The Jisc APC pilot project aimed to respond to a changing global Open Access (OA) landscape by exploring key issues around the management of article processing charges. By bringing together representatives from academic institutions, publishers, funders and intermediaries, the project explored different approaches to managing Article Processing Charges (APCs) and investigated opportunities for achieving greater efficiencies.
The project indicated that Open Access publishing activity must be considered in its entirety to deliver maximum efficiencies within an institutional context. Following the pilot project, Jisc OA Monitor aims to provide a shared service enabling institutions to collate, analyse and report on all of its Open Access publishing activities and outputs (Green and Gold) both internally and to its funders. The service will offer institutions an insight into their degree of compliance with funder mandates and encourage international co-operation to assist in the development of processes, systems and standards that facilitates the sharing and exchange of relevant information between institutional, publisher and vendor systems.
An overview of Jisc OA Monitor outlining its core components. Community engagement and co-design is a key aspect of Jisc OA Monitor and the workshop will enable participants to contribute ideas to inform development of this new service.
Jisc Monitor workshop - Jo Lambert and Brian Mitchell - Jisc Digital Festival 2014
1. Jo Lambert and Brian Mitchell
Jisc Monitor Workshop – Jisc Digital Festival
2. Jisc Digital Festival 2
Workshop aims
» Reflections on Jisc APC
» Jisc Monitor aims
» Workshop activity
3. 3
Jisc APC Pilot: aims & objectives
APCs Systems and processes
Information sharing Role of 3rd party provider
Sustainability
4. Jisc Digital Festival 4
Some reflections to date
» Compliance and reporting
requirements
» Workflows and processes still being
established
» Managing communications
» Infrastructures not yet in place
» Standards - lack of/not fully adopted
5. Jisc Digital Festival 5
Reflections on the Jisc APC platform
» Level of APCs
» Publisher engagement
» Financial transactions
» Data flow and exchange with other
key systems
» Value of an intermediary service
6. Jisc Digital Festival 6
Jisc Monitor context
» Reflecting and building on outputs of Jisc APC
» HEFCE policy from Jan 2016 is likely to mandate Open Access
availability for all journal and conference proceedings submitted
to REF 2020
» 1 year project starting April 2014 to scope and explore how a Jisc
managed shared service might support institutions in meeting
this requirement
7. Jisc Digital Festival 7
Jisc Monitor outputs
› Prototypes mapped to 4 use cases and released as free and
open source software by April 2015
› Supported by robust user feedback and an assessment of the
opportunities, challenges and dependencies that are likely to
impact development
› Recommendations for further development of components
8. 11/03/14 Jisc Digital Festival 8
Use cases
Monitoring all publication activity
to ensure compliance with funder
mandates
Monitoring all publication activity
to ensure a clear understanding of
what has been published
Standards development to enable
efficient data exchange
Monitoring spend on all items
Jisc Monitor use
cases
9. 11/03/14 Jisc Digital Festival 9
Jisc Monitor principles
» Collaboration is key
» User-centred development
» Agile approach
» Open-source
11. Jisc Digital Festival 11
Compliance with funder mandates
» Jisc Monitor analyses the publication data to determine whether
they are compliant with funders’ mandates
12. Jisc Digital Festival 12
Understanding what has been published
» Jisc Monitor aggregates data from various sources in the form of
a database / knowledge base of an institution’s publication
activity
13. Jisc Digital Festival 13
Standards and interoperability
» Jisc Monitor connects publisher and institution systems to
collate publication data from the point of manuscript submission
to acceptance of manuscript and subsequent publication
14. Jisc Digital Festival 14
Monitoring spend
» Jisc Monitor provides data on how much an institution has spent
on their OA publications and subscriptions
15. Jisc Digital Festival 15
Workshop activity
» 20 minute group activity
» 10 minute feedback
» Select a use case and reflect on the following questions:
› What are the key challenges for your institution?
› How are you addressing those challenges within your institution?
