The IUPUI Open Access Policy was adopted by the faculty council on October 7, 2014. Since that day, the University Library Center for Digital Scholarship has been working to promote broad participation while also minimizing the labor for our faculty authors. The policy enables several paths to participation while relying on the Center to bring them altogether and, ultimately, to archive articles in the open access (OA) institutional repository, IUPUI ScholarWorks. Here are a few of the ways that faculty authors can participate in the policy:
- upload an article directly to IUPUI ScholarWorks,
- submit an article (or choose to opt out and get a waiver) at the IUPUI OA Policy site,
- share a copyright-legal version of the article on another OA website (for example, ResearchGate or a personal site),
- publish in an OA journal or with a Creative Commons license,
- or deposit the work in a disciplinary repository, such as the NIH’s PubMed Central.
In short, if the author finds a (legal) way to make their article OA, they’re participating in the OA policy. It’s our job, in the Center, to discover that article and to archive it. In addition, if the author did not find a way to make their article OA, then the Center sends an email (and a couple of reminder emails) asking for a copy of the “accepted manuscript.” If the author sends us a copy, we archive it for them. If the author says “no thanks” we count that as an opt out. If the author ignores us, we count that too.
In 2016 we used two databases to identify articles authored by our faculty members — Scopus and PubMed Central (PMC). The PMC articles that we found were archived within the constraints of copyright. The articles that we identified in our Scopus search were de-duplicated and verified for faculty authorship and then subjected to a second round of searching, title by title, in Google Scholar. (We refer to this process as “triage.”) If we found a version that we could archive, we did that. If not … we sent a few emails.
Open Access Policy “Triage” for 2016
According to a recent Scopus search, authors on the IUPUI campus published 2,702 articles in 2016. (Our triage process runs about 120 days behind the date of publication. So, it will be another 100 days before we finish working on the 2016 articles.) During the same year, we successfully “triaged” 2,436 items. When we removed the ineligible items (duplicates, works by students, works that are not articles) we were left with 2,087 articles to fetch or request. Working in collaboration with a small group of subject liaisons, we sent email notifications to request the author’s accepted manuscript for 1,025 articles. When you count the reminders, we sent more than 2,100 emails in 2016.
Open Access Policy Outcomes for 2016
We successfully archived 65% -- 1,360 of the 2,087 eligible articles -- from our Scopus searches. At the same time, we archived another 910 articles (beyond the Scopus list) in the IUPUI ScholarWorks Open Access Policy collection -- for a total of 2,270 OA policy articles in 2016. When compared to the 2,702 articles that Scopus says that IUPUI published that year that would mean that we have 84% success rate!
| OA Policy Participation – 2016 In Brief | ||
|---|---|---|
| Achieved Deposit Rate (of eligible IUPUI Scopus articles) | 65% | (1360/2087) |
| Total Deposit Rate (all deposits/all IUPUI Scopus articles) | 84% | (2270/2702) |
| Archived Within One Year of Publication Date (2015 IUPUI Scopus articles) | 47% | (1318/2795) |
| Faculty Response Rate to OA Policy Email Notifications (deposits + opt outs) | 39% | (Deposits 298, Opt outs 104, No response 623) |
But, remember, there are many ways that an article might find its way to the OA policy collection. Many of the 910 extra articles arrived from PubMed Central and several were submitted directly by authors. These included articles that were published before the policy was adopted. In these cases the authors were participating within the terms of their copyright agreements with publishers, but not under the rights of policy.
Because these “extra” articles inflate our success rate, I decided to isolate the articles published in 2015 to see if we managed to share them in the OA policy collection within one year of the publication date. By then end of 2016 the OA policy collection included 1,318 articles published in 2015. A Scopus search indicates that the campus published 2,795 articles in 2015; so, our with-in-one-year success rate is currently 47%. That’s a great deal less than 84%, but that number will grow as our faculty members learn more about the policy.
Participating OA policy authors are rewarded with exposure to new readers. In 2016 alone, IUPUI OA policy articles were downloaded from IUPUI ScholarWorks 49,585 times. These downloads came from nearly every country in the world.
In 2017 we are looking for ways to reduce the number of requests that we need to make while also increase our efficiency in requesting and archiving manuscripts. In the meantime, we’re happy to provide free access to IUPUI scholarly articles for a world of readers.
-- Jere Odell, Jan. 24, 2017