The shifting sands of open access: gaining trust & influence?

The presentation will reflect on the open access journey, lessons learned along the way and looking to the future. Moving from distrust and hostility through to compliance and then to good practice. From starting a service with no workflows, systems or guidelines to developing a trusted, high level service. As a result of the Finch report in 2013 and funding from BIS, across the United Kingdom Higher Education Institutes made a concentrated effort to make open access part of the scholarly communication process. Posts were created, workflows and service provisions were introduced, however open access was met with hostility and mistrust from academics who for the first time had non-academic staff interfering with their workflow process! Looking at the journey taken from these early days, and how the services developed and built up can not only be maintained, but also developed and grow further. From introducing open access to our academics, receiving responses such as “why do you want my work” and “what are you going to do with it” whilst always striving to demonstrate the extra added value to academics. It will look at how the introduction of HEFCE’s open access policy has moved academics in ways that advocacy never could! However, that is not to say that “all” academics are now compliant and engaging with open access, or would continue to engage with open access if HEFCE’s open access policy ceased to exist. Working in the area of open access, and curating the research outputs of academics, has led to the development of trusted services within our Institutes that not only curate the research outputs produced in our institutions, but now also provide advice and training in terms of copyright, visibility and impact of not only research outputs but also the data underlying those outputs. In order to become a trusted service within the Institution it has had to be demonstrated that what we are requiring of academics will not damage their careers, or opportunities for further research to be published, but will actually add value to their research. Academics would previously not have engaged with non-academics in relation to where they would publish, what copyright transfer agreement to sign or where to store their datasets. In order to maintain and build that trust further, we must continue to add value to research outputs and to the services that we can offer in this area. Discussion will focus around how we can gain and build trust within our own departments, potential obstacles and ways in which to overcome these.