UWL Repository and local events
Much like The Beast from The East, March came and March went, but certainly not without notice for the UWL Repository.
Indeed, the last month has seen the UWL Repository hit several milestones. Firstly, we now have over 3’000 outputs recorded in the repository. This corpus of deposits has also yielded over 70’000 downloads!
The number of outputs discoverable and accessible from the repository is expected to rise rapidly following with the REF eligibility mandate for open access to journal articles and conference proceedings with ISSNs shifting. These item types must now be deposited to the repository within three months of acceptance in order to be eligible for the REF.
Given the increasing requirement to use the repository at the institutional and If you need any support or assistance with queries relating to your use of the repository, please do not hesitate to get in touch!
Louise Penn, Resource and Technology Manager, and Kevin Sanders, Research Support Manager, recently gave a well-attended session on ‘The REF, Stern, and You’ as part of the Brown Bag series of sessions organised by the Research and Enterprise Office. This allowed a lot of information to be shared, and also was a convenient place for a range of interrelated issues to be raised.
Louise and Kevin are running another session in this series on Green and Gold Open Access, and we would strongly encourage to take the opportunity to speak to them about the various nuances around different routes to achieving openness with regards to your scholarly outputs. Indeed, with the University’s New Vistas title looking to migrate to a formal OA publishing platform and licensing model later in the year, it might be a great opportunity to learn more about what this all means.
Westminster Higher Education Forum Keynote Seminar: The next steps for delivering open access – implementation, expansion and international trends
This event is important as it foreshadowed UKRI and Research England’s official operations, providing some insights into their initial focus on open access and openness in scholarly pursuits.
The event covered some familiar ground, but Sir Mark Walport gave a rapid overview of the current and possible future OA policy landscape just before UKRI came into fruition, noting:
- UKRI is committed to Open Research, going beyond open access to scholarly outputs, and including open data, open metadata, open metrics, and (possibly) open peer review.
- The five-year transition targets envisioned by Finch have not been met. The relative value for money from the investment in gold open access needs to be assessed, and UKRI’s timely development makes them well placed to make this assessment.
- There are two areas where the UKRI could make a positive intervention: with the UK-SCL and DORA (https://sfdora.org). However, Sir Walport was not explicit about what these interventions might be.
- UKRI is planning a review of OA policy over the next year. It will be an ‘internal’ review, but they will seek input from external stakeholders. It will cover:
- have the existing policies worked?
- how do they compare with other countries?
- what should any future policy be?
On the issue of future policy, it was noted that it:
- has to be sustainable and provide value for money
- will cover all of the research councils, in a unified policy
- will need to address double-dipping.
- Should take note of the fact that much of the current funding goes into APCs for hybrid. Sir Walport raised the possibility of a ban on spending from the block grant for certain types of hybrids operations, although UKRI would ‘need to think about this carefully’.
A key take-away was that the community needs to start thinking carefully about what we would want from a new policy – especially around the issue of hybrids. It sounds as if the review is imminent.