Part of the Jisc event: How compliant is your institution? Meeting RCUK and REF metadata and policy requirements, which took place on on 24 November 2015. More information about the event can be found on the Jisc website: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/how-compliant-is-your-institution-24-nov-2015

1. RIOXX in context:
Demonstrating Compliance
with RCUK OA Policy
Jisc Workshop, 24 Nov 2015
Ben Ryan
EPSRC / RCUK
ben.ryan@epsrc.ac.uk

2. Research Councils UK
£3B

3. Why ‘open’ ?
• Public good agenda.
• Support for innovation and growth:
– remove barriers to access;
– get the stuff out there and get it used.
• Research transparency and integrity.
• Data intensive science.
• Expectations of a digital age.

4. The digital & networked world is a
real game changer
• Expectations and opportunities have changed.
• We are in a world where:
– The expectation is ‘I want it now and I want it for
free’;
– Anybody can ‘publish’ anything on the web;
– People expect to develop services based on freely
available publicly-funded information;
– Experts have to earn trust.
• Funders are responding to these drivers.

5. RCUK Policy in a nut-shell
• Covers peer-reviewed articles and conference
papers which acknowledge RCUK support
• Authors must publish in journals which comply
with the RCUK policy.
• Articles must acknowledge Research Council
support and give the relevant grant reference(s)
• Where appropriate, articles should signpost the
underpinning data

6. Journal Compliance
• Journals achieve compliance by allowing:
– ‘Gold’: immediate ‘CC-BY’ licence on publication,
OR
– ‘Green’: ‘CC-BY-NC’ licence, or equivalent
on the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM)
in any freely accessible repository
after maximum 6(12) months embargo.
• Longer 12(24) month embargo allowed in
transition if ‘Gold’ option is offered but not used.

7. Core data requirements for
Compliance Monitoring
Monitoring at institutional, not article level
It’s not the individual decisions that matter, but their
cumulative effect, per article, of:
• Re-use permissions (Licence),
• Timing of free availability
• Content (acknowledgement, data)
At institutional level, to capture these and to be able to report
on use of RCUK block grant, there must be:
– Awareness of all articles and whether ‘gold’ or ’green’
– tracking of spend on OA (APCs/other)

8. Creative Commons Licences…
…a reminder
CC-0 : No restrictions on reuse
CC-BY : Attribution
CC-BY-SA : Attribution-ShareAlike
CC-BY-ND : Attribution-NoDerivatives
CC-BY-NC : Attribution-NonCommercial
CC-BY-NC-SA : Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC-BY-NC-ND : Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

9. Monitoring Compliance - Gold
‘Relatively’ straightforward
1. Is the work freely available from date of publication
under a CC-BY licence?
2. Does the article acknowledge RCUK support?
3. Is the data adequately signposted?
In theory, easy to assess: use of RCUK Block Grant to
support payment of APC is conditional on compliance,
In practice, a real burden just checking that licence
terms and free availability are delivered by publishers
as expected

10. ‘Deceptively simple’
1. Is the ‘author’s accepted manuscript’ freely available
(or will it be) under a CC-BY-NC or equivalent? (but can
be deposited anywhere, and which licences are ‘equivalent’!)
2. Is the Journal embargo period within the allowed
maximum? (but when does embargo begin?)
3. Does the article acknowledge RCUK support?
4. Is the data adequately signposted?
Monitoring Compliance - Green

11. Acknowledged complexity of
process must be reduced.
• Significant effort needed to gather necessary compliance
data.
• Inadequate organisational awareness of publications
authored by their own researchers
– Some organisations estimate output volume using e.g.
Web of Science, Scopus; but HEFCE’s next REF
eligibility requirements is driving increased deposit in
institutional repositories.
• Time spent tracking block grant spend on APCs / other.
• Time spent providing advice and guidance.
• Time spent dealing with publishers.

