Abstract
In the United Kingdom, librarians are adapting their roles to support researchers with the Open Access publication of their research in a post-Finch world, including grappling with reporting requirements at the institutional level. Particularly challenging is the need to provide high-level analysis for strategy makers while also extracting low-level detail for service provision and reporting in order to meet the needs of stakeholders across the university and numerous national external bodies. David Walters of Brunel University London describes how the library maximized its reporting capability by using the research management information in the university’s instance of Symplectic Elements, along with other Open Access data sources to establish the effective management of the institution’s Open Access publications data. Monitoring institutional data in real-time is guiding the development of library services and has allowed library staff to tailor appropriate training to researchers in very different disciplines.
Walters began the program by providing background information on Brunel University London to contextualize the challenges the library faced in supporting Open Access at their institution. The university is a single university campus in West London with 13,504 students, 2,454 staff, and £23.7 million in grants in the 2013–2014 fiscal year.Footnote1 The single geographically contiguous campus helps foster a well-established sense of community among faculty, staff, and students, and the library resides in the heart of campus. The university has made impressive strides in recent years and has done well operating within the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF), a national exercise for research institutions that determines funding allocations from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). This in turn drives academic excellence and demonstrates the global impact of the UK research base to the world at large.
Like many higher education institutions across the United Kingdom, staff at Brunel have been working diligently to ensure that university researchers are complying with both the recommendations set forth in the Finch Report and other national mandates.Footnote2 The Finch Report recommended that publicly-funded research be published as Gold Open Access. Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) both established funding mechanisms to enable researchers at participating universities in the UK, including Brunel, to pay the article processing charges (APCs) necessary to disseminate their research through a Gold Open Access model. Additionally, in 2014, the HEFCE mandated that all research papers included in the next REF exercise must be available in a repository via a Green Open Access dissemination model in order to be eligible for submission.Footnote3 These updated recommendations and mandates, along with the new streams of income, required institutions to invest staff time and administrative resources in tracking research outputs and associated funding affiliations, and ensure that each article in question became Open Access upon payment to the publisher and/or was deposited in the institutional repository or mandated subject repository. Compliance with funders’ expectations is essential to ensure future grant applications are not put at risk. Non-compliance could negatively impact an individual academic’s career and limit the research undertaken by institutions.
The library quickly realized that the time involved in the administrative tasks necessary to support the Open Access recommendations of the Finch Report and accompanying national funding initiatives eclipsed the time available for other tasks and services. In particular, the library desired to play a greater role advocating for Open Access to university researchers to help bring about lasting cultural change and widespread adoption of Open Access at Brunel. The library has a dedicated research team poised to support these tasks and visionary services, but they found themselves in a reactionary position, needing to create and respond to the university community with administrative services to facilitate authors’ compliance with the new policies. Typical tasks and services included checking licenses, populating the institutional repository, monitoring budgets, and tracking the status of individual articles on spreadsheets. While important, the demands of operating these services did not allow library staff to directly engage with end users as fully as they would like, forcing them to find new ways of communicating efficiently and effectively with researchers.
To better ensure and monitor compliance with these new recommendations, many universities in the United Kingdom have deployed a Current Research Information System (CRIS), a database used to monitor academic output alongside the universities’ internal business systems. The data extracted from a CRIS can be examined across different scales, from the academic department, to an interdisciplinary research group, all the way down to individual authors. The data are often useful across all levels at the university, from individual researcher teams and department heads, up to university administrators for both decision making and advocacy. The heart of the system is based on research output, but data are also fed in from local business systems, such as the university’s human resource database and any databases that track grant receipts and funding, along with other traditional purchasing system data. Relating the information within the CRIS architecture provides a much richer system of data reporting that would otherwise require a significant amount of manual work to compile and normalize.
Although the CRIS touches all areas of the institution, the library was a logical sponsor and administrator for the tool at Brunel. Library staff are familiar with their local academic communities and are accustomed to building information services and responding to research needs for these communities and the university at-large. University researchers and administrators quickly leveraged the data from Brunel’s CRIS to better showcase the university’s research output. Library staff at Brunel were quick to embrace the advanced data ingest and reporting features of their CRIS implementation and quickly realized the system’s potential to curtail the staff time associated with the administrative tasks of managing Open Access compliance across the university.
