More content in the institutional repository

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1 More content in the institutional repository final report to BIBSAM by Jörgen Eriksson, with input from Salam Baker Shanawa and Hampus Rabow. "Self-archiving is, of course, very desirable, but the issue is quite simple: Publishers are not really going to allow authors to self-archive in an easy way, and authors are not going to do it unless it is completely painless. " Vitek Tracz, InfoToday January [ Aims of the project: To increase the awareness of self-archiving and Open Access issues among researchers at Lund University To try a work-flow that makes it as simple as possible for authors to selfarchive, supplying them with information on which of their publications they are allowed to self-archive and doing the actual self-archiving for them by proxy. Introduction Setting up an institutional repository is a fairly simple and straight-forward operation and there are a number of software packages to choose from today [ The major difficulty is to get researchers to add content. Looking at the growth charts available at the Institutional Archives Registry [ ] few of the services contains more then 1000 resources. Setting up a technical infrastructure, helpdesk and doing advocacy does not yet seem to be enough to give the researchers motivation to self-archive. Different methods to increase the researchers incentive to make their publications available are being tested. These include university policy decisions that make it more or less mandatory or desirable for a researcher to self-archive his output. Few universities or research institutions have implemented such policies. The list maintained by eprints.org [ ] contains nine departments or institutions with policies. Self-archiving by proxy. Recognising the difficulty to make researchers self-archive on their own some institutional repositories are doing the actual work for them. St. Andrews University have offered this possibility since 2003 [ ]. The submission by proxy offer alone has not lead to a substantial increase of submissions at St. Andrews. "I couldn't say that the method has led to a large increase in submissions. We believe that we need more institutional lead from the top down for that to happen, but I do think that the offer from us to deposit material has encouraged a good rapport with the academics and researchers we have contacted. It has created a climate where we anticipate more submissions will happen." Janet Aucock, Bibliographic Data Services Manager, St. Andrews, in personal to the author

2 Electronic publishing and self-archiving at Lund University Lund University have no policies on electronic publishing or self-archiving. Neither does the university require any kind of annual standardized or centralized publication lists from faculties or departments. Electronic publishing and self-archiving is a very decentralized affair where every department or division make their own decisions. The most common way to self-archive at Lund University is that the author makes his publications available from his personal home page. There are also a few examples where departments or divisions self-archive systematically. (e. g. Department of Automatic Control [ ] ). Awareness of the Open Access movement, the changes in scientific communication, copyright issues is not widespread but it is growing. The Lund University Libraries, Head Office have tried to raise awareness by giving workshops, seminars, writing articles in the university magazine and visiting departments. The Lund University Libraries Library Board recognises the importance of paying attention to the changes in scientific communication and one of the strategic goals for the head office is "To support researchers publishing and self-archiving in Open Access journals and services" Lund University Libraries offers two central services where self-archiving is possible. Since 1996 all dissertations have been registered in Lund University Dissertations [ ]. Registration is mandatory but making the dissertation available in full text is optional. Out of ca 3,500 registered dissertations 150 are available in full text. Starting in 2005 the Faculty of Medicine will publish all their dissertations in full text in Lund University Dissertations and we have noticed an increasing intrest from individual doctoral students to make their dissertations available, but it is still a small percentage of the total number of dissertations. In 2002 we set up an institutional repository demonstrator (LU:research [ ). The Information Committee at the Faculty of Medicine immediately took an interest in the possibillities of using the service and as a result of our meetings we choose a broader scope for the service and included references without full text in the archive. The Faculty of Medicine wanted to have a single entry point to their publications. They also stressed the importance of branding and together we created a medical faculty user interface to their sub-set of LU:research called Lund Virtual Medical Journal (LVMJ) [ ]. LVMJ is seen as a marketing tool for the faculty and it is "owned" by their Office for Strategic Communication. It is maintained by the faculty library who also enters the records and the full text. At the start only references where entered but from spring 2004 full text is entered whenever possible. The use of LU:research by other faculties is very uneven, with individual departments, divisions or researchers entering mainly references. To increase the use of LU:research and make more full text dissertations available we are working both towards the university administration to get policy decisions and towards the researchers to get their publications into the repository. Since there are no central policy decisions yet we have to be able to convince the researchers and the departments that there are advantages in making their publications freely available and preferably by using the LU:research in favour of the already excisting decentralized self-archiving. 2

