many journal articles and conference proceedings as larger organisations which host additional disciplines. 2 - Goldsmiths main RCUK funders are the ESRC, AHRC, and EPSRC. Some BBSRC money has been awarded recently. 3 - Since receiving the RCUK block grant Goldsmiths has been awarded 2M AHRC grant, 500k BBSRC grant, 4 ESRC Future Leaders awards, an EPSRC doctoral training centre and had several EPSRC grants transferred. Thus the value of the Goldsmiths block grant which was calculated on previous research income, may not reflect its current RCUK research portfolio. Staffing: 4 - Monitoring and complying with the policy has had an immediate impact on staffing in multiple departments across the University. 5 - In the Library we now have a new fixed term post (one year) part time Repository Coordinator working to collect and collate information on Open Access, assist academics in meeting RCUK requirements, seek out Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs), and answer queries. This post will need to be made permanent as the workload is likely to increase as we move towards the next REF and in view of the fact that Goldsmiths has been relatively successful in maintaining and exceeding previous levels of research income. 6 - To develop the Goldsmiths Repository, Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO), Senior Management have approved funding for 1 year to create a post based in Computing to develop GRO s eprints system. The objective is to help GRO better deal with open access requirements in the arts, humanities and social sciences which tend to include more audio visual materials. The post-holder will also make the eprints system more user-friendly in order to improve engagement with the repository and open access more generally. Funding for this post has been allocated from internal resources. 7 - In the Research Office no new post has been created to help support the open access agenda specifically. The Research Development Officer overseeing the Goldsmiths RCUK grants portfolio in 1

2 the Research Office has been tasked with leading on the open access agenda together with the open access working group. This is in addition to the normal workload for this post. 8 - In Finance a management accountant has been designated as the contact for open access APC spending, liaising with the Research Finance team post-award. No new post has been created specifically to support open access implementation in Finance. 9 - The Head of Procurement is the point of contact for adding all open access suppliers on to Agresso to facilitate expenditure. No new post has been created to support data entry or supplier set-up In the Graduate School no additional post has been created to facilitate open access implementation. PhD student requests for APCs come through the Library and Research Office and training for doctoral students is arranged via the open access working group in collaboration with the Graduate School Research centre and project administrators have been tasked with uploading publication data on to the repository and ResearchFish. Not all departments or PIs on grants at Goldsmiths have project and/ or departmental research administrators. No extra staff have been recruited to facilitate uploading or data entry. 12 By and large therefore, the implementation of the open access agenda has fallen on the shoulders of existing staff with an already heavy workload. At this stage it is difficult to predict whether additional staffing is required in order to implement the RCUK open access mandate. It is however certain that more staff time will be required to meet Hefce open access compliance targets. Given the fact that a significant portion of Goldsmiths research is unfunded, Wellcome Trust income minimal and that the Goldsmiths RCUK research portfolio has broadened it is likely that Senior Management will deploy some of the RCUK block grant to support both the Hefce and RCUK open access mandates to ensure maximum benefit. This is in keeping with the relaxed RCUK block grant terms and conditions. Processes for Ascertaining Levels of Compliance and Challenges Faced: 13 - Our academics are encouraged to self-deposit into our institutional repository but at present there is no formal requirement to do so. This may change in future now that Hefce have indicated that open access will be mandatory for journal articles and conference proceedings in the next REF. Discussions on this subject are on-going due to their sensitive nature Presently, the content of our repository does not accurately reflect publication data for Goldsmiths researchers. PIs are not accustomed to depositing their work regularly. The number of deposits has however increased moderately since the availability of the RCUK APC funds was announced and the Hefce agenda revealed (see below) To establish levels of compliance we have focussed on consolidating information between JeS, the Research Outputs System (now ResearchFish) and our repository. However, indications are that PIs do also deposit their work off-site, using personal and project webpages and academic networking sites such as Academia.edu or Research Gate. Therefore we need to harmonise the data, clean it up and ensure that research staff use our repository as their first port of call when outputs 2

