Tag: JIsc

Springer Nature negotiations

UK higher education institutions along with Jisc are currently in negotiation for a new “read and publish” agreement (also referred to as “transitional” or “transformative” agreements) with the publisher Springer Nature. Our current agreement runs to the end of December 2022 and we are seeking a new agreement that will not only enable us to read the journals covered by the deal, but also enables researchers to publish open access in those journals at no additional cost.

The sector has agreed criteria for our negotiations. Agreements should

  • Reduce and constrain costs
  • Provide full and immediate open access publishing
  • Aid compliance with funder open access requirements
  • Be transparent, fair, and reasonable
  • Deliver improvements in service, workflows, and discovery

We achieved these aims with last year’s negotiations with Elsevier and are seeking to do so with Springer Nature. In addition to seeking a renewal of the existing Springer Compact agreement which has been running since 2016, we are also seeking to include Nature research journals and Palgrave journals.

If you are reading this and wondering what a “transitional” agreement is, my colleague David Phillips wrote about these in an earlier blog. At the time David noted that we had 11 such agreements in place at Imperial. This has now risen to 33 with fully covered publishing costs plus further agreements which include discounted article processing charges (APCs). Back in 2019, only 9% of sector spend enabled full OA publishing. That figure is now over 80%.

Why are the negotiations criteria important for researchers?

It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the sector criteria and what they mean for academic authors:

Reduce and constrain costs

  • To be sustainable, the costs of reading and publishing cannot continue rising more than that of inflation. Back at the turn of the century, under 44% of Imperial’s Library Services budget was spent on content. Today it is closer to 60% and further increases are simply not sustainable either for Imperial or for the sector. Our most recent Jisc negotiations  went some way to stem the rise and we need the agreement with Springer Nature to similarly deliver. To illustrate the impact of increasing content prices, the chart below shows the breakdown of expenditure on staff, operations, and content costs.

100% stacked bar chart showing Breakdown of Imperial College Library Expenditure between content, operations and staff 2000 to 2021. In 2000 the cost of content was 45.5% of total budget and in 2021 it was 56.6% having reached 59% in 2020

Provide full and immediate open access publishing

Aid compliance with funder open access requirements

  • One of the  questions that libraries frequently get asked is what should authors do to both ensure they meet funder obligations, and that their research outputs are eligible for the Research Excellence Framework – the REF. Our agreement with Springer Nature needs to enable both, affordably.

Be transparent, fair, and reasonable

  • As researchers you have secured the grant funding, you have assembled the team, drawn up the protocols, undertaken the research, undertaken the analysis and written up the findings. You then undertake the peer review. All of the above without payment from the publisher. You may also act as editors for journals, often on a voluntary basis with no compensation. Libraries then pay the publisher for publishing and content provision services. We need those payments to be transparent, fair and reasonable, reflecting the contribution researchers already make to the system.

Deliver improvements in service, workflows, and discovery

  • We are in a transition from paying for content to paying for publishing services on behalf of researchers. It is really important that those services are efficient for all parties otherwise we simply introduce additional administrative costs into the system. For authors, time spent battling a clunky submissions system or an unclear or conflicting publishing contract, especially processes which involve back and forth with libraries, are taking time away from your research activities as well as adding to admin burdens.
  • It is of course vital that research is discoverable for it to be built on and to have impact.

What next?

Negotiations

Researchers can continue to publish in SN journals and meet both funder OA obligations and have REF eligibility

“It is the intention that the UK higher education funding bodies will consider a UKRI open access compliant publication to meet any future national research assessment open access policy without additional action from the author and/or institution”

  • To be sure that your research output both meets funder requirements and is eligible for the next REF, we advise that you insert the following Rights Assertion Statement on all submitted articles (not just Springer Nature):

“For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising”

If you have questions or want further information

For other activities during #OAWeek2022 see this post by my colleague John Murtagh.

About me: I am Director of Library Services at Imperial College London. My profile is here and you can find me on twitter @ChrisBanks. I have an ORCiD and you can get yours here

How to implement ORCID at a university?

Last week I presented on Imperial’s ORCID implementation at the German Library Congress in Leipzig, as part of a panel on researcher identifiers. The College implemented ORCID in 2014 when it generated identifiers for academic and research staff; see my ORCID article in Insights for details. We use Symplectic Elements, our Current Research Information System (CRIS), to track ORCID iDs and to allow new staff to register – a straightforward process.

