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In addition to information and advocacy campaigns, there are a number of practical steps to take to help ensure the IR is populated.
Populate the IR yourself
There is a chicken-and-egg situation with repositories in that they need to be seen to be populated and used in order for more academics to be encouraged to join in. You need to ensure there is some initial content there, and this can be done by identifying so-called ‘green’ publishers – those who allow self-archiving in any form – and then asking the academics at your institution who have published in those journals for permission to deposit those papers in your IR. Use of the Copyright Knowledge Bank is vital here as this resource gives details on the self-archiving policies of publishers. More information can be found on using this resource here.
Deposit on their behalf
You can let academics know they can give you their work to deposit on their behalf. As part of this mediated deposit service, you can also identify potential work to deposit by checking the self-archiving policies of publishers and pursuing those articles for your own IR where you know they can be fairly and safely self-archived. You can then deposit the papers on the author’s behalf, adding the necessary metadata. Remember to keep authors informed of their own, their institution’s, and third-party rights relating to work submitted to the repository. Mediated deposition should not, however, be a long-term solution as the ideal scenario is to get authors to perform their own self-archiving, for expediency’s sake as much as anything. More information on depositing by proxy can be found in the case study of St Andrews ePrints and their Let Us Archive it for You campaign.
Offering guidance on copyright issues
Dealing with copyright is of major concern to academics with regards to making their research openly accessible. Offering help and guidance on this is therefore vital to help encourage academics to deposit. Repository staff and librarians should feel able to offer copyright advice to authors, informing them of such issues as securing the necessary rights when submitting work to a publisher and ensuring awareness of their own, their institution’s, and third-party rights on work submitted to the repository. There are many resources offering guidance on copyright issues to which you can refer authors, HEI managers and librarians. These include:
JISC Legal
Copyright Knowledge Bank
SURF Copyright management for Scholarship
RoMEO list of journals’ policies on self-archiving
Copyright information produced by specific repositories includes:
LSE’s copyright guidance for authors
White Rose Consortium’s copyright information page
Glasgow ePrints copyright awareness
UCL ePrints and copyright
Please note that copyright guidance sometimes appears within the general information section of repositories, such as FAQs.
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Showing that the service actually does make a difference
Providing the usage statistics of the actual service is a very good way of promoting the digital archive, as long as these statistics are favourable. It is also beneficial to look at the citation rates of open access articles in general, including those of Open Access journals.
Giving examples of other institutional repositories
By providing examples of actual eprint archives, such as the University of Kansas KU ScholarWorks and those of the SHERPA partners, academics will be able to see for themselves how they may look and work. These will also provide information on such issues as copyright and the submission process.
Academics As Researchers
Changing the way academics search for information may have a knock-on effect on how they view open access. If academics actually use digital repositories and repository search engines, such as Google Scholar and OAIster, to find research articles and other research outputs, then they will be more likely to see the benefits of self-archiving. Unfortunately, not only is there a lack of awareness of open access, but also a limited level of knowledge of open access tools and how to use them (Swan & Brown, 2005). Again there are large differences between subject disciplines.
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