3 become available via publishers before disseminating them using other mechanisms. This is proving troublesome to implement as digital systems do not always support automatic cross-population of publication data therefore requiring additional data entry by PIs or project administrators where available Identifying RCUK funded research outputs deposited into our institutional repository has been problematic since we currently do not have a metadata field for funders or grant numbers. Neither have we got interoperable systems which help us draw data from ROS and ResearchFish to our Library eprints system. There are as yet no funds available to invest in such a system. The fact that ROS has been closed whilst ResearchFish is being implemented has meant some PIs have discontinued uploading details so there might be more data available than what we are aware of To encourage authors to submit to our repository we ask them to fill in a minimum amount of metadata and then we review and add the extra metadata. This means that there is a considerable amount of manual checking per item that needs to occur, even for RCUK items. Namely, we have to establish: 1. whether the author is (RCUK) funded; 2. whether the article complies with funder acknowledgement and data information; 3. whether APCs can be funded in line with the initial application to ensure there is no double funding; 4. whether the academic s preferred journal has an open access option; 5. which copy right licence is being used by the journal and whether it is appropriate Only then can we begin asking for Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) and evidence of publisher acceptance if appropriate In preparation for our report we downloaded a report from the Research Outcomes System (ROS, now ResearchFish) for 2013/2014 articles and conference proceedings and began a manual process of checking whether we had the metadata and article green/gold in our repository. There were certain issues in trying to identify whether a paper had been submitted for publication after the April 2013 start date of the compliance period, and as a result there may be some papers in our report that were in fact submitted earlier and therefore not subject to RCUK compliance. We also discovered that some papers listed in ROS as funded by RCUK were not acknowledged as being such on the publishers sites or in the accepted/published papers. Statistically we can report the following: i. The number of peer reviewed research papers arising from research council funded research that have been published by researchers within that institution. : 29 ii. Of these research council funded papers, the number that are compliant with the RCUK policy on Open Access by: a. The gold route: 9 (2 of which awaiting payment and outside of July cut-off date) b. The green route.: 12 3

4 iii. And the number which have been published in a journal which is not compliant with the 20 - RCUK policy on Open Access.: 1 potentially (we are awaiting to hear back from publisher re: policy. The publishers allowed this particular article to be deposited in GRO but it has no indication of what licence is being used) 21 - Thus, out of 29 items we have 19 that are compliant in total which works out at roughly 65.5% 22 - Total Costs of APCs to be spent = 3, (3 APC's). This amount is still being processed and therefore technically outside the reporting period. We thought it pertinent to mention it however, to demonstrate that Goldsmiths is making every effort to support RCUK open access mandate To assist with compliance monitoring Goldsmiths has continued its subscription to Scopus (this was originally subscribed to for the REF) to identify missing papers (approximately 80). The Library team then imported these into the repository and subsequently checked each article for its RCUK funding status via ROS and the Research Office. This information was then added into the metadata in our institutional repository as well as in our compliance spreadsheet and then we sought the Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) from the grant holder. Challenges we discovered, included: 1. absence of an AAM; 2. the RCUK grant was led by another institution; 3. the RCUK grant had multiple funders, one being RCUK; 4. identifying who actually held the RCUK grant if not Goldsmiths; 5. the open access fee already having been paid for by some other means and the PI needing to be reimbursed; 6. articles must be made gold by 31 st Jan in year after publication (Elsevier) 7. transferred staff from one HEI to another 8. publishers disallowing retrospective conversions to open access after 31 st January in the year following publication. This is a newly introduced rule. It hampered our initiative to quickly convert deposited and otherwise compliant articles in our repository to Gold open access. It is also worrying if authors publish in December and fail to make their articles Gold open access within a month or so We have yet to decide whether to continue our subscription to Scopus next year. Whilst it has been invaluable in identifying our research outputs, it increases the workload of the repository team and removes responsibility for deposit from authors. Given the size of the repository team (see above) it is crucial academic authors assist with the task of uploading their work. 25 Presently, our aim is to use these early implementation stages to test and further develop our repository systems and educate all our staff on what is required for Goldsmiths to be compliant with the RCUK and Hefce mandates. This we hope, will encourage authors to deposit with our institutional repository, whilst providing the information required, reducing our need to rely on external systems (e.g. Scopus) or manual checking internally. 4

