This is the second in a three-part guest blog post written by Eddy Verbaan, Head of Library Research Support at Sheffield Hallam University.
We need more data!
When we started thinking about the practical implementation of our new policy, one of the first questions we addressed was: what data do we need to capture to manage the policy?
Essentially, we needed to be able to tell which items are in scope and which aren’t. The way we had formulated our policy meant that only journal and conference papers submitted after 15 October, 2022 would be in scope, and that we would apply rights retention to these items if the publisher had been notified, either by formal letter in advance or by the inclusion of the rights retention declaration unless the author had chosen to opt out). In other words, the crucial pieces of data were:
- submission date
- whether the publisher had been formally notified
- use of the declaration
- use of opt out
We found ways in which we could add these pieces of data to our publications management system, Symplectic Elements. But we also keep a list of notified publishers separately. And additionally, from the very start, we gave thought to how we were going to measure success, and what data we would need for those measurements. Our thinking was that we needed to understand:
- author engagement with the policy
- the effect of the policy
- and any issues arising
Since our policy mandates that our authors include the declaration in all their submissions, it seemed to us that engagement with the policy was best measured by calculating what proportion of papers include the rights retention declaration. We therefore needed to capture the use of the declaration in our metadata. But this proved to be not entirely straightforward… We discovered that some authors would send the declaration separately via e-mail to the editors, and therefore the declaration will not always appear in the AAM, although its content or intent has been communicated to the publisher, which is what matters. Therefore, we do not only keep track of whether a paper contains the declaration in the AAM, but also ask authors whether they communicated the declaration in any other way, using a tick box in Symplectic Elements.
Another sign of engagement is the speed with which authors deposit the AAM into our repository, especially the number of days from the publication date. We were of course already capturing all the metadata required for this measurement e.g., the date of first compliant deposit and the date of publication. Finally, we think that the effect of our IRRP could best be measured by:
- the proportion of papers made immediate OA thanks to rights retention
- the hypothetical cost-saving that our policy yields, because we would have had to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to achieve the same effect (defined as immediate open access) without rights retention
We can provide these measurements without the need to capture any supplementary data, and with regular intervals, can provide a very simple dashboard with these measures of success.
Coming soon: the final part of Eddy’s blog. In the meantime, you can read more about rights retention at Sheffield Hallam on the cOAlitionS website.