1. Enlighten and Open Access William J Nixon Enlighten Service Development Manager Researcher Staff Conference, Glasgow, 20 April 2010 With thanks to Morag Greig and the Enlighten Team
BOAI “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.”
You may be aware that many funding bodies already have a policy that requires deposit of the full text of papers resulting from the grant in an open access repository. For example, ESRC already has a policy in this area. Where we can link to full text deposited in other repositories we will do do this means that the full text only has to be deposited in one place. Other funding bodies will policies in this area do not specify deposit in a particular repository but ask for deposit in any appropriate repository. Deposit in Enlighten meet this criteria.
Over 16,000 records imported directly into Enlighten (Dec 09) 2000+ Duplicates “caught” in Editorial Review GUIDs mapped by Staff Number No Library of Congress Subject Headings Further imports to be done including: Vet (1500+) Physics (1000+) Education (2000+)
The University Publications Policy is how we are referring to the policy approved by Senate at the June 2008 meeting. There are three distinct elements within the policy. No one is being asked to deposit any full text for publications from before this academic session, although these will be very welcome if people would like to deposit them.
So why do we need a policy on the management of research publications? The work that needed to be carried out to gather the relevant data for both the RAE and the REF Pilot, which various departments took part in, made it clear that it is vital for the University to have a centralised way of managing publications data. We need to ensure that data about publications is being gathered on a regular basis so that it is available whenever it is needed. Externally there is a strong steer from funding and governmental bodies that universities should be able to produce accurate and timely information about their research outputs.
And why does the policy include the requirement for full text to be deposited? It is important that the research outputs of the institution are made as widely available as possible in order to have maximum visibility and impact. The University is also very supportive of the open access – in other words, making research as freely available as possible. The University wants to be able to present its research outputs, as a coherent body of work, to the outside world. At the moment this research is either only available in subscription journals, or displayed unevenly on departmental web pages. Enlighten offers a platform to collect, preserve and display the University's research outputs in one place. Within Scotland such policies already exist at Stirling and QMU and are due to be implemented at Strathclyde and Edinburgh shortly. Many of the UK funding bodies, including the AHRC have policies that require deposit of publications in an online repository
Our usage statistics demonstrate that the material already held in Enlighten is being very heavily used. There have been over 1.3 million downloads of material held in Enlighten since Feb 04 (we currently have over 1700 full text publications). One of the most well used items in the repository is a publication the Celtic Department – this book by Dr Forsyth held in Enlighten has been downloaded more than 48,000 times. The top ten papers in Enlighten have all been downloaded more than 7000 times.
Papers will only be deposited where this is allowed by publishers. If there are conditions attached, e.g. an embargo period, Enlighten staff will make sure these are adhered to. When full text is being deposited it’s very important that it is a suitable version – most publishers won’t permit their published PDF version to be deposited.
We realise that staff want to have details for older publications in Enlighten too, so we are embarking on a programme of adding data back to 2001 initially using the date we already hold for the RAE and for the REF pilot. We realise that the data we have from the RAE from the Faculty is only selected publications so we will be talking to departments about how we can get data for all publications back to 2001 from them if this is of interest. As already mentioned, you do not need to give us full text from before this academic session but if you have it it would be very welcome. You will be able to set up an automated feed from Enlighten to your departmental web site, so that staff lists of publications are up to date and will link directly to the full text where this is available.
Teaching material does not require to be deposited.