Best practices in ‘internal’ scholarly publishing by Strathclyde researchers
Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian
A number of research outputs by Strathclyde researchers ranging from the very valuable to the extraordinary are typically being released without meeting the basic standards of open publishing. This is mainly because these are unusual types of publications – i.e. not the standard journal articles, conference proceedings, books or book chapters, but rather reports or policy papers, which automatically fall under the category of ‘grey literature’. Scholarly publishers face a great deal of often justified criticism from Open Science advocates, but this specific area is one where they definitely prove to be reliable collaborators for academics. Very few publishers these days will not make emphasis on aspects like using the appropriate open licence, minting the appropriate persistent identifiers (DOIs or ISBNs) or ensuring that the impact of their publications on social media is adequately tracked. As opposite to this, and even in cases where they are made openly available, ‘internally’ published reports or books are to a certain extent condemned to ‘digital obscurity’ if they fail to keep these aspects in mind upon their online release.
For anyone aware of how relevant these publications may be for the institution and the wider society, this is very painful to watch. It also points at certain lack of digital science skills among researchers – an issue that furthermore tends to arise in very specific fields.
As with all other aspects that relate to a given scholarly culture, changing this – even gradually – represents quite a mountain to climb. Training activities on social media competence as a critical scholarly communication skill for researchers may be designed and advertised, but it will usually prove difficult to attract very busy researchers to this kind of ‘soft’ skills training. While the HEFCE policy of requiring an early deposit of every institutional research output in Pure may help identifying candidates for providing the adequate support, raising awareness of these basic requirements among the key authors and departments is extremely complex.
To climb a mountain one starts with the first step though, and it’s rewarding to see that in certain occasions the internal publishing workflows do happen to meet the appropriate standards. This has recently been the case for a report arising from the field of Speech and Language Therapy. The lead author of this publication got in contact with the Library while the final version was still being written. The purpose was to ask about Creative Commons licences that might suit the publication.
The report was subsequently released under a CC-BY licence. Moreover, a DOI or Digital Object identifier was also minted for the publication and shared with the researcher so that it would feature on the document cover for citation purposes. The full-text final version of the report was published in the Strathprints repository, which allows to track its centralised usage both via the number of downloads and its Altmetric score for impact on social media. It was not a surprise to find out that just four days after its online release, the figures for the social media impact of this humble user manual on the use of ultrasound to treat speech disorders were far higher than any other research work that their authors have ever published. The lead author herself declared to be delighted about this.
This is not to say that there is just one way of meeting these basic requirements for an effective open institutional publishing effort: posting the report or the book in an internal departmental webpage with a google analytics tracking mechanism might also allow to closely follow its usage figures. It is hardly a good practice however, as it fails to benefit from the far more advanced – and rather expensive – tools for tracking research impact that Strathclyde Uni has at its disposal.
