The group meets by phone every 2-3 months. Here are the notes from the last call.
Present: Neil Jacobs, Tim Devenport, Nawin Gupta, Roy Kaufman, Nicola Swann, Roy Kaufman, Richard Wynne, Lars Bjornhauge, Cameron Neylon, Simon Thomson, John Walker, Paul Walk, Gemma Hersch, Ian Potter, JR, Ken ? (CCC), Ed Pentz, Richard Gedye, Graham Taylor, James Butcher
Apologies: Caren Milloy, Mark Thorley, Robert Kiley, Peter Burnhill, Todd Carpenter, Caroline Sutton
1. Recap on why we’re here
We agreed that the scope of the group is OA articles and workflows, whether related to “pure” or hybrid journals.
2. Develop a set of more-or-less typical workflows associated with Gold OA, that would be a good basis for coordinated developments by all stakeholders
Update from Caren:
The Jisc APC team is looking at workflows and working on development of a couple of schematics to illustrate the Jisc APC workflow (including an author and then by passing an author). In order to meet the project objectives they will start with this and restrict to the interactions that involve the platform initially because the Jisc APC institutions about to use the platform need more information to help them get started. But they have also been collecting information about workflows from various institutions including those not using Jisc APC) and the intention is to synthesise some of this information to illustrate a typical workflow, supplemented by the case study interviews.
They have also been collating details of OA policies and are keen to work with the Gold OA infrastructure group to capture publisher and funder workflows and are discussing this at their next team meeting and Steering Group meeting. I can report back further on this after that.
We agreed that it is important to include workflows beyond Jisc-APC, covering institutions, funders, publishers, others; within and between each. PLoS has some documentation that might be shareable. There is also the 2012 RIN report on Gold OA intermediaries.
We agreed that there is a need to pull together what is available and put it in front of the group in a way that we can work on, and draw conclusions from. To do this, we need resource.
Action: Neil to put a one page proposal for the group to agree, and for members to consider whether their organisations could help resource the work.
(The discussion under 3, below, is also relevant to this action)
3. Consider whether a metadata profile would be helpful for information associated with the payment of an APC and/or the submission of a manuscript
We agreed that the workflows work (see above) needs to come first. At this point it is not clear whether a single profile would be the right way of doing this.
In terms of existing work in this area, we noted that, in ONIX, there would be a schema that would allow various mappable options. CCC has parsed this problem out into different stages of workflows (submission – acceptance). On metadata, CCC has adopted mechanisms to track what eg CC licence is applied for articles, taking metadata through process, and informing licensing people as appropriate. We noted that other metadata are relevant, eg links to full text, repository IDs, and opportunities for people to tag their own metadata.
It would be important to be clear what workflows would be in scope. For example, some workflows vary with the publisher business model, whereas others do not. Eg, a membership model to cover APCs would imply certain metadata. However, we asked whether this group is more about pre-publication workflows, and is early days in specifying those. And, while business models are changing, some are relatively stable, and we might be able to make progress on metadata to support these.
There are many classes of “workflows” (e.g.editorial workflow,) it would be useful to clarify that we are talking about “APC workflows”, even though of course they cohabit with or overlap with manuscript submission requirements.
The NISO working group is close to having some first stage recommendations, which will be simple and implementable eg on access status. From this experience, it is useful to think about access metadata and article-level bibliographic metadata as different to business-model related metadata. The NISO group is focusing on licence statement and access statement.
We noted that Editeur would like to be involved in work in this area.
4. Invite those involved in manuscript submission to Gold OA or hybrid journals to discuss and agree improvements to the user experience
Suppliers of manuscript submission / peer review systems were invited to comment on the opportunities as they saw them. Aries and ScholarOne have both worked with intermediaries (in Aries’ case, CCC) to develop system modules outside the editorial workflow, to manage APCs. The business rules live in the CCC system, and the MSS passes metadata at various points in the workflow. This clearly separates editorial and business workflows. Work continues on these developments, with publishers engaged to provide feedback.
