United Kingdom: Summary of Activities
Currently in the UK there are 108 Open Access repositories, representing
over 75 institutions. According to the OpenDOAR directory, there are 986
repositories worldwide and the UK accounts for nearly 11% of this total
while in Europe alone there are 476 repositories and the UK accounts for
22% of this total.
Nationally, there have been a number of important statements in support
of Open Access. Some institutions are adopting archiving policies for
the work of their staff. Other declarations in support of Open Access
include the Scottish Declaration on Open Access from Scottish universities,
research funders, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and the
Scottish Executive. The Russell Group has publicly declared that they
wish to minimise barriers to the dissemination of research output. To
Date, 15 UK funding bodies have Open Access policies. These include the
Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the Arthritis Research
Campaign. The policies require or encourage that researchers make their
material open access. In terms of investment, JISC has currently invested
£14 million in projects related to Open Access.
The UK is home to some major OA initiatives and it has adopted a model
of collaborative partnerships. This model builds on a partnership of institutions
working together in a mutually supportive initiative. Partners benefit
from peer-level support and the identification and sharing of best practice.
There are over 170 education institutions within the UK. These vary from
research-led universities like Oxford, or Edinburgh, through to far smaller
specialist organisations which may have more of the teaching focus. The
Universities are divided into different groupings: those of the research
led universities are the Russell
Group and the 1994
Group. These two groups hold the top 40 research led institutions.
At the time of writing every Russell Group University has an institutional
repository, and most of the 1994 Group -- only about six of these did
not have a repository.
Therefore, the infrastructure for ingest and storage of open access material
is largely in place. Work continues on advocacy to academics to encourage
authors to use these repositories, and the expansion of these repositories
the whole different materials; for example, datasets, multimedia material,
and learning materials.
In response to requests from the repository community, and with input
from UKCoRR members, SHERPA has compiled a skills set and description
of the common repository roles needed to develop and manage a successful
institutional repository. The document can be found on the SHERPA website.
SHERPA: a consortium
of 34 universities and internationally recognised as a leader and advocate
for the development of OA IRs and associated services. It has been successful
in developing related projects, such as OpenDOAR,
JULIET, RoMEO
and DRIVER.
There are a number of open access organisations and groups are active within the UK. Some of these have arisen from funded projects, while others have been self created by their members. Please find below a list of some of the prominent open access organisations, links to their websites, and a brief description.
SHERPA Partnership
The SHERPA partnership grew out of the original SHERPA project (2002 -- 2006). It currently holds over 30 institutional members, and an Affiliate Partnership programme is available.UKCoRR
This is a recent development that has been launched through the work of Sherpa plus. UKCoRR is intended to be a professional body for repository managers within the UK. As such, it concentrates on the practicalities of running institutional repositories rather than advocacy of open access itself. More information can be gained from its website.IRIScotland
This was an initiative funded by the JISC for the development of a federated open access environment for Scotland. This brings together all of the open access repositories within Scotland -- see the website for further details.ePrints.org
eprints software was the original institutional repository software,
developed at the University of Southampton. This software now powers a
significant fraction of the world's open access repositories and is under
continuous development.
The vast majority of open access projects and initiatives have been funded by the JISC. The JISC is responsible for the disbursement democratic for the development of IT in higher education. The organisation has been responsible for much of the initiative and strategy in the development of the UK's open access environment. A full list of all of the open access projects that have been funded by the JISC would be impractical to list here -- there must be over a hundred. The JISC website has links to these projects through the different funded programmes through which they had managed. Some significant projects are as follows:
- The Repositories Support Project (RSP) has a remit to support and actively encourage all Higher Education Institutions to establish institutional repositories.
- INTUTE Repository Search is working on a value added search service to promote UK research.
- DART-Europe that isa partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses.
- EThOS (Electronic Theses on Line Service): The aim of EThOS is for anyone to search and access the full-text of post graduate research theses. It enables UK Higher Education institutions, in partnership with the British Library, to promote their post graduate research and increase usage of their theses output.
- UK PubMed Central: mirror of PubMed Central as a subject-based repository, funded by the Wellcome Trust and proposed for use by several funding agency mandates.
- The Depot
acting as a national repository for researchers not yet having an institutional
repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters
(e-prints).
The JISC have produced, along with SURF, a Licence that they suggest
authors can use to give to publishers in order to retain some control
of their work, particularly with regard to open access dissemination.
This may be useful for authors elsewhere to use, or for copyright agencies
elsewhere to use as a model for recommendations.
Most government funding for research in UK universities is directed through
the research councils, which collectively are known as RCUK.
Some of the individual councils have now adopted mandates for open access
dissemination of the research outputs that they fund. Another significant
Funder in the UK (although they work internationally) is the Wellcome
Trust. The Wellcome Trust has a mandate which requires grant recipients
to make their information available through open access -- in this case
through the repository UKPMC. Further information on funding requirements
in the UK and internationally is available through the JULIET
service.
The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.
Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.
Last updated: 14-Nov-2008