OA good practice initiative: Final project report

"Open access good practice has been a community-based support activity comprising nine pathfinder projects (involving 30 universities plus a wider community of practice of more than 200 professionals from 90 universities). The pathfinder projects have produced advice, guidance, models, case studies and other support materials to help the higher education sector implement OA as efficiently as possible.

The scholarly communications system is evolving rapidly with OA becoming the new paradigm. UK research funders’ commitment to support OA offers universities both opportunities and risks as they implement OA policies. While Higher education institutions (HEIs) have generally responded quickly, more support is needed so that universities can exploit these opportunities and manage the risks.

By taking a sector-driven approach to creating and delivering support, this project aimed to deliver value to all institution-based professional staff who have a role in OA implementation. This includes, but is not limited to: librarians, repository managers, research managers and even researchers themselves who have a professional interest in OA.

Nine pathfinder projects have investigated what’s working well for a range of institutions with differing sizes of research base and varying financial and human resources as they implement OA policies. Their findings have been shared widely across the sector. Each project has explored diverse issues, including ways to manage and monitor compliance with funder and institutional mandates, management of publication charges and how to advocate good practice around OA implementation to researchers.

Please note What follows is an account of the initiative as a project. For OA professionals who are keen to find out about what support is available to them when implementing OA a handbook and links to all project resources are available on the OAGP project page (jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/open-access-goodpractice)."