However, not all universities have a CRIS and some do not even have an institutional repository (repository systems like DSpace often support ORCID). This has triggered the question, in Leipzig but also in discussions with colleagues in the UK and elsewhere, on how a university should implement ORCID if they do not have a system (or systems budget) for ORCID. Some universities are also not (yet) in a position to become institutional members of ORCID, so they could not integrate with ORCID even if their local systems supported it.

How should a university ‘implement’ ORCID if it has no suitable systems, no or not much of a budget and if it may not be able to become an institutional ORCID member in the immediate future?

This sounds daunting but there is actually a simple, straightforward solution. ORCID is only effective if researchers use their iD – at minimum they should share it with their publisher so the iD can be added to the metadata of their research outputs. Universities can simply encourage staff to self-register – it is free for individuals and only takes a minute. Neither systems support nor ORCID institutional membership are required. Whether to register with ORCID remains the choice of the individual academic, which also gets around lengthy institutional processes for defining policy and evaluating the legal background.

Simply set up a page describing the advantages of ORCID – see Imperial’s ORCID pages as an example-, and start highlighting ORCID as part of the academic engagement that libraries undertake anyway. If and when the university eventually becomes a member of ORCID and makes systems support available you can simply ask researchers to link their existing iD. At that point there may already be some outputs with ORCID in the metadata!

Speaking of systems: I would suggest to add ORCID to a system that gives researchers direct benefit, and to only add it to systems if and when there is a clear business need. For example: if you do not plan to report on ORCID through the HR system, then why implement ORCID there right now?

The key for success with ORCID is to ensure academics understand and use ORCID.

 

P.S. As part of the support for the UK ORCID consortium, Jisc are currently working on a more detailed decision tree for ORCID implementation, and we are discussing future events to support ORCID uptake.

Less is more? A metadata schema for discovery of research data

In recent years, universities have become more interested in the data researchers produce. This is partly driven by funder mandates, in the UK in particular the EPSRC Expectations, but also by a concern about research integrity as well as an increasing awareness of the value of research data. As a result, universities are building (or procuring) data repositories and catalogues – and these require metadata.

The world is not short of metadata schemas, and yet there is no widely used standard for how research data should be catalogued (not to replace disciplinary schemes, but simply to enable universities to track their assets and others to discover potentially valuable resources). In my keynote at RDMF14 I questioned whether universities building their own data infrastructures is always the most efficient way to address research data challenges, and I suggested that as a minimum we should aim for an agreement on a simple metadata schema for research data. This would save universities the trouble of having to come up with their own metadata fields, and perhaps, more importantly, such a consensus should help us in discussions with platform vendors and other data repositories. Academics are already using a wide range of disciplinary resources as well as generic repositories, and if we want to be able to harvest, search and exchange data we need a core metadata schema. This would also reduce the burden on academics to have to re-enter metadata manually.

One of the colleagues interested in this idea was Marta Teperek from Cambridge. After RDMF we exchanged the metadata fields currently used for research data at Imperial and Cambridge, with the idea to start a wider discussion. Today Marta and myself attended the kick-off meeting of Jisc’s Research Data Shared Service Pilot where we learned that Jisc are working on a schema for metadata – and there is considerable overlap, also with other initiatives. It seems the time is ripe for a wider discussion, and perhaps even for a consensus on a what could be the minimalist core of metadata fields or research data. Minimalist, to make it easy for researchers to engage; core, to allow institutions to extend it to meet their specific requirements.
To facilitate that discussion, I am going to propose a Birds of a Feather session at next week’s International Digital Curation Conference on this topic. As a starting point I have put together a suggestion, inspired by the fields used in the data catalogues at Imperial and Cambridge:

• Title
• Author/contributor name(s)
• Author/contributor ORCID iD(s)
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Licence (e.g. CC BY)
• Identifier (ideally DOI)
• Publication date
• Version
• Institution(s) (of the authors/contributors)
• Funder(s) (ideally with grant references; can also be “none/not externally funded”)

I would be interested to hear your thoughts – in person at IDCC or another event, or in the comments below. I will update this post with feedback from IDCC.

 

Update, 23/03/2016: Having discussed this with colleagues at IDCC I thought it useful to clarify something. As I mentioned above there are already several metadata schemas out there, and as you will see from the fields I have proposed above this is not about introducing something new. The issue that we face is that systems either don’t include such fields or they are not mandatory. I would like to explore if we can find a consensus on what is considered the mandatory minimum for discovery and funder compliance (including reporting). For example, institutions need to know who funded an output, but a widely used schema designed for a different purpose may list funder as optional. So in that sense this is not about a new schema as such, but about agreeing what has to be implemented as mandatory in order for us to link systems, reduce duplication etc. That could result in a new schema, but doesn’t have to.

