We’ve now reached 8000 items in our repository!

The last major content milestone we celebrated was when we reached 5000 items, this was back in February 2015. The blog post we wrote in recognition of this mentioned that the upsurge in activity was largely down to research funders and HEFCE (the folks behind the Research Excellence Framework) requiring authors to self-archive their publications. 17 months on and this trend is continuing.

In April 2016 the Research Excellence Framework open access policy came into effect (to find out more read our previous blog post). This means that to ensure compliance with the policy authors must deposit their accepted manuscripts for journal articles and conference proceedings into the University’s research information system (Pure). To ensure all St Andrews researchers are aware of the policy we have been working hard to deliver the message: ‘Act on acceptance: deposit in Pure’. This slogan, which is emblazoned on posters around the University, is just one part of a tapestry of approaches to increase author self-archiving rates across the University. Currently the REF compliance rate for the whole University is very high at around 85%.

We are also still continuing our support for Gold Open Access. Gold OA usually requires a payment, called an APC or Article Processing Charge, and providing all the conditions are met the Library will cover this charge. The charges average out at around £1500, but can be anywhere from a few hundred pounds to more than £4000. The 8000th item was published Gold Open Access, by the publisher BioMed Central. It is freely available (with a Creative Commons attribution licence) either from the publisher or from our repository.

8000th article:
Title: Changes in selective pressures associated with human population expansion may explain metabolic and immune related pathways enriched for signatures of positive selection
Journal: BMC Genomics