We asked whether MSS might interoperate usefully with institutional research management systems? While in principle this might be discussed, it would be hard for workflow system to interface with many institutions. Institutional needs will be met by intermediaries (CCC, OAK, etc), and manuscript / peer review systems will interface with them, rather than directly with institutions.
From one intermediary’s perspective, OAK, have set up interfaces with institutional content management systems, and metadata flow is key, and needs to get fed back into institutional systems (eg CRIS). Web APIs could make this possible. This is a requirement of UK institutions, though it is not clear how much involvement authors want in these workflows.
As well as a role for intermediaries on both publisher (eg CCC) and HEI (eg OAK) sides, it would also be useful to have some standardisation of metadata / interfaces in this area, to ensure that there is not fragmentation in the services offered to users, and collaboration at this level would be helpful.
We noted that MSSs could and likely will have non-exclusive arrangements with a number of intermediaries.
We agreed that we can return to these questions with greater precision once we have the workflows documented.
5. Create machine-readable expression of relevant policies by funders, publishers, journals and universities
Again, we agreed that we can return to these questions with greater precision once we have the workflows documented.
6. Conducting an “audit” of identifier systems, covering what might be done to improve the interoperability, take-up, sustainability, governance, etc, of those meeting key requirements
At previous meetings, we came from a recognition that identifiers will have a key role, but they vary. Peter made a start defining some workflows on an author submitting and publishing a paper, pointing out where identifiers might be relevant.
Tim then developed the draft matrix that has been circulated; it is incomplete, intended to start discussion of what is required. The matrix should show what each identifier is intended for, who is involved in governance, what is the uptake, etc. At present it is limited to public identifiers, not commercial / internal HEI identifiers, though perhaps some should be included.
We agreed that it was important to differentiate in the matrix between governance bodies and registration agencies.
One minor comment is that books are now getting Crossref DOIs in some cases, particularly for OA book publishers. Also do we need to know if identifiers are freely available from the authoritative source? Eg ISSNs are only freely available from non-authoritative source, is this an important aspect? We agreed that these comments should be incorporated into the matrix.
It was proposed that a DOAJ list or identifier would add value.
Action: Simon to clarify this point
Action: All to send comments on the matrix to the list / Tim
It is likely that we will see the value of this list once the workflows have been documented.
7. Relation of this group with CASRAI
Many on the call had not heard of CASRAI, an international initiative to agree vocabularies in research management. Jisc and CASRAI are piloting an approach this year in the areas of data management plans, organisational identifiers, and open access reporting.
We agreed that there can be a tension between focusing on UK needs to get something done, and maintaining an international perspective.
For the time being, we agreed that good communication and some cross-membership between this group and CASRAI groups would ensure coordination.
9. Support project proposal
Neil proposed that this group needed a support project to help it achieve its aims. The outline presented was:
Aim
The aim of the project is to enable those developing technical infrastructure for Gold OA to work more effectively together to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Gold OA workflows.
Objectives
1. To help stakeholders articulate a representative range of use cases relevant to the full lifecycle of Gold OA publishing;
2. To work with stakeholders to identify, within those use cases, opportunities to improve automation, through better machine interfaces, systems, protocols, standards, etc.
3. To support those with an interest in those opportunities to enable them better to exploit them, by providing functions such as task group / meeting secretariat, information gathering, sector monitoring, report-writing, external communications, etc.
Evaluation criteria
The project will be a success if (i) all stakeholders agree it provided the support described above, and (ii) if demonstrable improvements in Gold OA technical infrastructure can be attributed to this work.
The group agreed to consider a proposal, so long as it supported the group in a way that keeps everyone fully engaged.
Action: Neil to draft up a proposal for members to agree, and consider whether they can contribute to resource.
10. AOB
Action: Neil to poll for dates in 2-3 months for next telcon.
