Imperial College London –journey to open scholarshipOpen Repositories 2016, Dublin, 15th June 2016

Dr Torsten Reimer, Scholarly Communications Officerhttp://orcid.org/0000-0001-8357-9422 / @torstenreimer

Imperial College London

Imperial College London

• Faculties of Engineering,Medicine, Natural Sciencesand the Business School

• Ranked 3rd in Europe / 8th in theworld (THE 2015-16 rankings)

• Net income (2015): £969m, incl.£428m research grants/contracts

• ~15,000 students, ~8,000 staff, incl. ~3,900 academic & research staff• Staff publish 10-12,000 scholarly articles per year• 2015 Article Processing Charges (APC) commitment: £1.7m• Largest data traffic into Janet network of all UK universities

Decision to go open: College policies

College support for Open Access dates back more than a decade

2012: Open Access (OA) Mandate“Imperial College London is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. […] The College has implemented an open access mandate for all research publications […], authors are required to upload their final peer reviewed copy of the paper into Spiral.”

2015: Research Data Management (RDM) Policy“[...] free and timely open access to data so that they are intelligible, assessable and usable by others. [...] The minimum requirement is to share all relevant data to support and underpin published findings including e-theses. [...] Principal Investigators must deposit their shareable research data in a publicly-available repository of their choosing no later than the time of publication of the findings.”

www.imperial.ac.uk/scholarly-communication

Sample of UK funder requirements

• Research assessment brings College ~£100m/year• All articles deposited within 3 months of acceptance

Higher Education Funding Councils

• Provide funding for Gold OA to universities• 100% open access to scholarly articles by 2018

Research Councils UK

• College able to track location of all data assets• Ideally all research data made available publicly

Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council

College decisions for the route to “open”

• Set up a governance structure with senior College representation• Open Access Publishing and Research Data Management working groups,

chaired by Associate Provost / delegate of VP Research• OA Implementation Group, chaired by Scholarly Communications Officer

• Close collaboration between Library, IT and Research Office

• Establish a new role to coordinate across College• Scholarly Communications Officer

• Enhance support capacity in College Library• 6 full time posts for OA, 2 for RDM, 1 for licensing (previously only part-time

posts); led by Head of Scholarly Communications Management

• Focus on improving systems and workflows for (and with) academics

• Aim to be ahead of funders (where sensible)

Simplify compliance: combine green & gold workflow

On acceptance workflow

Elements

Deposit

DSpace

Apply for APC

ASK OA

Link funding

Reporting

Single open access workflow to meet College and funder requirements – covers gold and green OA in one action.

• User interface: Symplectic Elements• Repository: Spiral (DSpace)• Gold OA: ASK OA, dedicated APC (Article

Processing Charge) management system• Minimise manual input• 2012-2015: deposits increased 18x;

support staff ~3x

ASK OA (cloud-based APC management system)

Move before the funders: College ORCID project

College became ORCID member in 2014:• Raise awareness and uptake• Issue researchers with an iD

Approach:• Capture existing iDs (in Symplectic)• Create new iDs on behalf of academics• Encourage academics to link iD to Symplectic

Outcomes:• ~75% of iDs claimed• Academics linked 1,800 iDs to Symplectic• Ongoing awareness raising and work with

ORCID community (Imperial hosted 1st UK ORCID (HE) members meeting in 2015)

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/orcid https://dx.doi.org/10.1629/uksg.268

Towards an automated “on acceptance” workflow

Author links ORCID with

CRIS

…shares ORCID iD with

publisher

…shares funder information with

publisher

Publisher mints DOI on

acceptance

…shares iD and funder details with CrossRef

CRIS pulls data from CrossRef, using ORCID iD

Jisc Publications

Router

manuscript

Link via iD

CRIS = Current Research Information System (Symplectic Elements at Imperial)

Process of RDM policy development

• Set up a governance structure, coordination across College• Aim: guide academics through funder requirements and to best practice• Policy not be implemented until College can support compliance

• Lack of reliable data (on data storage needs, scale in particular)• Concerns about cost of maintaining infrastructure• Concerns about uncertainties and changing market / policy landscape

• Approach• RDM Green Shoots: 6 bottom-up, academic projects (2nd half of 2014)• RDM investigation (Oct 2014-Jan 2015)

• Online survey (academics; 390 responses), in-depth interviews with academics (~40), workshops (academics & data managers)