3 In this project we wanted to reach new researchers and try to catch their attention by giving them a very specific offer to self-archive named articles for them. Shades of green: publishers policies To find the articles that could be self-archived we used the publishers copyright policies & self-archiving directory maintained by the SHERPA project [ ]. The SHERPA list covers 110 publishers publishing 8950 journals. All the major publishers are covered. According to the colour symbolism of the list 92% of the journals are a shade of green, i. e. at least preprints may be self-archived. From our earlier work with researchers at LU we knew that a clear majority of those we have met were not interested in self-archiving their preprints so we decided to leave preprints out of the project. We also decided to separate the ones that allow self-archiving of postprints using the publishers pdf from those who allow self-archiving of the final, refereed and accepted manuscript. Almost half of the journal titles in the Southampton directory [ ] end up in this latter category. We did this separation because we wanted our offer to the researchers to be as short, clear and unambigous as possible. We decided to start with the most straightforward case, all articles where the publishers pdf is allowed. Then we would ask all who replied positively to that message if they would be interested in publishing manuscript postprints. The replies to this question would decide how we should continue with this category. Selection of articles and connecting them to the authors' e- mail. Using standard bibliographic databases, we searched for all papers with at least one author from Lund University in journals from publishers listed in the SHERPA/ROMEO ( database on publishers copyright policies and self-archiving. We made a table of our own to separate the publishers who allows self-archiving of postprints using their pdf-file and those who allows self-archiving of the last refereed, accepted manuscript. The author names and addresses from the bibliographic data were checked against the LDAP directory for Lund University. Thus we could, with reasonable accuracy, derive a list of authors from Lund who had published in journals that allowed archiving of pre-prints or post-prints. The technology used to reach the objectives of the project is simple, a couple of perl scripts and a very simple (2 tables) Mysql relational database. The database was built in order to answer different questions mainly for statistical purposes. In addition it makes it very easy to extract information grouped by different fields like year, authors, self-archiving policy etc. One of the scripts was used for uploading the article information into the database. The other script was written to take care of sending the s to the authors. The main technical difficulty was to correctly identify all the authors from the bibliographic data. 3

4 We limited the search to publication years and to the databases in ISI Web of Science to get a reasonable amount of articles. The total number of hits for authors with affiliation Lund for these three years came to ca Then we matched the publishers against the SHERPA/RoMEO database. Finally we matched the authors against the Lund University staff directory LDAP-server to get the authors adresses. This gave us 377 articles where the publishers allowed self-archiving of postprints using their pdf-file, 836 articles where the publishers allowed self-archiving of the final, refereed and accepted manuscript and 218 articles where only pre-prints was allowed. The number of articles where no self-archiving was allowed was ca 620. Lund University is strong in chemistry research and a large portion of these "white" articles are published by the American Chemical Society. We did some rough analysis on the difference between the number of authors with affiliation Lund (9,000) in Web of Science and the number of articles that actually can be self-archived (ca 1,100). Some reasons are. Many articles are co-written by authors that share the Lund affilation. Those articles are counted for each author in the total number of authors with affiliation Lund. The 377 articles that allows self-archiving of the publishers pdf-version have 647 hits for authors with affiliation Lund which gives an average of 1,7 authors from Lund to each article. Journals are bought and sold between publishers and with that a journals selfarchiving policies change. These changes in ownership are not reflected in the ISI records. An example is Munksgaard, a former Scandinavian publisher with many authors from Lund, which has been bought by Blackwell during this period. Since Munksgaard is not on the RoMEO list we lost all these articles. This is an error that can be avoided by matching the journal titles against an updated journal and publisher directory. Publishers that are not in the RoMEO directory. Authors not found or not correctly identified in the LDAP-directory because they have left the university or their name was written differently in the article. Ca 25% of the total number of authors with LU affiliation could not be identified in the LDAP directory. Authors with affiliation Lund not belonging to Lund University. Contacting the authors The collected information was stored in a database and from that database authors e- mail, article and journal title was added to a standard that we sent to the article authors (Appendix 1). In addition to the information in the we also created a web page with additional information on self-archiving and Open Access. [ The subject line in the read "Gör din forskning mera synlig - ett projekt vid Lunds Universitets Bibliotek". In english "Increase the visiblity of your research - a project at Lund University Libraries". The content was a brief introduction to the 4