 

Update, 26/03/2016: Back from IDCC; we had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion. Perhaps not surprisingly, we spent most of the time agreeing on definitions and understanding the use case. Most of the participants of the session were not from the UK and therefore not familiar with UK funder requirements.UK institutions are essentially looking for a pragmatic solution that helps us track datasets, report and meet funder requirements for discoverability. Introducing the concept of discoverability may not have been helpful for the international discussion as it made the proposal sound bigger than it is. We have no plans to replace or supersede disciplinary schemas (where these exist); the aim simply is to be able to point to disciplinary or other external repositories so that someone looking at data from an institutional system can learn that there is a dataset, what it may be about and where to locate it – and, ideally, further information such as detailed disciplinary metadata.

From the discussions with this international audience I am mostly drawing two conclusions: 1) This may be, at least partly, a UK-specific issue. 2) When engaging in discussions with metadata experts there is no such thing as a pragmatic definition – speaking about funder compliance and internal track of datasets for reporting is the more useful question.

For those interested in an example of a national consensus on metadata, look at Research Data Australia, provided by the Australian National Data Service.

A Universal Open Access Policy?

Despite claims to the contrary, open access as such is not very complicated. Either publish your scholarly output with a publisher who will immediately make it available as open access, or put a copy of the (peer-reviewed) manuscript in a repository. What makes open access complicated is the myriad of policies that regulate it.

The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) alone lists way over 700 OA policies – just from research organisations and funders. If you add publisher policies it gets even more confusing. As a sector we often complain about the difficulties publishers create with journal embargoes. We are also criticising funders for not aligning their policies. These criticisms are valid, but we tend to gloss over that universities are not always aligning their policies either. Policies that vary across universities make it more difficult for third parties to provide solutions as they need to map onto a wide range of workflows resulting partly from different policies. Different institutional policies also make it harder to communicate open access to academics.

I have on a few occasions suggested that we should aim to align institutional policies more, and that we should also simplify them. Thankfully, I am not the only one thinking about this. Jisc, SHERPA Services and ROARMAP have jointly developed a Schema for Open Access policies. The schema should help policymakers “to express their policies in a systematic manner”, as “an initial step to ensure greater clarity and uniformity in the way information about OA policies is recorded and made available”. Imperial College was one of 30 institutions that  provided information to the new initiative. You can read more about the schema, initial findings and how to engage on the Jisc blog.

My ideal would be that over time we move to a single open access policy, or at least to a core policy to which institutions can add a selection of clearly defined elements to reflect their specific needs – where this is really necessary, of course. In the UK we do already have what could be considered the core of an OA policy, the Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework. Leaving the details aside, the policy requires deposit on acceptance (for publication). Currently it only applies to scholarly articles and conference proceedings, but I would argue that that makes it ideal as a starting point as these more formalised outputs (compared to e.g. performances) are easier to deal with across institutions.

Therefore, my suggestion for a minimal universal OA policy would be:

  • Publish in the journal of your choice, including full open access journals (subject to availability of funding).
  • Deposit a copy of the peer reviewed manuscript of your journal article or conference proceeding into a repository on acceptance for publication.

Incidentally, that is effectively the OA policy at Imperial College. As the vast majority of College publications are articles or conference proceedings we can effectively limit the policy to these, at least for the moment. An institution with a more diverse range of outputs may decide to add monographs, videos, websites etc., and those who cover costs for hybrid open access (Imperial’s own fund does not support it) may want this included as well.

I fully understand that just two bullet points will not be enough. However, I would like to put out a challenge: look at your institution’s open access policy and think about which elements you really need, and how you could simplify it in a way that would help us moving towards a universal policy. And make sure to check out the schema!

UK ORCID members meeting and launch of Jisc ORCID consortium at Imperial College London, 28th September 2015

On Monday 28th September representatives of over 50 UK universities, ORCID, Jisc, GuildHE, RCUK and CRIS vendors met at Imperial College London for the first UK ORCID members meeting, and to launch the Jisc ORCID consortium. ORCID provides a persistent identifier that links researchers to their professional activities and outputs – throughout their career, even if they change name or employer. The unique iD ensures that authors receive credit for their work and allows institutions to automate information exchange with other organisations such as funders, thereby increasing data quality, saving academics time and institutions money.

