This is the last in a three-part guest blog post written by Eddy Verbaan, Head of Library Research Support at Sheffield Hallam University.
The previous two posts focused on the creation of an IRRP at Sheffield Hallam, including the practical issues of implementation, such as data capture and management. The final post in the series looks at author and library workflows.
Author workflows will be more complex
The next thing we needed to decide was what we were expecting our authors to do, and what we in the library needed to do to make the policy work. With regards to our authors’ new workflow, there were four considerations.
Although ideally, we were looking to design a policy that did not require our authors to do anything extra to what they were already doing, ultimately, we felt that we could not rely on formal notifications to publishers alone and that the inclusion of the rights retention declaration in all submissions was prudent. Therefore, the essential ask for our authors is the inclusion of the rights retention declaration in all their submissions. (We do provide a list of all publishers we have notified, and if authors wish to do so, they can check the list to see whether they really need to include the declaration or not, but we think the process is clearer if we ask authors to always include the declaration.)
Secondly, there is the question of co-authors and joint ownership of copyright. Our authors should agree on the inclusion of the rights retention declaration with their co-authors at other institutions. We see this very much as being part of the usual discussion authors have about where to publish.
Thirdly, when rights retention applies, we no longer need a deposit on acceptance. Rather, for the policy to work, we simply need to be in possession of the AAM on the day of publication, so that we can make it available for download on that day, or at least within a month from that date. (We think of making something OA within one month of publication as still being immediate open access. And even to achieve compliance with the current REF OA policy, deposit within 3 months of publication is still compliant.
This shift from deposit on acceptance to deposit on publication is a good thing: our authors are in the habit of depositing their work just after publication rather than just after acceptance. Despite all our efforts, the event of acceptance never became a reliable trigger to deposit. But the event of publication always has been such a trigger and remains so.
Fourthly, a final consideration was how we would find out when a paper is published. We need to know about the publication date in a timely fashion, so that we can make the AAM downloadable within one month from the publication date.
This is of course notoriously difficult; Jisc’s Publications Router, and external databases such as Scopus and the Web of Science, do not cover all our publications and they also do not provide us with the publication date soon enough. We had tried in the past to do some manual checking on publisher’s web pages for all publications without a publication date in the repository, but this proved to be a real drain on our resources. The only alternative we could think of was to ask our authors to notify us of the publication date as soon as they know it, for example, by forwarding an e-mail from their publisher.
All this means that, unfortunately, there is more for our authors to do than we had hoped when we first designed the policy.
Library workflows
There are two more workflows to consider. Given our authors’ workflows, how do we communicate with authors, prompting them to do certain things at certain times in the process? And what repository workflows do we need to put in place?
To start with the former, we have found that there are two different types of author engagement workflows.
There are reminders that are triggered by certain events that happen in our publications management system:
- We remind authors to deposit their AAM, once we know that a certain publication exists (the trigger is the addition of a metadata record for a forthcoming publication),
- We remind authors to notify us of the publication date, once the author has deposited the AAM (the trigger is the deposit of the full text).
But we feel there is some further ongoing awareness raising required to truly embed rights retention in our authors’ publication practices. To this end, we send out regular messages outlining the terms of the policy and the benefits of engaging with it. The focus in these messages is on increasing impact from published work, and the call to action is the inclusion of the rights retention declaration in submissions, and the timely deposit of the full text. We’re also trying to embed discussions about rights retention and OA in yearly appraisals.
Lastly, we gave quite a lot of thought to repository workflows. When an author deposits the full text of a research output, what does the repository team need to do to make rights retention work? In practical terms, we use a very simple decision tree:
| YES | NO | |
| Has the author requested a waiver? | Follow the publisher’s self-archiving policy | Go to next question |
| Did the author communicate the rights retention declaration on submission?
|
Make available under a CC BY licence | Go to next question |
| Have we notified the publisher in advance?
|
Make available under a CC BY licence and notify author the OA policy has been applied in absence of a declaration, and advise them to let their co-authors know | Follow the publisher’s self-archiving policy, and send formal notification to the publisher (the submission did not include the declaration nor was the publisher notified in advance) |
On the face of it, it seems that rights retention simplifies our repository workflows and that it could potentially save us time:
- we treat all papers in the same way
- there’s no more looking for self-archiving policies and dealing with ambiguous or changing self-archiving policies
- we also do not need to check funder requirements anymore, because rights retention ensures compliance
- and since we expect deposit on publication rather than acceptance, on publication, we don’t need to go back to deposits we’ve already processed at acceptance, to update the record
So, some efficiencies have been made, but we now need to collect additional metadata, which takes time and effort, and we have also needed to intensify our communication with authors.