5 project, article and journal title, some information on the probability of free articles being used more than those that requires subscription, a short how-to-do, link to more information and contact information. The authors only had to reply if they wanted their articles self-archived in our institutional repository LU:research [ and then we did the practical work. Either the authors sent us the pdf-files or we downloaded them from the journal sites. Response from the researchers Out of the 377 s we got positive replies to 109. These came from 63 authors out of 398 possible. No one responded negatively to our . The only complaints we got were from three authors who were co-authors of several articles. They wished we could have sent all articles listed in one message. One per article was a bit like spamming to them. The reason we did not send lists was that we wanted all co-authors of an article to get the same mail. Divided by faculty the responding authors were affiliated as follows. Faculty of Medicine: 28 Faculty of Science: 24 Lund Institute of Technology: 5 Faculties of Humanities and Theology: 4 Administrative, Economic and Social Sciences: 1 Lund University School of Economics and Management: 1 The total number of postprint, publishers pdf allowed, articles sorted by authors faculty affiliation. By faculty of medicine: 192 articles science: 125 articles technology: 48 articles humanities: 6 articles social sciences: 5 articles economy: 1 article 13 of those who responded asked us to self-archive as much of their publication lists as possible. Ca 200 full text articles were added to the archive. Follow up After adding the articles to the archive we sent a personal to each of the authors who had responded, telling them how to find their records in LU:research and asking them to reply to a set of questions. We got 28 replies out of 63 possible. 5

6 Workflow The first questions were related to future workflow. How would they want this service to be organised in the future. Would they do the self-archiving themselves or through a centralized service? 27 replied that they wanted the self-archiving done by a central service at the university and 1 that the individual researcher should do it. 25 would send information to a central service when they had published a new article. 2 would not. One of these argued that the identification of new articles should also be done centrally. A concern that was raised by 3 of those that replied was about how to remember to send the information to a central service. Attitudes towards self-archiving postprints in manuscript form and preprints. Willingness to self-archive a postprint in a refereed and accepted manuscript version. 16 yes and 11 no. The concern raised in a number of the no replies was the difficulty to know for certain the status of a manuscript copy. 1 would self-archive a preprint. Sum up of replies. To sum up the replies from this small subset of researchers that are positive to selfarchiving would be that they don't want to do the the actual self-archiving themselves, more then half of the group are willing to self-archive accepted and refereed postprints in manuscript form and only one would also archive preprints. Since major publishers like Elsevier, Springer/Kluwer, Nature Publishing Group, etc have adopted the strategy of allowing manuscript post-print publishing only this implies that the researchers attitude towards self-archiving postprints in this format is an obstacle to consider. Out of the 1431 articles where some kind of self-archiving was allowed in our sample 836 belongs to this category. Based on the replies regarding the willingness to self-archive postprint manuscript we decided not to make a mass-mailing of the 836 articles in this category. Even if this was a small number that replied we did not want to "spam" a lot of researchers who probably would be adverse to the proposal. A visit to their department Our last question was if they wanted us to visit their department and inform about LU:research, self-archiving, Open Access etc. 12 answered yes and 12 answered no. Conclusions. As an one off marketing of LU:research and self-archiving in general we deem the outcome of the project as satisfactory even if we only got replies to 109 s out of 377. Since the authors only had to reply to an to get an article self-archived this only emphasises the general lack of awareness of and incentives to self-archiving at 6

