Could the so-called Gold Rush result in Green reinforcement? (II)

  A post was published last December at the UKCoRR blog examining the question of whether Green Open Access could become mainstream at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as a result of the policies resulting from the Finch report and aiming to drive the scholarly communication model towards a Gold OA-based one. Buiding on the discusions held at the webinar "The Role of Institutional Repositories after the Finch Report" organised by the Repositories Support Project earlier that month, the post highlighted the role IR managers were to play in explaining the different options for policy compliance at HEIs and the relevant role deposit into institutional repositories would acquire as a result of the economic impossibility to make the whole institutional research output available via Gold Open Access.

A few months later, at a time when the RCUK Open Access policy is about to come into effect, preliminary strategies for ensuring compliance are being designed at HEIs. Driven by the RCUK policy statement that "The RCUK OA Block Grant is principally to support the payment of APCs. However, Research Organisations have the flexibility to use the block grant in the manner they consider will best deliver the RCUK Policy on Open Access, as long as the primary purpose to support the payment of APCs is fulfilled", institutions are wisely investing part of the Block Grant funding on enhancing their Green Open Access infrastructure (including human resources) and making sure their institutional repository will be ready to provide support for Open Access dissemination purposes to all researchers whose publications are not awarded Gold OA funding.

In an even more inspiring realisation of this leveraging policy, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) released last week the requirements it will apply for authors to be eligible for Gold Open Access funding (Spanish only). With the caveat that "due to limited resources, just one article per author will be allowed per year", these include the need to deposit the author's research outputs published in the last three years into the Digital.CSIC institutional repository in three months time since the funding for the payment of APCs has been awarded.

Compliance monitorisation is becoming a key concern at HEIs as a result of these policies and attempts at having pilot systems in place for ensuring the reporting tools for policy compliance are available will shortly be carried out at pioneering institutions. In the meantime the whole move towards Gold and Green Open Access remains a daring experiment whose outcome -including the way researchers in different domains are willing to follow the policy guidelines- will be very interesting to follow in upcoming months. The Global Research Council meeting in Berlin next May 2013 will provide a good opportunity to agree on an international action plan for implementing Open Access to Publications – Open Access implementation is one of only two items on the agenda.

Primer proceso de creación automática de ORCIDs a nivel institucional

  Con fecha 25 de marzo se ha realizado desde la Universidad de Oviedo (UniOvi) el primer ensayo exitoso de creación automática de ORCIDs para autores institucionales desde la Biblioteca. El proceso consistió en la ingestión de una modesta primera tanda de 10 ficheros XML de autores UniOvi en la API de ORCID en producción. Como resultado de este proceso se crearon 9 perfiles ORCID, y un décimo fue identificado como un potencial duplicado y se reportó como tal al administrador. A continuación se ofrece una breve descripción del proceso que condujo a este resultado.



El proceso

Tras un intenso esfuerzo de difusión de ORCID en el país, la Universidad de Oviedo devino el pasado mes de diciembre el primer miembro institucional de ORCID en España. Una vez firmado el acuerdo con ORCID, UniOvi decidió que serían la Biblioteca y su Jefe del Servicio de Información Bibliográfica María Luisa Alvarez de Toledo las responsables de la adopción institucional de ORCID en la Universidad. Además de apoyarse en el servicio de soporte técnico de ORCID – muchas gracias a Catalina Oyler en este sentido – la Biblioteca UniOvi decidió contar también con el apoyo de GrandIR para este propósito. GrandIR había organizado la sesión técnica sobre ORCID el anterior mes de septiembre y estaba muy involucrada en la difusión y la adopción de ORCID, de modo que esta colaboración se perfilaba como una buena oportunidad para poner a trabajar los conocimientos adquiridos en el proceso.

El primer paso en el camino hacia la adopción institucional de ORCID por parte de UniOvi fue definir una estrategia para la creación institucional de ORCIDs y su implantación en los sistemas de gestión de la información científica de la Universidad. La Biblioteca UniOvi mantiene un registro de todos los autores institucionales en una tabla en la que figuran también sus firmas más frecuentes e identificadores tales como ScopusID o ResearcherID – que con frecuencia son asimismo gestionados directamente desde la Biblioteca. Esta tabla se empleó para generar ficheros XML de los autores UniOvi listos para introducir en la API de ORCID.

