Institutional OA policy implementation: The Joys and Challenges

Session Type: Working Session

Session Description:
The adoption of an institutional Open Access policy, while a happy event, presents enormous implementation challenges. Chief among these is the development of a simple, intuitive and virtually labor-free system for faculty compliance. One strategy for meeting this request has been for librarians to do much of the work of gathering the correct manuscript version and generating metadata before depositing in the institutional repository on behalf of faculty. On campuses where librarians’ time is already stretched thin, this personalized approach may not be feasible. It is therefore necessary to develop semi-automated, self-service solutions to bridge the gap between faculty needs and available library resources.

California Digital Library has recently been tasked with such an implementation scenario, following UCSF’s adoption of an OA policy. We have so far developed a waiver & addendum portal that allows faculty to request these documents without librarian intervention.

Our current challenge is the development of a streamlined, intuitive submission workflow that utilizes 3rd-party services to automate processes such as rights checking and file and metadata harvesting.

We’ll begin this working session by briefly describing the policy considerations that have informed our development of a submission and waiver request workflow. We’ll then share the latest mock-ups and demos of our new submission workflow, highlighting successes, challenges and remaining roadblocks.

In the second half of the session, we’ll explore the challenges and roadblocks in more detail, focusing on such topics as synching harvested publications with local deposits, facilitating deposit in multiple repositories, providing aggregated usage statistics across repositories, identifying and pointing end users to the publication of record, etc. Our hope is that the session will not only help to move our own implementation forward, but will provide valuable guidance for other institutions that are (or will be) working to establish a customized, resource-light OA policy implementation.

Session Leaders:
Justin Gonder, California Digital Library
Catherine Mitchell, California Digital Library
Lisa Schiff, California Digital Library

Session Notes:
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Session Slides: