Support the development of an institutional Open Access policy
Support the development of an Open Access policy in your institution which requires staff to deposit research outputs into their institutional repository. Such policies are gaining in popularity as a way of building a comprehensive record of an institution’s intellectual outputs to support research assessment, and as a way of engaging authors with the advantages offered by open access dissemination. These policies may also help authors to negotiate archiving rights where these are normally denied by publishers, and will allow researchers to fulfil deposit mandates from their funders.
To support you, Enabling Open Scholarship is a new organisation for senior institutional managers that explains and promotes the principles of open scholarship. EOS reports on developments relevant to open scholarship (eg policy action), and also offers outreach services.
Look at examples of institutional policies and see Harvard University’s Open Access Policy. The policy will need to be supported by a set of FAQs and some formal processes for adding materials to the Repository. The Repository Support Project can supply suggested wordings, as can the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) website. Also, consider the Immediate Deposit/Optional Access (IDOA) policy model.
Why?
Your institutional repository is a tool for managing your institution’s impact and image. It will support the mission of your institution in enabling, engendering and in encouraging scholarly research and disseminating its findings, minimising the effort that individual researchers must devote to providing open online access to their research output and ensuring the storage and preservation of the institutional research output at institutional level. Other benefits include the possibility of attracting greater funding to departments, raising the international profile of your researchers, and to support the Institution in the forthcoming HEFCE REF. An overview of the business impacts of institutional repositories is provided by the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook.
Further reading
Look, Hugh (2009) Embedding repositories in research management systems: final report.
Harvard University’s Open Access Policy
ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies)
Repository Support Project
Enabling Open Scholarship
Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) website
Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook
This Scholarly Communications Action Handbook and related documents have been prepared by a team led by Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd (in conjunction with Professor Charles Oppenheim and Ms Naomi Korn) on behalf of the JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group. It is part of a series of outputs that have been developed to support the HE sector in addressing the key concerns of researchers in scholarly communications.
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