› How can Jisc support you in addressing these challenges? (local, national,
international).What should our priorities be?
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The protoypes are required as although standards exist in some areas, they haven’t really been tested. In other areas there are no current standardsJisc Monitor is being driven by the needs of the end users and is based on an agile approach to reflect the pace of change in the OA environment
The use cases illustrate the key problems that this Jisc Monitor seeks to address
Effective stakeholder engagement is considered crucial to support project development. The primary stakeholder is the academic institution. Other key stakeholders include publishers, funders, system vendors and other third parties such as subscription agents. A user-centredapproach to project development provides an opportunity to secure stakeholder buy-in and engagement and test ideas and developments. The project objective could be achieved through creation of a number of proof of concept demonstrators, evaluated in consultation with stakeholders in order to assess Jisc’s ability to support institutions in meeting requirements. A user-centred design process puts the institutional users at the heart of development. This achieves buy-in, support for the development and makes sure that the service is fit for purpose.The adoption of an agile approach to development provides a useful framework for the project. This enables the project teams to respond to opportunities as they arise and address the general challenges that exist within the sector.Outputs will be developed and released as Open Source software with supporting documentation being openly available.
This is a scenario in the perfect world. There are existing products that meet some of these requirements, which areas would it make most sense for Jisc to focus its efforts on?
Institutions require assistance in knowing whether their publications are compliant with the funder mandates. Currently this is difficult because:Institutions don’t always know the full extent of what they have publishedIt is not always easy for them to determine what OA options that the researcher chose in the publishers’ systems. If the information can be captured from the point of manuscript submission then there is less change of non-compliancePublishers often find it difficult to affiliate researchers to institutions and funders in their systems so Jisc Monitor interoperability module is keyInstitutions require some clarity around some of the funder’s OA requirements (e.g. RCUK) especially when it comes to reporting – they are looking at Jisc to help them in this area
Institutions require assistance on gathering intelligence on their publication activity. Currently this is difficult for them to do this on their own in practice as part of the scholarly communications takes place direct between the author and the publisher. Therefore they cannot always be confident that their systems have captured all of their publication activity. Institutions also want to know their total publication output whether it is Open Access or not. Furthermore if institutions are not aware of all of their publication output then they will not be fully aware of their degree of compliance with funder mandates.
As the scholarly communications takes place direct between the authors and the publishers, this presents a number of problems:Institutions – the library and research office staff are not involved in the process and are therefore not always in the position to advise their researchers on what steps they need to take to ensure that they comply with funder mandates and institution policiesResearchers – the authors are not always sure what options they are supposed to take when using publisher systems to ensure that they select the correct licence when publishing their work. Any issues around non-compliance are then only likely to manifest themselves after the event.Publishers – they often have difficulty validating and associating a researcher to an institution e.g. how do I know that this researcher is actually from that university? The only people who can do that of course are the institution staff, hence the need to connect publisher and institution systems via Jisc Monitor.At the moment the same information is being entered several times into multiple systems. By developing the API’s that allows Jisc Monitor to interact with the different systems, this will save users time as the data will only need to be entered once in the relevant system as the data will be exchanged to the appropriate areas. This also allows the metadata to be enhanced by different users in the process as necessary.Jisc monitor will be interacting with a variety of systems such as IR’s / CRIS, subject repositories, funder systems as well as publisher systems
Due to the different routes by which an institution may be paying their publication charges, it is often difficult for them to track the payments, especially for OA publications where an article may not be published until the publisher has received the payment. This is especially problematic if the fees are being paid via an intermediary and has in cases led to the authors being chased for payments that have already been made which can hold up the publication process. Institutions also require assistance for Jisc in terms of VAT reporting.Interoperability with institution finance systems has also been requested.If the financial data is being collected in Jisc Monitor then it would also make sense to link this with the subscription data via the Jisc Collections website to feed into the Total Cost of Ownership project. HEFCE is also interested in finding out in knowing the overall cost to institutions for OA publications and where they are receiving discounted publication charges.