In 2014, Imperial College London was one of the first universities in the UK to make ORCID available to researchers, working with the Jisc-ARMA-ORCID pilot. We have since actively engaged with ORCID and the community to increase uptake and improve systems integration.The UK ORCID meeting was designed to bring together different strands of these discussions, andto facilitate a broad discussion about the next steps for ORCID in the UK. Following the pilot programme, Jisc has negotiated an ORCID consortium through which universities can benefit from premium ORCID membership at significantly reduced cost. The meeting was the official launch event for the consortium.Over the last two years ORCID, a relatively new initiative, has gained a lot of momentum, not just in the UK:

  • over 1.65m researchers registered globally
  • ORCID iDs associated with over 4.3m DOIs
  • over 300 member organisations
  • 3 national consortia agreements signed (Italy, UK and Denmark) with more in progress

In 2011, Jisc had set up a “researcher identifier” task and finish group, that included funders, libraries, IT directors, research managers and organisations like HESA. This group eventually recommended ORCID as a solution for the UK. Since then, ORCID has seen increasing support from research organisations and funders. Recently, both the Wellcome Trust and NIHR have mandated the use of ORCID for grant applications. RCUK’s Overview of Systems Interoperability Project resulted in a strong endorsement for ORCID, as did HEFCE’s Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management.

Neil Jacobs from Jisc speaking at UK ORCID members meeting

The UK ORCID meeting was not in the first instance about funders and their mandates though, it was about a discussion between the ORCID member organisations, the Jisc consortium and the way we as a community want to move forward. Specifically, the meeting had four aims:

  • to raise awareness and understanding of ORCID and the Jisc consortium offer and benefits
  • to bring together the UK ORCID community and establish how we want to work together
  • to discuss community expectations for system and platform providers, funders and publishers
  • to inform the Jisc technical and community support offering

Audience at UK ORCID members meeting

The aim of the morning session was to raise awareness and create a shared understanding of ORCID. It started with presentations from ORCID and Jisc, followed by four university case studies from the pilot programme (Kent, Imperial, Oxford and York) and a Q&A panel. After lunch we discussed community requirements, and ways to work together to achieve these. Four thematic areas were discussed in breakout groups, organised through a community document where participants and others who could not attend in person, had listed their issues and expectations in advance of the meeting. This approach helped focus the discussions and led to a broad agreement on key issues.

Below is my summary of the key community requirements:

CRIS and repository platforms:

  • actively prompt users to link their ORCID iD
  • facilitate iD creation by pre-populating ORCID profiles with institutional affiliation and other relevant information
  • harvest metadata for outputs associated with an iD from other systems
  • allow users to push output metadata into the ORCID registry

Publishers:

  • collect ORCID iDs for all authors, not just the corresponding author
  • make iDs of all authors available with output metadata
  • mint DOIs on acceptance and link to authors’ iDs
  • make the author accepted manuscript available on acceptance, with an ID

Funders:

  • fully integrate ORCID into their workflows and systems
  • move towards mandating ORCID

This is only a high-level summary of a much richer discussion. Some of the detail that I have conveniently skipped over will no doubt lead to further discussions later, but I found it remarkable how broad the consensus was – across more than 50 universities with very different approaches, requirements and cultures. There is still a lot of work to be done until we can reap all of the benefits that ORCID can enable, but the members meeting showed that universities are keen to work together with Jisc and ORCID to make progress.

Universities across the UK are now actively considering how to roll out ORCID, and there was much interest in lessons learned and emerging best practice. A UK ORCID mailing list is currently being set up and Jisc and ORCID are looking into ways to capture and share information through the new consortium. Jisc are currently hiring for staff to support the consortium and help members to implement ORCID. I am looking forward to follow-on discussions with Jisc, ORCID and the community about the next steps.

 

Presentations (in order of appearance):

 

International Digital Curation Conference 2015

Monday 9 – Thursday 12 February 2015 saw data management and curation professionals and researchers descend on London for the 10th annual International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), held at 30 Euston Square. Although IDCC is focussed on “digital curation”, in recent years it has become the main annual conference for the wider research data management community.

This year’s conference theme was “Ten years back, ten years forward: achievements, lessons and the future for digital curation”.

