This was a presentation given at the LIBER2014 conference in Riga. See http://liber2014.wp.lnb.lv/programme/papers/abstracts-and-biographies/#ChrisBanks for an abstract and biography.

1. Whose Property Is It Anyway?
Part 2: the challenges in supporting the UK’s main research
funder agendas which seek to ensure that the outputs from
publicly funded research are published Open Access
Chris Banks @chrisbanks
Director of Library Services
Imperial College London

2. POLICY ENVIRONMENT

3. Research Councils UK (RCUK) Policy
• From 2005 RCUK sought to encourage open access publishing
• Article Processing Charges could be paid from grants - low take up

4. Wellcome Trust and Open Access
• From 2007 the Wellcome Trust funded APCs
• Also mandated deposit in PubMedCentral
• Compliance is currently at 66% and costs the Trust around £4.5m a
year
• Wellcome are now implementing sanctions for non compliant
academics seeking further grants

5. Finch Report
• 2011: Dame Janet Finch commissioned to lead a group to explore how
to accelerate the adoption of Open Access to publicly funded research
• Summer 2012 Finch Report Published
• Author-pays model was preferred
• Publication Fund established to encourage adoption of OA by
explicitly funding APCs for immediate CC-BY publication where
possible
• September 2012: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
endorses the report (and allocates £10m pump prime funding)
• Autumn 2012 RCUK announces new policy to take effect April 2013.
They currently spend around £11.2bn on research funding and have
allocated 1% towards Gold Open Access
• Institutions awarded funding on the basis of Research Council grant
income to support the payment of APCs on journal articles and
conference proceedings where RCUK acknowledged as funder
• Target 45% compliance in the first year- assumed APC £2000

6. HEFCE policy for post REF2014
• Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) REF policy
published on 31st March 2014 states that for any journal article or
conference proceeding accepted for publication in a volume with an
ISSN from 1 April 2016 to be eligible for the next REF [REF2020?] the
Final Author Version/Accepted Author Manuscript must have been
deposited in an institutional or subject repository and made
discoverable within three months of acceptance for publication.

7. Big numbers: why the HEFCE policy matters

8. HEFCE and RCUK policies seen together
• From 2016, for a Journal/Conference proceeding publication to be
eligible for submission to the next REF it must meet the following
minimum criteria:
• Have a discoverable metadata record in a repository within 3 months
of acceptance for publication
• Have a closed deposit FAV/AAM in the repository within 3 months of
acceptance for publication
• BUT if the research was funded by RCUK/Wellcome/Horizon2020 then
the following criteria must also be met:
• Be available as an Open Access publication (either Gold or Green).
• If Gold: immediately upon publication, and with the relevant
license (e.g. CC-BY)
• If Green: be open access within the embargo period set by the
funder

9. The challenges of compliance
Author action RCUK /
Wellcome
compliant?
HEFCE
REF
compliant?
Additional
REF
credits?
APC paid for Gold OA?   
Repository deposit with
Green embargo
  
Immediate Deposit/Optional
Access
  ?
Immediate deposit /
Immediate Access / SPARC
(or similar) Author Addendum
to Publication Agreement
  
It can be all too easy for academics to comply with one policy and fail to comply with others

10. INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES

11. • Senior academic leadership is essential to effect behavioural change
• High level committees drawn from Research VP, Research Office,
Policy, Strategy, Library, ICT + relevant academic representation
• Advocacy, Advocacy, Advocacy – the message is still not widely
understood
• Challenges with multiple policies which are not wholly aligned,
particularly cross-border policies

12. Imperial College 2012 mandate
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/library/subjectsandsupport/spiral/oamandate

13. ACADEMIC RESPONSES

14. Responses vary by discipline
• Sciences & Medicine likely most engaged
• Engineering and Maths less so
• Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences – even less so
Individual responses
• On a spectrum between passionately engaged and
unaware/disinterested
• Still rewarded by publication in high impact journals, so minimal
motivation to change behaviours
• Like the elitism of publishing in high impact journals
• Beleaguered: yet more constraints, more reporting requirements,
perceived less time for research
• But: want to be eligible for submission to the REF