5 APC Payment Processes and Workflows: 26 - At present we have had only a few requests for APCs and are still in the early stages of establishing clear processes and workflows for all involved in making the payments. As per the above section in staffing, the implementation of open access requires collaboration from many professional service staff. Not all are familiar with the open access mandate and may not view it as a priority for the institution. New collaborations have had to be formed, policies and procedures drafted and approved, suppliers set up and staff primed and trained before the actual spending of APCs could occur Instructions for applying for APC support were circulated to all RCUK grants holders, Heads of Department, Directors of Research and research administrative staff where available. Several have since come forward to request support or have indicated they will need it in future Currently, the block grant is being distributed on a first come first served basis. We expect this to change due to increased awareness of the policy and increased RCUK award success. In addition, we have had a number of requests for APCs but the articles have not yet been accepted so we have not agreed to make the payment until the paper has been accepted (should funds remain available) due to our small block grant. Some articles are gold but were not paid from our block grant. We believe that it is likely that these were paid by a co-author institution. 29 We have provided a workshop to our finance department and departmental research administrators on APC processing, RCUK and Open Access mandates and grant terms and conditions but there is still a need to provide guidance to them as we clarify the day to day process. A list of the publishers where we have previously published was collated and sent through to Finance, and the Procurement team, to ensure that these were all entered into Agresso, our institution s procurement system so there would be no delay in making payments. This work is ongoing. This will speed up the payment of APCs in the coming months. Green Open Access Embargoes: 30 - Goldsmiths favours Green OA for numerous reasons, one being the expense of Gold. Green raises its own issues, which are further compounded by various embargo periods, which are especially long for the arts, humanities and social sciences in which Goldsmiths specialises. At present we have not come across any embargo that is longer than RCUK requirements. This in turn means that for certain academics Gold is the preferred option since this allows immediate Open Access We have had correspondence with smaller non-uk publishers that have stated that we would only be allowed to make articles available to our own staff and students either immediately or after an embargo period, but as yet the research described in these articles has not been RCUK funded. Green embargo periods do cause a certain amount of confusion with academics since they vary from publisher to publisher and whether the article is funded or not. Different embargoes might be applied by the publisher i.e. Elsevier Equally the relationship between Gold, Green, Hefce compliance and the differing compliance rates and expectations for Hefce and RCUK are not well-understood. Colleagues often confuse one mandate with another and assume they are entitled to APC support from the RCUK block grant 5

6 even if not RCUK funded. A typical example: Many colleagues erroneously believe that to be compliant they must opt for the Gold route. They become concerned if told that for Hefce compliance they can also go Green as they have heard about RCUK s preference for Gold. Another common misunderstanding we found is that colleagues still do not know that monographs and practice-based outputs are exempt from the open access mandate. Explaining all these intricacies is extremely time consuming, especially if colleagues are anxious. Communication: 33 - The Hefce open access mandate have been the main focus Goldsmiths communication strategy. As a result, the RCUK policy took a back seat. This year we have put a lot of time and energy into developing an institutional strategy which addresses both the RCUK and Hefce open access policies The policy, strategy and procedural implementation of open access is being overseen on an ongoing basis by the open access working group. The core group consists of a lead from the Library, Research Office and a senior academic member of staff, with occasional input from other professional service departments and senior scholars. It reports in to the Research and Enterprise Committee. The working group is in charge of: organising events; reporting to RCUK (and Hefce); and overseeing the block grant expenditure. Members to this group do this as part of or in addition to their normal work load In addition to our institutional statement and decision tree (see links above) we have supported the open access agenda more widely. For example, we have: 1. created a Goldsmiths Open Access address to deal with related enquiries: openaccess@gold.ac.uk; 2. collected and made available FAQs on Open Access and RCUK policy as a live document; 3. hosted a workshop for PhD students (May 2014), to be repeated again in the new term; 4. invited David Sweeney to deliver a talk to academics, Professional Services staff and the institution s Senior Management Team in May followed up David Sweeney s talk with a discussion on how best to engage with Open Access locally as an institution specialising in the arts, humanities and social sciences; 6. contacted all RCUK funded researchers to inform them of the Goldsmiths policy 7. pro-actively sought out and contacted RCUK funded authors to help them comply with the RCUK mandate 8. reviewed the institutional website, to facilitate the promotion of our policy and Open Access at a more visible level including more detailed information that we hope will be of benefit to our staff, once our new external website and intranet systems have been implemented. Suggestions for the Future: 36 - It would help Goldsmiths if RCUK and Hefce: 1. harmonised their policies even further, or clearly communicated the distinctions between the two somehow 2. clarified that Green is acceptable to support compliance (despite the preferred means being Gold for RCUK) to reduce academic anxiety 6

7 3. clarified and helped lobby for reduced embargo periods in the arts, humanities and social sciences 4. lobbied for a more transparent and standardised approach to costing mechanisms for APCs that can be justified and understood as presently they appear unnecessarily high 5. encouraged publishers to develop mechanisms to adopt the Gold route retrospectively 6. calculated APC support on RCUK grants portfolio value, rather than retrospective portfolio value 7. actively sought a better understanding the hidden costs of open access, particularly to smaller institutions with a less flexible, voluminous budget where costs are hidden as existing staff are required to absorb them. 7