Key links:

Day 1: Keynotes, demos and panel sessions

Tony Hey opened the conference with an overview of the past 10 years of e-Science activities in the UK, in highlighting the many successes along with the lack of recent progress in some areas. Part of the problem is that the funding for data curation tends to be very local, while the value of the shared data is global, leading to a “tragedy of the commons” situation: people want to use others’ data but aren’t willing to invest in sharing their own. He also had some very positive messages for the future, including how a number of disciplines are evolving to include data scientists as an integral part of the research process:

How we worked/how we work

Next up was a panel session comparing international perspectives from the UK (Mark Thorley, NERC), Australia (Clare McLaughlin, Australian Embassy and Mission to the EU) and Finland (Riita Maijala, Department for HE and Science Policy, Finland). It was interesting to compare the situation in the UK, which is patchy at best, with Australia, which has had a lot of government funding in recent years to invest in research data infrastructure for institutions and the Australian National Data Service. This funding has resulted in excellent support for research data within institutions, fully integrated at a national level for discovery. The panel noted that we’re currently moving from a culture of compliance (with funder/publisher/institutional policies) to one of appreciating the value of sharing data. There was also some discussion about the role of libraries, with the suggestion that it might be time for academic librarians to go back to an earlier role which is more directly involved in the research process.

After lunch was a session of parallel demos. On the data archiving front, Arkivum’s Matthew Addis demonstrated their integration with ePrints (similar workflows for DSpace and others are in the works). There was also a demo of the Islandora framework which integrates the Drupal CMS, the Fedora Core digital repository and Solr for search and discovery: this lets you build a customised repository by putting together “solution packs” for different types of content (e.g. image data, audio, etc.).

Eprints Arkivum workflow

The final session of the day was another panel session on the subject of “Why is it taking so long?”, featuring our own Torsten Reimer alongside Laurence Horton (LSE), Constanze Curdt (University of Cologne), Amy Hodge (Stanford University), Tim DiLauro (Johns Hopkins University) and Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef), moderated by Carly Strasser (DataCite). This produced a lively debate about whether the RDM culture change really is taking a long time, or whether we are in fact making good progress. It certainly isn’t a uniform picture: different disciplines are definitely moving at different speeds. A key problem is that at the moment a lot of the investment in RDM support and infrastructure is happening on a project basis, with very few institutions making a long-term commitment to fund this work. Related to this, research councils are expecting individual research projects to include their own RDM costs in budgets, and expecting this to add up to an infrastructure across a whole institution: this was likened to funding someone to build a bike shed and expecting a national electricity grid as a side effect!

There was some hope expressed as well though. Although researchers are bad at producing metadata right now, for example, we can expect them to get better with practice. In addition, experience from CrossRef shows that it typically takes 3–4 years from delivering an infrastructure to the promised benefits starting to be delivered. In other words, “it’s a journey, not a destination”!

Day 2: research and practice papers

Day 2 of the conference proper was opened by Melissa Terras, Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, with a keynote entitled “The stuff we forget: Digital Humanities, digital data, and the academic cycle”. She described a number of recent digital humanities projects at UCL, highlighting some of the digital preservation problems along the way. The main common problem is that there is usually no budget line for preservation, so any associated costs (including staff time) reduce the resources available for the project itself. In additional, the large reference datasets produced by these projects are often in excess of 1TB. This is difficult to share, and made more so by the fact that subsets of the dataset are not useful — users generally want the whole thing.

The bulk of day 2, as is traditional at IDCC, was made up of parallel sessions of research and practice papers. There were a lot of these, and all of the presentations are available on the conference website, but here are a few highlights.

Some were still a long way from implementation, such as Lukasz Bolikowzki’s (University of Warsaw) “System for distributed minting and management of persistent identifiers”, based on Bitcoin-like ideas and doing away with the need for a single ultimate authority (like DataCite) for identifiers. In the same session, Bertram Ludäscher (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) described YesWorkflow, a tool to allow researchers to markup their analysis scripts in such a way that the workflow can be extracted and presented graphically (e.g. for publication or documentation).

Daisy Abbot (Glasgow School of Art) presented some interesting conclusions from a survey of PhD students and supervisors:

  • 90% saw digital curation as important, though 60% of PhD holders an 80% of students report little or no expertise
  • Generally students are seen as having most responsibility for managing thier data, but supervisors assign themselves more of the responsibility than the students do
  • People are much more likely to use those close to them (friends, colleagues, supervisors) as sources of guidance, rather than publicly available information (e.g. DCC, MANTRA, etc.)

In a packed session on education:

  • Liz Lyon (University of Pittsburgh) described a project to send MLIS students into science/engineering labs to learn from the researchers (and pass on some of their own expertise);
  • Helen Tibbo (University of North Carolina) gave a potted history of digital curation education and training in the US; and
  • Cheryl Thompson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) discussed their project to give MLIS students internships in data science.