A continuación se realizó una etapa de testeo: a partir de los ficheros XML se generó una serie de perfiles ORCID de prueba desde la línea de comandos del entorno de pruebas OAuth de ORCID. Estos ensayos fueron exitosos y permitieron testear la configuración particular de los XMLs en aspectos tales como la codificación de caracteres o el uso de caracteres especiales característicos de la lengua española. Sin embargo, la necesidad de operar desde la línea de comandos hacia que la creación de los perfiles ORCID resultara un proceso muy lento, que podía valer para crear ORCIDs para unos pocos autores, pero no para la generación de perfiles para el conjunto de autores de la institución. Se decidió entonces desarrollar una aplicación que permitiera crear ORCIDs de manera automática para un gran número de autores, tarea que se encomendó a GrandIR. Unas semanas después el primer prototipo estaba disponible para realizar pruebas 'en real' sobre el entorno de producción de ORCID. Estas pruebas arrojaron como resultado la introducción de 10 ficheros XML de autores UniOvi en la API de ORCID y la creación automática de 9 nuevos perfiles ORCID. La mayor parte de estos perfiles se encuentra aún pendiente de ser reclamada por los autores - y de hecho el ritmo de reclamación de los perfiles es uno de los aspectos que la Biblioteca está monitorizando antes de planificar ulteriores estrategias de difusión de ORCID a nivel interno.



Los retos

A lo largo del proceso que ha llevado a la creación automática de ORCIDs se ha resuelto toda una serie de retos. El principal entre ellos se deriva de ser la Universidad de Oviedo la primera institución en el mundo que ha realizado la mayor parte de los procesos, desde solicitar y utilizar sus credenciales de usuario hasta aprender a manejar las APIs de ORCID. El hecho de que ORCID se encuentre aun en un estado relativamente temprano de desarrollo también supuso una dificultad en algunos momentos, dado que ocasionalmente implicaba colaborar directamente con ORCID en la definición del procedimiento para realizar determinados procesos. Finalmente, la necesidad de apoyarse en un único servicio de soporte técnico de ORCID con su horario temporal específico fue asimismo una de las consecuencias del papel pionero adoptado por la Universidad.

Uno de los grandes retos que afronto la Biblioteca UniOvi – uno que sera además relativamente frecuente en otras instituciones – fue la falta de soporte técnico interno específico para la tarea. Esta dificultad se pudo superar no obstante gracias al apoyo proporcionado tanto por ORCID como por GrandIR.

Dos son los ámbitos adicionales en los que existen aún retos por resolver antes de lograr una adopción amplia de ORCID en la Universidad. El primero de estos ámbitos es cultural, y conlleva implicar a los autores en el proceso de reclamación, alimentación y utilización de sus ORCIDs. Esto debería basarse en buena medida en la definición y difusión de bunas prácticas. El otro ámbito en el que quedan retos por resolver es el técnico: en primer lugar hace falta un procedimiento para identificar con garantías los potenciales duplicados y posiblemente para fusionar perfiles ORCID creados sobre direcciones de correo diferentes de un mismo autor. Además de esto, la Biblioteca desearía contar con los permisos necesarios para poder mantener los perfiles ORCID de nueva creación y para ser capaz por ejemplo de reclamar publicaciones en nombre de los autores. Estas son áreas en las que ORCID está desarrollando su trabajo en este momento, y a medio plazo se podrá contar con las funcionalidades necesarias para abordar estos retos.

El resultado

El principal resultado del proceso hasta ahora ha sido el intento, tan exitoso como modesto, de crear automáticamente perfiles ORCID para unos pocos autores UniOvi desde la Biblioteca. Sin embargo, una vez que se han creado los primeros ORCIDs, extender su cobertura hasta abarcar la totalidad de los autores UniOvi no supone grandes retos técnicos. Además de esto, el éxito preliminar en la identificación de duplicados por parte de la aplicación para la creación automática de ORCIDs supone un primer paso en la definición de criterios que permitan asegurar la detección de potenciales duplicados como parte del proceso de creación automática de ORCIDs. La Biblioteca tiene ahora la oportunidad de examinar el proceso de reclamación de ORCIDs por parte de los autores – junto a la ocasión de proporcionar feedback durante el proceso, por ejemplo sugiriendo la posibilidad de permitir una personalización del mensaje de bienvenida por parte de la institución miembro a través de un panel de opciones que permita seleccionar el idioma en que se recibe el mensaje de bienvenida. Por otro lado la Biblioteca está ya diseñando estrategias institucionales de difusión, incluyendo una breve Guía de Reclamación de ORCIDs para los autores y un sitio web institucional que ofrezca una introducción a ORCID y un resumen de sus principales beneficios para los autores y para la Universidad. Todos estos contenidos deberían ser en buena medida reutilizables por las instituciones que se unan a ORCID de ahora en adelante.

