RIOXX in context: Demonstrating Compliance

with RCUK OA Policy

Jisc Workshop, 24 Nov 2015

Ben RyanEPSRC / RCUK

ben.ryan@epsrc.ac.uk

Research Councils UK

£3B

Why ‘open’ ?

• Public good agenda.• Support for innovation and growth:

– remove barriers to access;– get the stuff out there and get it used.

• Research transparency and integrity.• Data intensive science.• Expectations of a digital age.

The digital & networked world is a real game changer

• Expectations and opportunities have changed.• We are in a world where:

– The expectation is ‘I want it now and I want it for free’;

– Anybody can ‘publish’ anything on the web;– People expect to develop services based on freely

available publicly-funded information;– Experts have to earn trust.

• Funders are responding to these drivers.

RCUK Policy in a nut-shell

• Covers peer-reviewed articles and conference papers which acknowledge RCUK support

• Authors must publish in journals which comply with the RCUK policy.

• Articles must acknowledge Research Council support and give the relevant grant reference(s)

• Where appropriate, articles should signpost the underpinning data

Journal Compliance

• Journals achieve compliance by allowing:– ‘Gold’: immediate ‘CC-BY’ licence on publication,

OR – ‘Green’: ‘CC-BY-NC’ licence, or equivalent

on the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM)

in any freely accessible repositoryafter maximum 6(12) months embargo.

• Longer 12(24) month embargo allowed in transition if ‘Gold’ option is offered but not used.

Core data requirements for Compliance Monitoring

Monitoring at institutional, not article levelIt’s not the individual decisions that matter, but their cumulative effect, per article, of:

• Re-use permissions (Licence),• Timing of free availability• Content (acknowledgement, data)

At institutional level, to capture these and to be able to report on use of RCUK block grant, there must be:

– Awareness of all articles and whether ‘gold’ or ’green’– tracking of spend on OA (APCs/other)

Creative Commons Licences… …a reminder

CC-0 : No restrictions on reuse

CC-BY : Attribution 

CC-BY-SA : Attribution-ShareAlike 

CC-BY-ND : Attribution-NoDerivatives 

CC-BY-NC : Attribution-NonCommercial 

CC-BY-NC-SA : Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 

CC-BY-NC-ND : Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 

Monitoring Compliance - Gold

‘Relatively’ straightforward1. Is the work freely available from date of publication

under a CC-BY licence?

2. Does the article acknowledge RCUK support?

3. Is the data adequately signposted?

In theory, easy to assess: use of RCUK Block Grant to support payment of APC is conditional on compliance,

In practice, a real burden just checking that licence terms and free availability are delivered by publishers as expected

‘Deceptively simple’1. Is the ‘author’s accepted manuscript’ freely available (or will it be) under a CC-BY-NC or equivalent? (but can be deposited anywhere, and which licences are ‘equivalent’!)

2. Is the Journal embargo period within the allowed maximum? (but when does embargo begin?)

3. Does the article acknowledge RCUK support?4. Is the data adequately signposted?

Monitoring Compliance - Green

Acknowledged complexity of process must be reduced.

• Significant effort needed to gather necessary compliance data.

• Inadequate organisational awareness of publications authored by their own researchers– Some organisations estimate output volume using e.g.

Web of Science, Scopus; but HEFCE’s next REF eligibility requirements is driving increased deposit in institutional repositories.

• Time spent tracking block grant spend on APCs / other.• Time spent providing advice and guidance.• Time spent dealing with publishers.

Need to reduce the admin burden

• More efficient payment of APCs.• Easier, more automated, ways to measure

compliance.• Better ways of reporting block grant spend.

>> RCUK Support for:– Jisc Monitor– RIOXX– CASRAI OA reporting workgroup– Jisc APC data collection template.

How RIOXX contributes

• RIOXX defines the metadata needed to facilitate machine-based compliance checking of institutional repository records

• Three classes of elements in the RIOXX metadata record: Mandatory, Recommended, Optional

Element Description Notesdc:identifier 1 Mandatory unique, http URI for the article (the repository copy!)

rioxxterms:type 1+ Mandatory determines if journal article, etc. ali:license_ref 1+ Mandatory NISO defined, must be URI, include start date

rioxxterms:version 1 Mandatory determines if author accepted manuscriptrioxxterms:project 1+ Mandatory provides funder and grant ref

dc:title 1 Mandatory article titledc:language 1+ Mandatory article language

rioxxterms:author 1+ Mandatory article author(s)dcterms:dateAccepted 1 Mandatory needed for HEFCE policy compliance

dc:source 0-1 Mandatory(where applicable)

e.g. ISSN, ISBN

dc:description 0+ Recommendeddc:format 0+ Recommended e.g. MIME type

dc:publisher 0+ Recommendeddc:subject 0+ Recommended

rioxxterms:version_of_record 0-1 Recommended http URI - DOI of official version (the publisher’s copy!)ali:free_to_read 0-1 Optional NISO defined; not a sufficient indicator of compliance

with RCUK policy

dc:coverage 0+ Optionaldc:relation 0+ Optional http URI pointing to a related resource; NOT the DOI of

the official version of record

rioxxterms:apc 0-1 Optionalrioxxterms:contributor 0+ Optional

rioxxterms:publication_date 0-1 Optional

Growing take up of RIOXX

• At last count, 35 repositories using E-Prints plug in– 7 indicate 100% valid basic syntax– 17 indicate partially implement valid basic syntax– 11 still to implement basic syntax

• But none indicate full conformance with ‘RCUK compliance’ metadata; where the basic syntax is valid, the key missing elements include

• ali:licence_ref• rioxxterms:project• dcterms:dateAccepted

Compliance expected, block grant support

Future funding depends on OA review and CSRInitial year-5 target 100% compliance

75% Gold to 25% Green.

Year-1 Year-2 Year-3% compliance 45% (√) 53% (?) 60% (?)APC fund £17M £20M £23MPotential gold 10k 12k 14k

How much this time around….?

• Block Grant Spend in Year-2:– Reporting period: August 2014 to July 2015;– Report by September– Expectation of 53% OA

• Assessment of reports now in progress – paying attention to check if 53% target met and if OA funds are being spent effectively.

• Many organisations still find it difficult to track all articles arising from RCUK research – deposit in IRs and use of RIOXX will address this!

Initial outlook– based on responses of 6 ‘large block grant’ Universities

• Block grants used to fund approx 2400 articles– 2200 cite support of a single RC, remainder cite more than

one.• 103 different publishers

~ 10% of spend, 15% of articles, appear not to have clear CC-BY(4% spent on CC-BY variants)

approx. spend at…. % clear CC-BY~ £264k 45 publishers, 100%

~ £1,565k 15 publishers, 90%-99%~ £1,438k 7 publishers, 80%-89%

~ £228k 8 publishers, 70%-79%~ £62k 18 publishers, 0%

Looking ahead

• Great majority of journals are compliant with RCUK OA policy:– Misplaced concern with non-compliance.

Monitoring is at institutional level, not article level, so it’s not individual decisions but their cumulative effect that matters;

– More focus on repository deposit.• Consistent and significant underspend of block

grant and/or other indications of systemic ‘non-compliance’ could be cause for serious concern…

QUESTIONS ?