• Investigation into flexible, cost-effective infrastructure components

Þ Deliver a solution that’s good enough for the 80% who (usually) don’t have specialised requirements

College RDM workflow

1. Make a data management plan: use DMPOnline

2. Store your data management plan centrally: use InfoEd

3. Store your live data securely and safely: use Box

4. Store your final data (and/or code) for 10+ years, making it publicly available: use Zenodo

5. Tell the College where your data (and/or code) is published or stored: use Symplectic

6. Reference your funding and your data in the publications it underpins: tell your publisher

(5 is a similar process to OA manuscript deposit; 6 is linked with OA deposit process)

RDM Workflow, College Library Services 10.5281/zenodo.54000

Towards compliance as by-product of good workflows

Working towards:• One workflow for data generation,

publishing, reporting and curation• Link data generation directly to storage

(log into facility, data “at your desk” before you are out of the “lab”)

• Automate reporting and generating / sharing of metadata

Facilities write

(meta) data into

Box

Data processed / analysed from Box

Machine-learning

adds metadata

Publish to repository from Box,

with reference

Metadata directly or indirectly (ORCID) to CRISS

Author links ORCID with CRIS

…shares ORCID iD with repository

…publishes datasetDataCite DOI linked to ORCID iD

CRIS pulls metadata from ORCID /

DataCite / Repository

Moving on: research software

College RDM policy requires academics to archive the particular version of code developed in a project to generate or analyse data.

College-funded PyRDM project developed library to automate this process. College-recommended repository Zenodo offers GitHub integration.

College launched survey on DVS – 274 responses, 82% use Git

Decision: College to provide GitHub Enterprise to all staff

College survey on distributed version controlSoftware Sustainability Institute – I am a fellow

Communications, Communications, Communications

Coordinated comms plan across whole College

Driven by Library (good cop) and Research Office (bad cop)

Supported by departments, central communications, strategic planning etc.

• E-mails to all staff• Electronic staff briefings• OA & RDM roadshows• Departmental meetings• Drop-in sessions• OA & RDM lunches• Engagement through departmental

liaison librarians• Leaflets, flyers, calendars• Website, blog, social media• Funder (policy) news• Alerts sent from systems• Compliance reports to departments

and faculties• Briefings for senior academics• Etc.

Results

2013 2014 20150

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

Open Access outputs

DepositsAPCs

2013 2014 2015 20160

200400600800

100012001400160018002000

ORCIDs in Symplectic

12-15 01-16 02-160

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

“Box” users

College meets funder targets18x increase in deposits 2012-201504/2016: 3x deposits of total 2012>1TB research data added to Box daily

Average citations for articles in journals published 2011-2015Imperial Data: Citations sourced from Scopus®

2015 2014 2013 2012 20110

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Open Access: In Spiral and/or DOAJLikely to be Open Access: In Europe PubMed Central onlyPossibly Open Access: In arXiV onlyNot known to be in an Open Access Source

Data provided by Josie Lewis-Gibbs, College ICT, January 2016

Fixing the underlying problem: academic authors sign away rights to publishers

• This restricts academics’ reuse of their own scholarly outputs for teaching and research.

• This means universities retains no rights to most of the scholarly outputs of their academics.

• This makes compliance with funder open access mandates more difficult or more expensive* – and in some cases impossible.

• Management of embargos adds to the workload of the university OA services

• This prevents or delays open access, limiting the availability and impact of research.

* College pays ~50% more for hybrid open access, and hybrid is >80% of articles

©

Solution: the UK Scholarly Communications Licence

• Inspired by Harvard OA Policy, adapted to UK legal and policy context• Academics grant university a non-exclusive licence to scholarly outputs• University will make accepted manuscripts available (CC BY NC)

UK consultation on implementation of UK-SCL:• Led by Imperial College London (Chris Banks and Torsten Reimer)• Discussions involve 70+ organisations across the UK• Core group of “first movers” looking at implementation• International partners are expressing an interest too

Conclusion

• Going open pays off, not just for funder compliance

• Key is for universities to want to “own” the process

• Governance structure, coordinated activity across the university

• Engage with academic requirements

• Changing culture takes time and (communications) effort

• Make “compliance” a by-product of good workflows• Aim to simplify and automate workflows

• Academics should only interact with each output once

• Publishers can add value by providing good metadata on acceptance

• Don’t wait for the perfect solution: good enough is a good enough start

• If there are problems, try to fix the “root causes”, not the symptoms