7 Lund University and, it seems, most other universities. Even so we have reached many new researchers. These new contacts we hope will serve as inroads into their departments as we continue to work in a follow-up phase. Our next step will be to contact the researchers who have replied positively and see if we can get a general mandate from their division or department to self-archive all publications that are allowed and doing that by proxy. That we should do all this work centrally I see as a temporary solution while we are establishing self-archiving as a routine practice among researchers at Lund University. A success criteria will be the development of a network of proxies at faculty and/or department level, preferably utilising the network of libraries that is in place already at Lund University. The way of identifying articles and authors that we have used could be used to identify potential self-archivers at any University. This project also shows that using a database like Web of Science as a source will work best if you want to find authors from your faculties of science and medicine. Especially if your countrys' native language is not English, research output in social sciences, arts and humanities will not be well covered. Facts about the project. The project ran from September 2004 until January Jörgen Eriksson, Librarian at Lund University Libraries, Head Office co-ordinated the project and was responsible for the contacts with researchers. Hampus Rabow, MA, Lund University, did the search for articles and the matching against the different databases. Salam Baker Shanawa, System Developer at Lund University Libraries, Head Office, was responsible for the automated The project was funded by BIBSAM, the Royal Library s Department for National Co-ordination and Development. 7

8 Appendix 1: to the researchers Subject: Gör din forskning mera synlig - ett projekt vid Lunds Universitets Bibliotek Bäste Lundaforskare, Biblioteksdirektionen vid Lunds Universitets Bibliotek vill med det här meddelandet uppmärksamma dig på en möjlighet du har att att öka tillgängligheten till din forskning. Detta är ett automatiserat utskick. Om du har publicerat flera artiklar under tidsperioden i tidskrifter som tillåter att du gör dina artiklar fritt tillgängliga får du ett utskick för varje artikel. Vi hoppas du har överseende med detta. Ditt förlag tillåter att du/ni gör följande artikel fritt tillgänglig på Internet. Du får också använda förlagets version av artikeln när du gör det. Class, caste, and gender among cashew workers in the South Indian State of Kerala Published in: INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL HISTORY OBS! Den information du nu fått bygger på utdrag ur bibliografiska databaser, vars uppgifter inte alltid är entydiga. Har du felaktigt identifierats som författare till ovanstående artikel ber vi dig lämna detta brev utan avseende. Flera undersökningar visar att forskare som gör sina artiklar fritt tillgängliga via Internet läses och citeras mera än de som enbart publicerar i tidskrifter med prenumerationstvång. Du hittar ett antal studier på Biblioteksdirektionen vid Lunds Universitets bibliotek (LUB) erbjuder möjligheten att göra artiklar tillgängliga via LU:research ( Lunds Universitets institutionella arkiv. Vad du behöver göra. a) Om LUB prenumererar på tidskriften: Skriv och meddela att du vill lägga ut artikeln i LU:research så fixar vi resten. b)om LUB inte prenumererar på tidskriften. Skicka med en pdf-kopia av artikeln. För att se om Lund prenumererar, sök i vår tidskriftsdatabas ( 2. Om du har andra artiklar, papers etc. som du vill öka tillgängligheten till, kontakta oss. 3. Här hittar du förlagspolicies Skicka artiklar etc.i PDF-format som e-postbilaga till jorgen.eriksson@lub.lu.se Mera information om projektet, vad och varför finns på: 8

9 mvh, Jörgen Eriksson Biblioteksdirektionen Lunds Universitets Bibliotek Tel: Fax: