Following on from our annual review of data.ncl this post highlights some key statistics from our ePrints repository where researchers share their publications.
Headline stats for 2020
5086 new publication records added (total of 124,957)
2989 new full text publications made available (total 26,582)
Author profile pages were also some of our most popular pages, so we’d encourage researchers to keep their publication list is up-to-date.
Adding publications to ePrints makes them eligible for REF, but also means they are more visible and can have more impact. We optimise ePrints for research discovery and syndicate content to aggregation services such as CORE and unpaywall. That helps people find free versions of research that would otherwise be inaccessible to them as well as making text and data mining more feasible.
Our aim for 2021 is to increase the proportion of research outputs we make open access in ePrints. That will be helped by our new transformative agreements with publishers that make open access free for our authors and by funder policies like that of the Wellcome Trust and Plan S that increasingly mandate this.
This is our first guest post on the Opening Research blog. We are keen to hear from colleagues across the research landscape so please do get in touch if you’d like to write a post. But the honor of debut guest blogger goes to David Johnson, PGR in History, Classics and Archaeology.
The trainings on open publishing and data storage fundamentally changed my perspective on what constitutes data.
Coming to start my PhD from a background in history and the humanities, I really didn’t give the idea of data much thought. I knew I was expected to present evidence about my topic in order to defend my research and my ideas, but in my mind there was a fundamental difference between the kind of evidence I was going to work with and ‘data’. Data was something big and formal, a collection of numbers and formulae that people other than me collated and manipulated using advanced software. Evidence was the warm and fuzzy bits of people’s lives that I would be collecting in order to try and say something meaningful about them, not something to ‘crunch’, graph, or manipulate. This was a critical misconception that I am pleased to say I have come to terms with now.
What I had to do was get away from the very numerical interpretation of the term ‘data’, and start to think in broader terms about the definition of the word. When I was asked about a data plan for my initial degree proposal, I said I didn’t have one. I simply didn’t think I was going to need one. In fact, I had already developed a basic data plan without realising what it was called. My initial degree proposal included going through a large volume of domestic literature and gathering as many examples of emotional language as I could find to create a lexicon of emotions words in use during the nineteenth century. In retrospect, it’s obvious that effort was fundamentally based in data analysis, but my notion of what ‘data’ was prevented me from seeing that at the time.
What changed my mind was some training I went to as part of my PhD programme, which demonstrates how important it is to engage with that training with an open mind. The trainings on open publishing and data storage fundamentally changed my perspective on what constitutes data. Together these two training events prompted me to reconsider the way I approached the material I was collecting for my project. My efforts to compile a vocabulary of emotions words from published material during the nineteenth century was not just a list of word, but was a data set that should be preserved and made available. Likewise, the ever-growing pile of diary entries demonstrating the lived emotional experiences of people in the nineteenth century constitutes a data set. Neither of these are in numerical form, yet they both can be qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated like other forms of data.
I suspect I am not alone in carrying this misconception as far into my academic work as I have. I think what is required for many students is a rethinking of what constitutes data. Certainly in the hard sciences, and perhaps in the social sciences there is an expectation of working with traditional forms of data such as population numbers, or statistical variations from a given norm, but in the humanities we may not be as prepared to think in those terms. Yet whether analysing an author’s novels, assessing parish records, or collecting large amounts of diary writings as I am, the pile of text still constitutes a form of data, a body of material that can be subjected to a range of data analysis tools. If I had been able to make this mind shift earlier in my degree, I might have been better able to manage the evidence I collected, and also make a plan to preserve that data for the long term. That said, it’s still better late than never, and I am happy say I have made considerable progress since I rethought my notions of what data was. I have put my lexicon data set out on the Newcastle Data Repository, so feel free to take a look at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.11830383.v1.
We will be running a series of online briefings between November and January 2021 to help researchers understand the requirements of the new Wellcome Trust open access policy.
This new policy is significantly different in that from January 1, 2021 all research articles supported by Wellcome must be either:
Authors will also be required to apply a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence all their accepted manuscripts and inform the publisher of this when submitting articles to journals. This is intended to allow authors to retain rights to comply with the policy in otherwise non-compliant journals.
To find out more about the new policy and how we can support you with it, register for one of our online briefings.
The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), a block grant provided through a partnership of health research charities to enable publications to be immediately open access, ends on 30 September 2020. All COAF partners remain committed to open access and will continue to fund associated costs, but how they do so will vary.
COAF was established in 2014 and since then has awarded block grants annually to 36 institutions. As one of those institutions, we have allocated £1.5 million of COAF grant funds to make over 600 papers open access and help increase their visibility, reuse and impact. So, from our perspective it is a shame to see COAF end, but we understand why it must as the funders start to adapt their previously shared policy to Plan S at different rates.
However, this does not mean that researchers funded by the former-COAF partners can no longer make their papers open access. The Wellcome Trust, CRUK and BHF will be providing separate block grants to the university to support their researchers. Blood Cancer UK and Parkinson’s UK will now allow open access to be costed into their grants or applied for directly from the funder. Versus Arthritis researchers can also request funds for open access directly from the charity.
We’ve updated the funders’ information on the open access website to reflect this and are adapting our processes to support researchers funded by the different charities. If you have publications you plan to submit or that have already been accepted and want to discuss how this might affect your paper, please do contact the open access team.
As you may have picked up from reading this, many funder are changing their policies to implement Plan S. For the Wellcome Trust, that will be from Jan 01 2021 and for CRUK from Jan 01 2022, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
Our ‘Read and Publish’ agreements with publishers allow researchers to both read subscription journals and to make articles they publish in those journals open access at no cost. We have already signed agreements with publishers including Wiley, Springer, IOP and the RSC, meaning you can publish open access for free in thousands of journals. Further agreements with other publishers are currently being negotiated and evaluated.
This is intended to restart a transition to open access that stalled with ‘hybrid journals‘ (subscription journals that offer open access for individual papers.) While these have allowed more research to be made open, the separate revenue streams journals continued to receive for both subscriptions and open access wasn’t sustainable.
To address this these new ‘transformative agreements’ require publishers to make an explicit commitment to transition to open access. They must demonstrate an annual increase in the proportion of content published as open access and convert to full open access once an agreed proportion is reached. For example, the R&P deal with Wiley will lead to 85% of UK-authored articles in Wiley journals being open access by the end of this year, reaching 100% by 2022.
These agreements will also make a wider range of research open access, regardless of the discipline or research funding that may have supported it. Again using the Wiley agreement as an example, since starting in March 2020 we have approved 50 articles by researchers working in a wide range of disciplines. Without this agreement only 15 of these articles could have been made open access using funds from our UKRI or COAF block grants. Our agreement with Sage shows a similar pattern – we’ve approved 25 papers since June 2020 and could otherwise have made just two of these open access. Our longest-standing agreement is with Springer and has allowed us to make more than 300 papers open access since 2015.
At a more practical level these agreements also greatly reduce
the amount of administration required from authors and from the open access
team. When an eligible paper from one of our authors is accepted the publisher will
send us a request to approve open access under the agreement. All we need to do
is click ‘approve’. We don’t need to raise purchase orders, wait for invoices
to arrive, send them to finance for payment, all of which means your papers are
likely to be published open access more quickly.
There is of course a cost to these agreements. The price we pay for these agreements is based on our current subscription spend with a publisher and our average open access spend with them in previous years. Significantly however these agreements set out and constrain future costs to make them more transparent and sustainable.
In considering which publisher agreements to sign up to we have evaluate not just the costs, but the relative benefits. For example, while many agreements offer unlimited open access publishing, some limit the number of eligible papers at either an institutional or national level. Others may restrict the types of articles that are eligible. However, more and more suitable agreements are emerging from national negotiations and we intend to sign up to as many of these as we can to play our part in helping transform academic publishing to full and immediate open access.