El camino pendiente

Los siguientes pasos a dar para completar el trabajo son en primer lugar extender este desarrollo piloto hasta proporcionar cobertura a todos los autores UniOvi. Una vez que se logre esto, debe desarrollarse una estrategia para implantar los nuevos ORCIDs en los sistemas institucionales, comenzando con el repositorio institucional RUO. La implantación de ORCID en el repositorio debería suponer un medio para atraer a los autores hacia él y asegurarse de que aquellos autores que aún no han depositado ningún trabajo en el repositorio se percaten de los servicios de valor añadido que éste puede proporcionarles.

Finalmente, una buena parte de las tareas pendientes pertenece al ámbito de la difusión: desde la Biblioteca se pretende promover una serie de buenas prácticas para el uso de los ORCIDs por parte de los autores institucionales. Además de esto, una vez que se complete el proceso, la Biblioteca está también interesada en difundir las buenas prácticas para la adopción institucional de ORCID a través de un canal más riguroso que un mero post, por lo demás el medio más rápido para dar a conocer y compartir los progresos realizados.

First successful automated ORCID creation at institutional level

  On March 25th a first successful attempt was made at Universidad de Oviedo (UniOvi) for an automated ORCID creation process for institutional authors. A modest first batch with 10 XML UniOvi author files was fed into the production ORCID API and 9 ORCID profiles were successfully created – with the 10th being identified as a potential duplicate and subsequently reported. A brief description of the process that lead to this result is provided below.



The process

Following extensive ORCID outreach activities in the country, Universidad de Oviedo became the first institutional ORCID member in Spain last December. Once the membership was signed, the decision was made for UniOvi Library and its Bibliographic Information Service Manager Maria Luisa Alvarez de Toledo to become responsible for ORCID adoption at UniOvi. Besides relying on the ORCID technical support service -a big thanks to Catalina Oyler here- UniOvi decided to also contact GrandIR for the purpose. GrandIR had organised the ORCID technical session earlier in September and was very much involved into ORCID dissemination and adoption, so it looked like a good opportunity to put this knowledge to use.

The first step towards ORCID adoption at UniOvi was to define a strategy for institutional ORCID creation and implementation into UniOvi research information management systems. The Library keeps a registry for all UniOvi authors, together with their most frequent signatures and identifiers such as ScopusID or ResearcherID - which are often managed from the Library too. The process involved XML UniOvi author file generation so that these could be fed into the ORCID API.

A testing stage followed: a number of mock ORCID profiles were generated on ORCID OAuth Playground testing environment via the command line. These were successful and allowed to test specific XML configuration with regard to character coding and special characters often found in Spanish names. However, the need to operate from the command line made the ORCID generation process quite a slow one, which would suit the purpose of creating ORCIDs for a few authors, but certainly not for all UniOvi scholars. The decision was then made to develop an application that would allow automated ORCID creation for a large number of authors, and GrandIR took on the challenge. A few weeks later, a first prototype was available for live testing on ORCD production environment. These first tests resulted in 10 XML author files fed to the ORCID API and 9 new ORCID profiles created. Most of these new ORCIDs are still pending claim by authors - and in fact the claiming rate by authors is one of the aspects the Library is looking at before planning further internal outreach strategies.



The challenges

A number of challenges have already been tackled along the way to automated ORCID creation. The main one among these is a consequence of UniOvi being the very first institution to carry out most of the procedures, from requesting and using its credentials to learning how to operate the ORCID APIs. The fact that working together with ORCID was occasionally required to define how specific processes should be carried out was sometimes a bit challenging – but certainly fun as well. Finally, the need to rely on a single-point ORCID technical support service (running on a specific time zone) was also one of the consequences of the pioneering role UniOvi took that will presumably be improved in the future.

One of the big challenges that the UniOvi Library faced – and this will probably be quite frequent at other institutions – was the lack of specific internal technical support for the task. However, this issue could be overcome thanks to the support provided both by ORCID and GrandIR – and it should by no means discourage institutions interested in becoming ORCID adopters, since from now on there will be a growing network of supporting colleagues and institutions available to help.

There are two additional strands in which challenges remain before a far-reaching ORCID adoption is achieved at the University. The first one is cultural, and involves engaging authors into the process of claiming, completing and using their ORCIDs. This should very much be based on a best practice definition and dissemination. The other domain where challenges are still to be tackled is the technical area: first, there is a need for a reliable identification of potential duplicates and possibly for merging ORCID profiles created on different author email addresses, and then, the Library would also wish to have privileges for maintaining the newly-created ORCID accounts and be able for instance to claim publications on behalf of the authors. These are areas where current ORCID work is taking place, and new features will be available in the mid-term that will enable this functionality.

