Figure 1. Submission steps with OA Form

The article deposit form uses the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol, “a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another.” (http://swordapp.org/about/) DSpace provides a SWORD deposit interface, so it was a logical choice. The library selected the Easy Deposit open source SWORD toolkit in order to customize the form for our purposes. (http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/).

Depositors who want to use the article deposit form must have a valid OSU Network Identification (ONID) and be currently affiliated with Oregon State University. The form uses the CrossRef API (citation) to automatically retrieve and populate bibliographic metadata (e.g., author, publication year, journal, volume, and issue). Depositors who need to fulfill federal funding agency public access requirements can choose to enter information such as grant identifier, primary investigator (PI), and Co-PI in order to initiate article deposit to federal agency repositories. Contents submitted to ScholarsArchive@OSU using the deposit form are reviewed by library staff. Staff send a notification to the depositor’s email when the submission is approved and available in the repository.

Unlike in Europe and the United Kingdom, in the United States multiple federal research agencies have separate plans for meeting public access requirements. When an OSU author uses the article deposit form and includes grant number and grant agency information, the article enters the ScholarsArchive@OSU institutional repository review workflow. A staff member within the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services, a library unit responsible for the institutional repository and open access and public access policy implementation, processes all articles that contain NIH or Department of Energy metadata. This work constitutes .05% of her position, roughly 2 hours per week.

For NIH funded articles, the staff member checks to see if the article is already available in PMC with a PMCID. She checks to see whether the journal promises to deposit articles to federal agency repositories on the author’s behalf. If the article is not in the NIH manuscript submission system or scheduled to be deposited by the journal, the staff member completes the deposit of the article to the institutional repository and to PMC using the NIH manuscript submission system. The staff member notifies the author that the deposit is in process in the NIHMS and to expect an email from NIH that will ask for author approval of the final manuscript in PMC within 4-6 weeks (Figure 2?).

The NIH does not allow a third party depositor to provide that final review, the author must do it. Meanwhile, the article is already available in the institutional repository. Department of Energy PAGES deposits are very similar except that they allow links back to the article available in the institutional repository in lieu of PDF deposit. Complete article deposit procedures for both agencies are available in Appendix A. Both the NIH and the Department of Energy check articles carefully to be sure that all supporting figures and tables are included. If any tables or figures are missing from an article, the agencies won’t complete the processing of the article until they are supplied.