Brunel uses Symplectic’s product, Elements, for their CRIS system, which pulls in custom data feeds from other services via application programming interfaces (APIs), such as Scopus, Web of Science, and subject-specific repositories, along with institutional instances of ORCID and figshare, a sister company to Symplectic, which is used to host Brunel’s Open Access research data. The data fed into CRIS provides a richer research information data set that will expand the scope of applications for the combined data. For instance, library staff were able to harvest publication-level metadata records from Elements and deposit that data in the institutional repository, Brunel University Research Archive (BURA), a Dspace implementation, along with the full-text of the corresponding article while sending this same data to various campus units to be used for the university’s REF report in 2014. These additional data feeds, along with the tool’s native reporting features, allow library staff to quickly create custom reports for internal and external audiences.
Library staff implemented a CRIS-led data-managed approach to support the facilitation aspect of Open Access services. Library staff wanted to manage the data more effectively by making the best use of existing data sources to curtail administration time and give scalability to the administrative tasks that support the service requirements. Additionally, the library was interested in simplifying the administration process and achieving a greater level of understanding of the university’s publications data over different dimensions, particularly in the area of Open Access dissemination.
At Brunel, existing Open Access publications data serves a range of diverse applications. Holistically, these collections of data could be described as a jigsaw containing a number of distinct components with clear relationships and interdependencies that can be pieced together to meet service requirements. Some are data sources maintained by the research community and accessible via the web, some data feeds are available locally from other university units through the CRIS system, and for others, library staff have had to create and define the collection of remaining data requirements. Uniting all these data feeds within the existing CRIS infrastructure helped support the development and implementation of library Open Access services.
The library adopted a multi-phase approach to populating the CRIS and using its data to analyze research output and design research services. Brunel linked data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ),Footnote4 the Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access - Rights Metadata for Open Archiving (SHERPA-RoMEO) database of publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving,Footnote5 and Open Article Gauge APIs to its institutional records, which enriched the institutional data sufficiently to allow Brunel to monitor dissemination trends at different levels of scale across the university’s portfolio. This, in turn, informed the library’s service response in real time, enabling evidence-based conversations with departments or researchers needing help with understanding and applying the Open Access mandates of their funding agencies and navigating the services available at the university to support compliance with the mandates.
During the second phase, library staff created a transactional relational database so that Open Access funding and information requests for accepted manuscripts could be funneled into a coherent, shared workflow. Locally held records are ultimately linked to, and therefore updated by, records from the enhanced set of CRIS data, giving staff direct access to high quality metadata and attributes like publication dates and licenses, which are available post-publication for reporting, thereby obviating the need for time-intensive data entry. Syncing data across these systems was a critical step that allowed research output data to be mapped to its corresponding financial data, thereby reducing the amount of time and energy library staff devote to creating reports for external funding bodies, like RCUK, as well as internal progress reports for university administrators.
The third and most recent phase of CRIS deployment at Brunel involved proactively identifying funding organizations from the acknowledgments section of the Scopus and Web of Science databases. By extracting and analyzing this data, library staff identified publications by Brunel researchers that were subject to an Open Access mandate. This proactive approach allowed the library to innovate and build services around this data, ensuring Brunel’s researchers’ timely compliance earlier in the research lifecycle across a huge spectrum of funders, which is not exclusive to the requirements of RCUK and COAF.
Walters noted that Brunel sees far more Gold Open Access publications over the course of a year than requests for funds, which makes perfect sense, considering that in the United Kingdom many non-RCUK funders now support costs for Gold Open Access through mechanisms not visible to the library. The relevant financial statements are also modeled in .
Figure 1 Open access articles from automated tool results, 2013–2014.
Access to this data at such a high level allowed library staff to generate several reports like the one in looking at different areas to enable effective financial management, another difficult aspect of facilitation.