To close the conference proper, Helen Hockx-Yu (Head of Web Archiving, British Library) talked about the history of web archiving at the BL and their preparation for non-print legal deposit, which came into force on 6 April 2013 through the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013. They now have two UK web archives:

  • An open archive, which includes only those sites permitted by licenses
  • The full legal deposit web archive, which includes everything identified as a “UK” website (including `.uk’ domain names and known British organisations), and is only accessible through the reading room of the British Library and a small number of other access points.

Workshops

Data Carpentry

Software Carpentry is a community-developed course to improve the software engineering skills and practices of self-taught programmers in the research community, with the aim of improving the quality of research software and hence the reliability and reproducibility of the results. Data Carpentry is an extension of this idea to teaching skills of reproducible data analysis.

One of the main aims of a Data Carpentry course is to move researchers away from using ad hoc analysis in Excel and towards using programmable tools such as R and Python to to create documented, reproducible workflows. Excel is a powerful tool, but the danger when using it is that all manipulations are performed in-place and the result is often saved over the original spreadsheet. This both destroys (potentially) the raw data without providing any documentation of what was done to arrive at the processed version. Instead, using a scripting language to perform analysis enables the analysis to be done without touching the original data file while producing a repeatable transcript of the workflow. In addition, using freely available open-source tools means that the analysis can be repeated without a need for potentially expensive licenses for commercial software.

The Data Carpentry workshop on Wednesday offered the opportunity to experience Data Carpentry from three different perspectives:

  • Workshop attendee
  • Potential host and instructor
  • Training materials contributor

We started out with a very brief idea of what a Data Carpentry workshop attendee might experience. The course would usually be run over two days, and start with some advanced techniques for doing data analysis in Excel, but in the interest of time we went straight into using the R statistical programming language. We went through the process of setting up the R environment, before moving on to accessing a dataset (based on US census data) that enables the probability of a given name being male or female to be estimated.

The next section of the workshop involved a discussion of how the training was delivered, during which we came up with a list of potential improvements to the content. During the final part, we had an introduction to github and the git version control system (which are used by Software/Data Carpentry to manage community development of the learning materials), and then split up into teams to attempt to address some of our suggested improvements by editing and adding content.

I found this last part particularly helpful, as I (in common with several of the other participants) have often wanted to contribute to projects like this but have worried about whether my contribution would be useful. It was therefore very useful to have the opportunity to do so in a controlled environment with guidance from someone intimately involved with the project.

In summary, Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry both appear to be valuable resources, especially given that there is an existing network of volunteers available to deliver the training and the only cost then is the travel and subsistence expenses of the trainers. I would be very interested in working to introduce this here at Imperial.

Jisc Research Data Spring

Research Data Spring is a part of Jisc’s Research at Risk “co-design” programme, and will fund a series of innovative research data management projects led by groups based in research institutions. This funding programme is following a new pattern for Jisc, with three progressive phases. A set of projects will be selected to receive between £5,000 and £20,000 for phase 1, which will last 4 months. After this, a subset of the projects will be chosen to receive a further £5,000 – £40,000 in phase 2, which lasts 5 months. Finally, a subset of the phase 2 projects will receive an additional £5,000 – £60,000 for phase 3, lasting 6 months. You can look at a full list of ideas on the Research At Risk Ideascale site: these will be pitched to a “Dragon’s Den”-style panel at the workshop in Birmingham on 26/27 February.

The Research Data Spring workshop on Thursday 12 February was an opportunity to meet some of the idea owners and for them to give “elevator pitch” presentations to all present. There was then plenty of time for the idea owners and other interested people to mingle, discuss, give feedback and collaborate to further develop the ideas before the Birmingham workshop.

Ideas that seem particularly relevant to us at Imperial include:

End of 2014 Open Access news

Just in time before the College closes for the Christmas break I have found the time to write my overdue summary of recent developments in the world of open access and scholarly communication. Below are a few of the headlines and developments that caught my eye during the last couple of months.

Cost of Open Access

Commissioned by London Higher and SPARC Europe, Research Consulting have published Counting the Costs of Open Access. Using data provided by universities, including Imperial College, it concludes that there was a £9.2m cost to UK research organisations for achieving compliance with RCUK’s open access policy in 2013/14. Main conclusions are quoted below – the estimated costs for meeting REF open access requirements are particularly interesting seeing as HEFCE do not provide any funding for their in some ways even more ambitious open access policy:

  • The time devoted to OA compliance is equivalent to 110 fulltime staff members across the UK.
  • The cost of meeting the deposit requirements for a post-2014 REF is estimated at £4-5m per annum.
  • Gold OA takes 2 hours per article, at a cost of £81.
  • Green OA takes just over 45 minutes, at a cost of £33.