The outcome

The main process outcome has so far been a successful (if humble) attempt for automatically creating ORCID profiles for a few UniOvi authors from the Library. However, once the first ORCIDs were created, extending the coverage to the remaining UniOvi authors poses no major technical challenge. Furthermore, the successful identification by the application for automated ORCID generation of a previously existing ORCID for one of these 10 authors was a first step in putting together a set of criteria that will ensure detection of candidates for duplicated entries at ORCID creation time.

The Library has now the opportunity to test the process for ORCID claiming by authors - together with the opportunity to provide useful feedback along the process, for instance by suggesting that it might be useful to allow the welcome message to be customised by the member institution through an option panel that would allow to choose things such as the language the welcome message is written in. Institutional outreach strategies are already being designed, including a brief guide on ORCID claiming for authors and an institutional ORCID website providing an introduction to ORCID and explaining what its benefits are both for authors and the institution itself. All these contents should very much be re-usable by institutions which join ORCID from now on.

The way ahead

The next steps for completing the work are in the first place extending the pilot to cover the whole set of UniOvi scholars. Once this is achieved, strategies are to be designed for implementing the new ORCIDs on institutional systems, starting with the DSpace-based institutional repository RUO. Ideally, ORCID implementation on the repository will provide a means to engage authors with it and ensure that those authors who have not deposited anything yet in the repository will realise some of the value-added services it may provide them.

Finally, a great deal of the remaining tasks fall into the outreach domain: best practices for ORCID use by institutional authors are to be promoted from the Library as part of an awareness raising campaign about ORCID. Besides this, once the process has been completed, the Library has the intention to disseminate best practices in ORCID adoption at institutional level through a somewhat more rigorous channel than a blog post.

Preaching to the converted...

  Sometimes when you try to argue on controversial issues - say for instance you consider that the coverage of sex abuse in the media is biased and lacks objectivity - you'll be accused of not being interested in figting sex abuse. Regardless of how frequently found around the place these days, it's the sort of argumentation that will drive you mad, since its sole purpose seems to be to avoid discussing the issue itself.

Open Access is no exception in this regard. I do not think my personally being pro-Open Access or anti-Open Access should be part of the discussion here, but you may check posts below should this paragraphs raise any doubt about it. Incidentally I happen to be a physicist and have had the opportunity during my extensive Open Access dissemination activities (and have taken great pleasure in it) to discuss it with dozens of researchers from all fields, possibly hundreds of them, many of them Open Access-friendly, some of them reluctant, nearly all of them interested in a sensible dialogue on the future of scholarly communication.

As a result of these experiences, plus again lots of work for implementing OA at institutional and cross-institutional level, there are two relevant points I would like to make in this post:

1) Librarians ('shambrarians' would probably be more accurate) should refrain from going too far in telling researchers how to perform their professional activity. Librarians/shambrarians usually do not know enough about research and scholars can easily perceive that out of a five minute conversation. This is possibly the main reason for the huge divide among both communities - and the one that does actually explain why repositories are nearly empty. Underpopulated repositories is by no means just a 'keystroke issue' I'm afraid (although solving the 'keystroke issue' will help of course). Asking for strong mandates has lately become a mantra from the 'shambrarian' community, but when you listen to researchers' thoughts about this many of them are far from being convinced this is the right way to deal with Open Access implementation.

2) Open Access success is mainly a technology issue and not a policy one (or not to such extent anyway). Ideally the technology and policy strands should work in parallel, but technology can do without policy, whereas the opposite is not true. If you try to sell researchers an Open Access mandate for depositing their papers on the equivalent of a shack in architectural terms, they will very likely laugh in your face (this is the story of the last 20 years Stevan Harnad often talks about). You need to have a solid technical foundation with solid added-value services for talking researchers into Green Open Access. And that is presently far from being a fact. Regrettably far, I feel obliged to add. Not only that, it is kept far from being a possibility by the regular advocates ignoring most about technology and making emphasis on what they do know about: dialectics. I will not mention particular examples here, since it's not the goal of this post to get personal, but if Open Access is to succeed, the debate should clearly become more technical and less political.

No offence meant in any of this, I should warn. I read as much as I can of what gets published on OA, especially blogposts, and there's not too much I like out there I must say. But I do usually keep my opinions to myself since I believe there may be many different ways for OA to succeed - and fights between passionate Green OA supporters and their critical friends is certainly not one of them.

