Guide to tagging institutional repository records related to ARC/NHMRC grants

Prepared by: Paula Callan (QUT), Mark Gregson (QUT), Kerrie Burn (ACU), Tony McCall (ACU)

March 31st 2014

Context

Both the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) now require that publications arising from their grants should be open access (OA) online within 12 months of the date of publication. Grant recipients can comply bypublishing in an open access journal (Gold OA), by publishing in a subscription journal and paying for the right to make the article available to non-subscribers (often referred to as Hybrid Gold OA) or by disseminating an open access copy of the ‘Accepted Manuscript’ version via an institutional repository within 12 months of the publication date (Green OA). Grant recipients are required to acknowledge the funding when publishing. Even if the open access copy is being made available via a journal, funded researchers are required to deposit the metadata in a repository, the metadata must include publication details, grant ID and a link to the open access copy. This will enable the ARC and NHMRC to track compliance with their open access policies. Responsibility for compliance rests with the Chief Investigator.

Note: the ARC Policy applies to all publications arising from grants awarded since the beginning of 2013 while the NHMRC Policy applies only to journal articles published since July 2012.

technical preparation

Repository records for publications associated with ARC or NHMRC grants must include the name of the funder and grant ID in the metadata. The information must be displayed in the public view of the repository record in the form of a PURL (a persistent URL) which resolves to the record for that Project in Research Data Australia. For example:

Technical preparation includes creating new metadata fields to record funder name (e.g. ARC or NHMRC) and Grant ID (e.g. LP120200051). The concatenation of these two elements plus the addition of the prefix ( generate the required PURL.

Repositories must ensure that each grant PURL is output in the dc:relation field of the Dublin Core metadata for the OAI-PMH gateway. This will enable the harvesting and aggregation of records associated with ARC and NHMRC grants from the repositories.

strategies & workflow options

Ideally, the Chief Investigator will provide the grant information when the publication is deposited in the repository. Although the full-text of the publication can be embargoed for up to 12 months from the publication date, there are many advantages in depositing at least the publication metadata earlier. Authors are also more likely to be able to locate a copy of the Accepted Manuscript version around the time that the paper is accepted for publication or soon after. If the work has been published in an open access journal, the investigators need only supply the publication details and the repository can link to the open access full-text version on the publisher’s website. Many repositories also store a full-text version of papers published in open access journals.

For the first few years at least, it is likely that some funded researchers will forget to deposit their grant-related publications in the repository or they may not understand the steps they need to take to ensure a repository record has been created. Therefore, universities and their repository staff will also need to employ a range of other strategies to support compliance. If the publication metadata is supplied by the CI at the time of acceptance, a follow-up email may be required at a later date to remind the CI to deposit the full-text (or link to OA version on the publisher’s website). This may be timed to coincide with the expected date of publication or twelve months after the expected publication date if your repository is not able to manage embargoes.

Strategies for Identifying grant recipients

Going forwards, names of researchers awarded new grants can be obtained from the ARC and NHMRC websites (see links below). It is likely that your Office of Research will also have this information as soon as it has been released. Information about new grants may also be available from the university website; often in the form of media releases or research project pages. Once you have identified Chief Investigators based at your institution, provide them with information about the implications of the ARC and NHMRC open access mandates, explain local processes which need to be followed and provide details of any assistance that is available (i.e. help with repository deposit and/or financial support for Gold OA fees).

Strategies for Identifying publications linked to grants

It is likely that there will be a number of recently-published papers associated with NHMRC grants awarded prior to 2013. It is also likely that some researchers awarded grants since 2012 will forget to deposit the publications in accordance with the new funding rules. Consequently, it is a good idea to periodically cross-check the list of ARC and NHMRC publications in your repository against the information that can be found in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). The database records generally include the Grant IDs that are required for publication tagging. However, where there are co-authors from other institutions, it is not always possible to link the grant to a specific author. Therefore, it could be that grant is held by one of the external authors. As there is an association between the grant and the publication and between the local author(s) and the publication, it is advisable to have a ‘tagged’ record for the publication in your repository.

Scopus search: AFFIL(name of your institution)ANDFUND-SPONSOR(Australian Research Council)

WoS search: ORGANIZATION-ENHANCED: (name of your institution) AND FUNDING AGENCY: (Australian Research Council). Limit results by year of publication.

Note: re-run these searches using variants of your institution name and variants of the funding agency names.

Strategies for locating Gold OA articles

In some cases, the authors may have paid for Gold OA (including Hybrid Gold OA), in which case, you can link to the published version. To locate Gold OA articles via Pub Med, use the PMC Advanced Search builder and search for your institution name (plus variant names) in the ‘Affiliation’ field and the names of the paid OA options offered by all the major publishers as a ‘Filter’. Example:

Other ‘Filters’ to use include:

Elsevier sponsored documents, ACS author choice, APA open access, NPG open access, Oxford open, Royal Society of Chemistry, RSM open, Taylor and Francis iopenaccess, Blackwell online open, Maney open choice.

more information

  • ARC policy
  • NHMRC policy
  • Outcomes of ARC funding rounds:
  • Outcomes of NHMRC funding rounds:
  • Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) guide to ARC and NHMRC policies and compliance flowchart:
  • Wiley policy on funder mandates:

Author contact details:

Paula Callan (QUT) , Mark Gregson (QUT)

Kerrie Burn (ACU) , Tony McCall (ACU)

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