Figure 2 Approved payments—estimated, soft, confirmed, 2013–2014.
Walters also touched on the future services that might potentially emerge from this kind of data-led approach, such as applying Altmetrics data points toward the potential to develop new services that actively promote research and discovery alongside the university’s institutional brand. For instance, tweeting relevant papers on timely topics—elections and other current events—helps contextualize the university’s academic research for both a scholarly and non-academic audience, while increasing research impact at different points in the research lifecycle. Again, the university CRIS is ideally placed to support this endeavor, containing as it does the rich metadata required to identify and extract relevant papers, for example through keywords and subject areas.
Walters asserted that the library staff’s roles and tasks must be rebalanced in order to effect the cultural change we wish to see within our institutions. This rebalancing can be achieved through effective analysis of CRIS-provided data combined with specialized, authoritative data services maintained by the community. Much of the library’s resources thus far have been devoted to the administrative work of supporting Open Access at Brunel. By successfully leveraging the data and functionality of the university’s CRIS, library staff have been able to reduce the amount of time spent on facilitating the administration of Open Access, thereby allowing them to focus on developing targeted outreach initiatives to specific departments on campus and investing more energy in advocating for Open Access on Brunel’s campus. Taking the necessary steps to build a culture of Open Access takes time and requires that library staff invest energy in building and maintaining relationships with both academic departments and other administrative units across campus. Taking the time to engage researchers with library services that support Open Access is just as critical as the facilitative and administrative tasks, if not more so, in leading this cultural change in the scholarly community.
During the question and answer portion of the session, Walters answered many questions related to CRIS databases, confirming that they are not usually open source. Most of the major CRIS vendors offer different tiers of access and modules with additional functionality. Brunel additionally had a basic CRIS implementation, but then received support to purchase the reporting and Open Access module to maximize the utility of the system. The system has become fundamental to the library’s work. In response to the enormous pressure to drive up research standards and hold researchers accountable for the grant funds they have received, most universities in the United Kingdom either have implemented or are in the process of implementing a CRIS. At Brunel, the library has taken a real leadership role in managing this data, implementing and funding the campus instance of the CRIS system with full support from the university’s executive board and senior management. The library receives grants from funding bodies for Open Access, which can in part be used to develop new services to support Open Access at Brunel. The library was intentional in engaging the campus research office, since it is difficult to move ahead on such a large-scale project at a university without that support and collaboration. Populating and managing this system has also been a great opportunity for library staff to curate public metadata to a high standard. Walters speculated that the library might be the only unit on campus with the resources to engage with the data deeply enough to ensure accurate reports and effective decision making. Walters also noted that Brunel has an institutional implementation of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), which is managed via CRIS, eliminating the need to manage data separately and transfer it between multiple systems.
As libraries across the United Kingdom grapple with the best approaches to managing and reporting research trends at their institutions, many of them are turning to CRIS solutions to integrate research metadata with data from local financial and human resources systems. While these powerful tools have the potential to craft compelling narratives about the research impact of a university’s scholarly output, librarians are most energized by the potential of the datasets to articulate the need for new research services and conversations that will advance the culture of Open Access across the United Kingdom.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Walters
David Walters is Open Access Officer, Brunel University London, London, United Kingdom.
Monique Ritchie
Monique Ritchie is Research Librarian and Copyright Officer, Brunel University London, London, United Kingdom.
Megan Kilb
Megan Kilb is E-Resources Librarian, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Notes
1. Brunel University London, “Financial Statements: Brunel University London 2013–14 in Numbers (Infographic)” (London, England: Brunel University London, 2014) http://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/398069/finance-annual-report-2013-infographic.pdf (accessed July 30, 2015).
2. Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, Janet Finch, “Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications” (London, England: Research Information Network, 2012), http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf (accessed July 29, 2015).
3. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), “Policy for Open Access in the Post-2014 Research Excellence Framework: Updated July 2015” (London, England: HEFCE, 2014), http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2014/201407/ (accessed July 30, 2015).
4. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): https://doaj.org/
5. SHERPA-RoMEO database of publishers’ copyright policies and self-archiving: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/.