Open Access and Digital Scholarship Blog-Open Access and Digital Scholarship at Imperial College London. Making Open Access simple – The Imperial College approach to OA

"When you come at it for the first time, open access looks pretty complicated. Funder policies, institutional policies, publisher policies, different flavours of OA including ‘green’, ‘gold’, ‘libre’ and ‘gratis’ and a whole new language with mystifying terms like ‘hybrid journal’, ‘article processing charge’ and ‘author accepted manuscript’ await. Even librarians sometimes struggle to understand journal policies, or what certain licensing conditions actually mean. It was perhaps for this reason that, when we started the College open access project, academics gave us a clear mission: a one button solution to open access. We haven’t quite achieved that yet, but since May we are running a new workflow that reduces the complexity to one sentence: ‘When you have a paper accepted, deposit the peer-reviewed manuscript – we do the rest, no matter what type of open access.’ The workflow is based on two ideas: Ask authors for the minimum information required. Offer authors a single publications workflow that covers green and gold OA as well information required for funder reporting. The frontend for this workflow is Symplectic Elements, the system used by our academics to manage their scholarly outputs. We have worked with the vendor to deliver an OA workflow that kicks in on acceptance for publication, and then we customised the system to interface with ASK OA, our in-house APC management system ..."