Pinfield, Salter and Bath published: The ‘total cost of publication’ in a hybrid open-access environment. The study analyses data from 23 UK institutions, including Imperial College, covering the period 2007 to 2014. It finds that while the mean value of APCs has been relatively stable, ‘hybrid’ subscription/OA journals were consistently more expensive than fully-OA journals. Modelling shows that APCs are now constituting 10% of the total cost of ownership for publishing (excluding administrative costs).

EBSCO’s 2015 Serials Price Projection Report assumes price increase of 5-7%, not including a recommended additional 2-4% to allow for currency fluctuations.

John Ulmschneider, Librarian at the Virginia Commonwealth University, estimates that with current price increases the cost for subscription payments would “eat up the entire budget for this entire university in 20 years”. Partly in response to that, VCU has launched its own open access publishing platform.

UK Funder News

Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Campaign, the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Cancer Research UK, Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research, and the Wellcome Trust have joined together to create the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF). COAF operates in essentially the same way as the WT fund it replaces.

An article summarising responses to the RCUK review of open access cites the Wellcome Trust saying that sanctions could accelerate the implementation of open-access.

The Wellcome Trust published a list of journals that do not provide a compliant publishing option.

International Funder News

A new Danish open access strategy sets the goal to reach Open Access to 80% of all publically funded peer-reviewed articles in 2017, concluding with 100% in 2022.

The Open Access policy of the Austrian FWF requires CC BY (if Gold OA) and deposit in a sustainable repository on publication. The FWF covers APCs up to a limit of €2500.

Research Information published a summary of international developments around open access: The Research Council of Norway is making funding available to cover up to 50% of OA publishing charges. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China require deposit of papers in an OA repository within 12 months of publication. The Mexican president has signed an act to provide “Mexicans with free access to scientific and academic production, which has been partially or fully financed by public funds”.

Publishers and Open Access

In November, negotiations between Elsevier and the Dutch universities broke down following an Elsevier proposal that “totally fails to address this inevitable change [to open access]”. The universities have since reached an agreement with Springer; negotiations with Elsevier have resumed.

The launch of Science Advances, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), prompted strong criticism of the AAAS approach to open access. Over a hundred scientists signed an open letter criticising AAAS for charging $1000 for the CC BY license as well as $1500 for papers longer than ten pages – on top of a $3000 base APC. This has been picked up by media including the New Statesman.

The Nature Publishing Group has had two major OA-related headlines. Generally well received was the announcement that NPG would switch the prestigious Nature Communications to full open access. On the other hand, the move to give, limited, read access to articles has been widely criticised as beggar access and a step back for open access: NPG allow those with a subscription to give others viewing (not printing) access to papers, through a proprietary software.

An open letter signed by nearly 60 open access advocates, publishers, library organisations and civil society bodies warns against model licenses governing copyright on open access articles proposed by the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM). The letter says the STM licences “would limit the use, reuse and exploitation of research” and would “make it difficult, confusing or impossible to combine these research outputs with other public resources”. The STM licenses are seen as incompatible with Creative Commons licences.

Jisc and Wiley have negotiated a deal that provides credits for article processing charges (APCs) to universities that license Wiley journal content and have a Wiley OA account.

What is ORCID, and what is Imperial College doing about it?

Imagine you need to track down the author of an academic paper, and their name was “J. Smith”. If the area of research is specific enough or if J. Smith has referenced their article on their website it may not be too hard, but otherwise you might struggle. Are you looking at the Jane Smith from Computing, a J. F. Smith working on HPC or Professor James F. Smith – or are the latter two maybe the same person?

Now, you may think your name is unique enough in your area of research to suggest that others can easily find you. Unfortunately, even that does not always guarantee success. Take for instance Henry Rzepa, a chemistry professor at Imperial College London. When you search for his name on the DataCite site, you will find a “Henry S Rzepa”, “Henry S. Rzepa” “Rzepa, Henry” and “Rzepa, Henry S.” Is it safe to assume they are all the same Henry?

Problems like these are not uncommon when trying to identify creators of academic outputs, and different languages, typos, spelling conventions etc. add to the difficulty. ORCID, the Open Research Contributor ID, was designed to address this issue by making authors of research outputs easy to identify through a digital identifier – the ORCID.