15. PUBLISHER RESPONSES

16. • Currently UK pays around £163m in subscriptions
• In the UK around 140,000 articles are published per year.
• If all opted for gold then funding required would be £245m
• Some publishers seeing hybrid gold OA as an additional income stream

17. • RCUK funding is “transitional” but some evidence suggests publishers
are welcoming a growth in hybrid gold
• Challenge with license applications: correct funder-compliant license
not always applied
• “Pure Gold” does not necessarily mean low impact factor (e.g. PLoS)
• New government-led research into monograph publishing
• New publishing business models are emerging
• Some quality monograph publishers actively engaging in OA schemes
(e.g. Knowledge Unlatched)

18. LIBRARY ACTIVITIES

19. Library Activity
• Contributing to the work of institutional implementation groups
• Awareness raising amongst library colleagues, academics and
students
• Working with other departments, including ICT and Research Office,
on the requirements for management of the process
• Maintenance of web pages, FAQs and links
• Running the service to manage the payment of Article Processing
Charges (and learning from that process)

20. Open Access Funds managed at Imperial 2013-14
• Wellcome
• RCUK fund: £1,150,458
• Imperial College Fund: £650,000

21. Library involvement in OA at Imperial College
Gold
• Management and allocation
of the publication funds
• Supporting academics to
ensure funder compliance
• Record keeping and reporting
• Working with colleagues on
workflows and systems to
manage many transactions
• Checking whether the
publisher has published OA
and attached correct license
Green
• Support for self-archiving
in the institutional
repository
• Repository developments
to ensure metadata is
discoverable
• Metrics (downloads,
altmetrics, etc)
• “request” button for closed
deposits

22. Open Access workflow (without HEFCE . . .):

23. http://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/ - the College Repository

24. Repository Metrics

25. Article level metrics

26. The Library goal: making it as easy and attractive as possible
for authors to comply, deposit and get cited
People
• Be more pro-active about collecting
author versions of papers (e.g. at
time of request of APC funding)
• Consider a mediated licensing
advisory service
• Engage via repository notifications
• Encourage academics to challenge
publishers about the green options
• Consider in-house publishing
options
• Consider institutional subscription to
ORCID as this makes automation of
processes much simpler
• Consider which licensing options
might increase flexibility of deposit
Systems
• Consider making the repository the
single point of deposit, and simplify the
interface
• Automated population of SPIRAL with
metadata and harvested articles
• Development of SPIRAL to support the
next REF (e.g. working with publishers)
• Develop and visualise metrics and
bibliometrics
• Interoperability between systems is
necessary, as are version control tools
• Upgrade Sherpa Romeo to:
• Standardise publishers’ text to deliver
meaning
• Develop a Institutional Repository
Specific API

27. Ongoing challenges
• Scalibility of processing, especially for gold
• Creating a touchpoint with the repository for FAV/AAM to meet the new
HEFCE requirements
• Working with publishers to receive notification at “acceptance” for
publication
• Challenging the enduring hybrid gold – affordability question
• Working with publishers to achieve “offsetting” deals
• Note that Academic reward systems are not currently contributing to
behaviour change

29. SERVICE

30. SERVICE

31. SPARC addendum

32. Summary of opportunities for libraries
• Influence high level academic support and leadership
• Have one person whose role it is to oversee practical implementation and
reporting
• Work with institutions, publishers and with aggregators so as to minimise
the number of small value transactions that need to be processed
• Work with publishers to get better data, e.g. through implementation of
ORCID
• Work with publishers to get more transparent license information
• Work with CRIS developers and institutions and implement ORCHD etc
• Ensure that the CRIS can automatically deposit to the repository
• Work with academics so that the are fully aware of the value of appropriate
licensing
• Consider services which might take away some of the academic “pain” at
the point of publication, e.g. licensing advice and support
• Work at national and international levels to harmonise embargo periods
• Consider the ongoing affordability of hybrid gold OA and whether any
policies on upper limits are necessary