12. Need to reduce the admin burden
• More efficient payment of APCs.
• Easier, more automated, ways to measure
compliance.
• Better ways of reporting block grant spend.
>> RCUK Support for:
– Jisc Monitor
– RIOXX
– CASRAI OA reporting workgroup
– Jisc APC data collection template.

13. How RIOXX contributes
• RIOXX defines the metadata needed to
facilitate machine-based compliance
checking of institutional repository records
• Three classes of elements in the RIOXX
metadata record: Mandatory,
Recommended, Optional

14. Element Description Notes
dc:identifier 1 Mandatory unique, http URI for the article (the repository copy!)
rioxxterms:type 1+ Mandatory determines if journal article, etc.
ali:license_ref 1+ Mandatory NISO defined, must be URI, include start date
rioxxterms:version 1 Mandatory determines if author accepted manuscript
rioxxterms:project 1+ Mandatory provides funder and grant ref
dc:title 1 Mandatory article title
dc:language 1+ Mandatory article language
rioxxterms:author 1+ Mandatory article author(s)
dcterms:dateAccepted 1 Mandatory needed for HEFCE policy compliance
dc:source 0-1 Mandatory
(where applicable)
e.g. ISSN, ISBN
dc:description 0+ Recommended
dc:format 0+ Recommended e.g. MIME type
dc:publisher 0+ Recommended
dc:subject 0+ Recommended
rioxxterms:version_of_record 0-1 Recommended http URI - DOI of official version (the publisher’s copy!)
ali:free_to_read 0-1 Optional NISO defined; not a sufficient indicator of compliance
with RCUK policy
dc:coverage 0+ Optional
dc:relation 0+ Optional http URI pointing to a related resource; NOT the DOI of
the official version of record
rioxxterms:apc 0-1 Optional
rioxxterms:contributor 0+ Optional
rioxxterms:publication_date 0-1 Optional

15. Growing take up of RIOXX
• At last count, 35 repositories using E-Prints plug in
– 7 indicate 100% valid basic syntax
– 17 indicate partially implement valid basic syntax
– 11 still to implement basic syntax
• But none indicate full conformance with ‘RCUK
compliance’ metadata; where the basic syntax is valid, the
key missing elements include
• ali:licence_ref
• rioxxterms:project
• dcterms:dateAccepted

16. Compliance expected,
block grant support
Future funding depends on OA review and CSR
Initial year-5 target 100% compliance
75% Gold to 25% Green.
Year-1 Year-2 Year-3
% compliance 45% (√) 53% (?) 60% (?)
APC fund £17M £20M £23M
Potential gold 10k 12k 14k

17. How much this time around….?
• Block Grant Spend in Year-2:
– Reporting period: August 2014 to July 2015;
– Report by September
– Expectation of 53% OA
• Assessment of reports now in progress – paying
attention to check if 53% target met and if OA
funds are being spent effectively.
• Many organisations still find it difficult to track all
articles arising from RCUK research – deposit in
IRs and use of RIOXX will address this!

18. Initial outlook– based on responses
of 6 ‘large block grant’ Universities
• Block grants used to fund approx 2400 articles
– 2200 cite support of a single RC, remainder cite more than
one.
• 103 different publishers
~ 10% of spend, 15% of articles, appear not to have clear CC-BY
(4% spent on CC-BY variants)
approx. spend at…. % clear CC-BY
~ £264k 45 publishers, 100%
~ £1,565k 15 publishers, 90%-99%
~ £1,438k 7 publishers, 80%-89%
~ £228k 8 publishers, 70%-79%
~ £62k 18 publishers, 0%

19. Looking ahead
• Great majority of journals are compliant with
RCUK OA policy:
– Misplaced concern with non-compliance.
Monitoring is at institutional level, not article level,
so it’s not individual decisions but their cumulative
effect that matters;
– More focus on repository deposit.
• Consistent and significant underspend of block
grant and/or other indications of systemic ‘non-
compliance’ could be cause for serious concern…

20. QUESTIONS ?