... and preaching to the non converted

  After quite a long time away from this blog due to various circumstances – with work overload probably being the most convincing one – I will try to catch up with various threads in the next day ot two – and I shall start the attempt with an answer to this request for explaining what Open Access is and what its aims are I was delivered from the interesting comments section of this “Whoops! Are Some Current Open Access Mandates Backfiring on the Intended Beneficiaries?” post by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen blog. This is my answer – I tried to keep it as concise as possible, apologies if it may still be a bit long.


I am probably too busy trying to overcome the numerous challenges that stand in the way of Open Access implementation myself to provide a too detailed and accurate description of what Open Access is and what its aims are, but I'll give it a go. Let me start by quoting the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2002):

"The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access".

According to this, Open Access means ensuring this possibility is realised, and worldwide dissemination of research outputs should indeed be a shared goal for institutions (and its libraries) and for publishers. It means that any researcher anywhere in the world may have the opportunity for the first time in history to freely share her research results (and this includes research data) with the whole research community and beyond. Whether this is achieved through the so-called Gold route (Open Access or hybrid journals) or via Open Access repositories (the Green route) is secondary to some extent - although not of course if business models are our sole concern here.

Open Access deals with the have and the have-nots (which does not just mean developed vs developing countries, but rather privileged vs underprivileged researchers in terms of having or not an institutional coverage for accessing the research information they require for carrying out their own research). And Open Access deals with whether a freely available author's final peer-reviewed manuscript might provide a useful alternative to the much-preferable version of record for those underprivileged researchers who can't or won't afford paying the fees required to read the papers that will allow them keep up-to-date with advances in their own research area.

Research funders are well aware of the challenge, especially those in the area of biomedical research, and Open Access mandates are their attempt to tackle the access issue in an area where many institutions both in rich and poor countries lack the (quite substantial) budgets required to provide their reseachers a comprehensive access to publications in toll-access journals. What about publishers? They are indeed adapting their business models to fit the Gold route by taking Article Processing Charges from authors as a prerequisite to making research papers available Open Access so they can meet the funders' mandates – which is fine. But this adaption to Open Access has not at all improved their image in the eyes of institutions (and many researchers in them), who suspect some not-so-subtle form of double-dipping is taking place since they still need to pay for their journal subscriptions on top of the APCs.

What could publishers then do to stop the fight?

The European PEER Project was a 3-yr STM Publisher Association-lead attempt to assess the impact of Open Access repositories on the 'European Research ecosystem'. This was technically carried out by delivering a large amount of final peer-reviewed author manuscripts into a cross-European institutional Open Access repository network.

Publisher participation ensured the right research article version was deposited, and the whole exercise was also useful for them: not only they were able to become aware of the relevance of sufficient metadata (a concept that CrossRef has later extended among the wider publisher community), but also to harmonise their interoperability standards through the use of the NLM DTD. Furthermore, the conclusions of the PEER project assessment carried out by CIBER Research Ltd was that not only publishers were not harmed by Open Access repositories, but rather on the contrary the paper download figures from journal pages at publisher websites were much improved by their availability as final manuscripts at repositories (since it's the version of record any researcher will prefer to read and cite unless of course they have no means to accessing it).

PEER was a one-time exercise, but it also delivered a proof of concept for cooperation between publishers and institutions in order to provide researchers the service they require for meeting the funders' mandates they are subject to. And in fact some sensible publishers are still interested – and taking subsequent steps in this direction – in delivering their authors the deposit service they require to meet the mandates. The way these sensible publishers see it, this is a means to offer researchers competitive advantages at journal selection time and will ensure a steady number of submissions in an increasingly competitive market framework for journals.

In the meantime the institutional Open Access community (which reached a critical mass quite a long time ago) is taking steps to ensure the repository systems become fit for purpose in order to meet funder requirements in terms of offering OA to the outputs of research projects funded by them. There are indeed technical as well as cultural/political challenges, in fact quite a number of them, but there is also a sustained and persistent effort to figure out the best ways to gradually address them. Institutional Research Committees are suddenly becoming aware (and this is the concern comment #2 addresses) that institutional research publishing budgets won't reach for providing Gold Open Access via payment of APCs for the whole institutional research output, so they're instead turning their eyes to their institutional Open Access repositories and wondering whether it could be the way of meeting funder mandates in a much cheaper fashion. At the same time, some funders are starting to rule hybrid journals out of their mandates for compliance purposes on order to avid the abovementioned risk of double-dipping.

The landscape keeps hastily evolving and it seems further adaption will be required both from publishers and institutions. This could ideally happen through cooperation and not through struggle, but there seem to be too many prejudices and too little efforts out there for a constructive dialogue to take place in a sustainable way.