ORCID logo

ORCID essentially does two things for authors: It gives them a unique identifier (say 0000-0002-8635-8390) which they can add to outputs to claim authorship. Secondly, ORCID provides a registry to which the outputs can link: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390.  The author owns the profile in the registry and can decide what information to make publicly available – this is a personal identifier and the owner has full control over it, not the host institution.

ORCID does not only help academics to be identifiable as authors of an output, it also offers the promise to automate admin work for them. When funding bodies implement ORCID – something not only UK funders are currently looking into – it may be possible to just share the ORCID instead of generating publication lists and/or filling in forms that could be auto-populated from ORCID. ORCID is still fairly new, but there are already some practical implementations. For example, Symplectic Elements, the CRIS system used at Imperial, supports ORCID: when it comes across an article with an ORCID it can automatically add this article to a publication list, no need for the author to manually claim the article (this feature will soon be rolled out across the College).

Despite being a relatively new initiative, ORCID has already seen considerable uptake across the globe. There are now 850,000 authors registered, and about a thousand of them have used an Imperial College email account to do so – this demonstrates that authors see ORCID as a valuable service.

In order to support its academic community, Imperial College became a member of ORCID. ORCID is a not for profit membership organisation, so it is not at risk of being bought by another company. The College has also joined a pilot community of UK universities working with Jisc, ARMA and ORCID to develop best practice, share approaches and increase uptake of ORCID. This post briefly outlines what we are planning to do as part of this project. It forms part of the Jisc reporting requirements, so it also deals with some of the technicalities such as the budget.

Jisc logo

Aims, Objectives and Final Output(s) of the project

The aim of the project is to increase awareness and uptake of ORCID across the scholarly community at Imperial College. The objectives are:

  • Communicate the benefits of ORCID at Imperial College.
  • Roll out an updated version of Symplectic Elements that supports ORCID.
  • Work with Symplectic to improve the ORCID implementation, in particular setting of institutional affiliation and sharing of information during the registration process.
  • Plan and implement bulk generation of identifiers as a service to staff who haven’t already registered.

The aim and objectives will be achieved within the context the College’s Open Access project, and as part of the community of the Jisc-ARMA ORCID pilot project.

Wider Benefits to Sector & Achievements for Host Institution

Imperial College is keen to support its staff to make best use of digital technology in research practice and scholarly communication. ORCID is a solution that helps academics to claim authorship of scholarly outputs, and to be easily and uniquely identifiable as authors. It addresses the problem of the ambiguity of person names, and opens up the potential to improve sharing of research information across systems and organisations – in particular with funding bodies and publishers. This could have the potential to save all parties time and effort and to increase the quality of data relating to research outputs.

The expected benefits for the sector are as follows:

  • Documenting the experiences with bulk generation to enable others to decide whether it is the right model for them;
  • Contributing to improved ORCID support in Symplectic Elements;
  • Increasing awareness of ORCID with College partner organisations;
  • Strengthening ORCID by adding another institutional membership;
  • Contributing to ORCID’s momentum by increasing uptake in the scholarly community;
  • Sharing communications, guidelines, publicity and promotional materials;
  • Sharing experience of integration with institutional systems

Project Team Relationships

  • Project owner: ORCID Project Board, on behalf of the Open Access Publishing group and the Provost’s Board
  • Project Director: Steven Rose (Vice Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences)
    Responsible for the business case, benefits realisation and responding to escalated issues
  • Project Manager (Business Delivery): Torsten Reimer (Open Access Project Manager, Research Office)
    Responsible for communicating with the Project Board, assisting with eliciting business requirements and ensuring the proposed solution meets the business need. Also responsible for rolling-out the solution and organising communications.
  • Business Advisors: Ruth Harrison (Team Leader (Education & Research Support), Library), Henry Rzepa (Professor, Chemistry) & Ian McArdle (Research Systems and Information Manager, Research Office)
    Responsible for providing the requirements and business scenarios to help define and test the solution.
  • Senior Supplier: David Ebert (Programme Manager, ICT)
  • Project Manager (Technical Delivery): Sue Flockhart (Project Manager/Analyst, ICT)
  • Developers as required

Projected Timeline

  • Engagement with pilot programme: May-January 2015
  • Initial investigation: May-July
  • Technical planning: August-September
  • Communications: September-January
  • Technical delivery (bulk creation): October (estimate)
  • Review and final report: January 2015

Budget

The College covers most of the cost of ORCID implementation from its own budget, in particular the project management and the ORCID membership fee. The Jisc project budget is used for engagement with the pilot programme, including blogging and providing a case study, and participating in relevant events (£4K), and for supporting the technical development and roll out of bulk generation via the ORCID API (£6K).