Introduction
\label{introduction}
Academic libraries have long sought ways to increase the percentage of
faculty articles deposited to their respective institutional
repositories. OSULP has proactively sought ways to increase this
percentage at our own institution through a variety of means, including
commonly adopted outreach activities (
Mercer 2007), faculty vitae review
and deposit services (
Palmer 2008), article identification and
deposit services (
Hansen 2012), and open access policy implementation services
(
Zhang 2015). In 2014, the library initiated a service to deposit
faculty articles entering the university’s institutional repository to
the PubMed Central disciplinary repository to meet National Institutes
of Health article deposit requirements. In 2015, the service was
extended to deposit Department of Energy funded articles to the PAGES
repository. This case study describes the reasons of why OSULP initiated
this service, the processes and people put in place to make it happen,
the impact of the service, and plans for expanding the service to meet
other agency requirements.
ScholarsArchive@OSU, Oregon State University’s institutional repository
that runs on DSpace, has been in place since 2004. As of April 2016 it
contains over 57,000 total items including over 10,300 items classified
as research papers and articles. The library was charged with the
implementation of a rights retention open access policy in June 2013
(http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Good_practices_for_university_open-access_policies).
As part of the implementation, the library established a SWORD-based
article deposit form as a primary article deposit mechanism. The policy
ascribes rights to the university to distribute articles. This allows
the library, as the designated unit responsible for policy
implementation, to distribute articles to other disciplinary
repositories on author’s behalf.
Prior to the open access policy, the library already had a process in
place to identify and request newly published articles from faculty for
deposit to the institutional repository. The library identifies newly
published articles using a Web of Science feed and requests those
articles from faculty for repository deposit. In spite of having that
service in place, and despite the open access policy that requires
deposit of articles to the repository, we had a relatively healthy, but
still disappointing rate of between 40 and 50% of newly published
faculty articles entering the repository.
Making faculty articles available is not the sole reason for
establishing and maintaining institutional repository services, but it
remains a principal reason. The university faculty expressed their
support for open access via a faculty senate resolution (2005), college
and unit level open access policies (2009-2011), and a campus policy
(2013). Still, at best 50% of OSU-authored research articles are
entering the repository. This suggested to us that something more could
be done to achieve a higher article deposit rate.