We start today with the intervention of Pablo
de Castro, whom surely many of you already know.
You know that he is a librarian, promoter of
open access at the University of Stavklight,
and he also works in academic research communications.
He has experience in the promotion of open
access for research and a long career.
He has published multiple academic papers
on the use of persistent identifiers
and has collaborated on international projects.
He also actively participates in the development
of policies and practical improvements
to facilitate the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
He is linked to Heru Chris.
Now we will learn more about his proposals during the presentation.
[PAUSE]
[PAUSE] Good morning.
Thank you for the invitation, Beatriz
and the team of the UNED library.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I think I'm going to do my presentation in English, if that's okay.
I have a roundtable later, towards the end of
today's session, that I think will be in Spanish.
[PAUSE]
So, yeah, I was saying I will do this presentation in English,
and the roundtable afterwards at 1.30, I think, will be in Spanish.
So, I think the slides are up already.
I will be talking kind of on behalf of both Heru Chris,
this non-profit association based in the Netherlands,
to promote open research information and standardized
research information through the Serif data model,
and also on behalf of my university, Strasglade Uni in Glasgow,
where much of this practice that Heru Chris promotes is carried out.
So, this is, in a nutshell, what I will be talking about this morning,
starting by defining what CRIS systems,
current research information systems,
this is one of the reasons I'm speaking in English.
Many of the technical terminology is in English, anyway.
What CRIS systems are for, the Serif data model,
the common European research information formats data model,
that underpins the way the research
information is stored in CRIS systems,
system interoperability, also human interoperability,
which is as important as technical interoperability,
as an upshot of the CRIS landscape in Spain,
and then how this infrastructure, it's very
nice that William will be speaking after me,
because he will be talking about repositories,
and CRIS systems and repositories are very close
to each other as infrastructure bits and pieces.
So, how CRIS systems are used, this
will mostly be a Strasglade approach,
to support open access, to support open science at
the university, and then finally, some conclusions.
I will start with what CRIS systems are and what their objectives are.
I'd like to start with a snapshot, with an example
for a kind of recently published journal article.
I had yesterday an example of "Las ciencias se
nos pudre", I think it was a quote from Eva.
This is a different sort of example, as you can see,
it's an investigation on who funded
the research behind the COVID vaccine,
mostly produced and distributed by Oxford
University and AstraZeneca, the pharma company.
So this would be a different kind of
example for "La ciencia nos salva El día".
Arguably, there are far more examples
for this sort of success from research,
than for the malpractice that Eva was describing yesterday.
And this, I mean, it could make sense to try and keep this in mind,
when defining new research assessment frameworks,
in order not to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
So a couple of interesting things about this paper.
First, the corresponding author there is
from the Netherlands, which is interesting.
She's at the medical center at the University of Amsterdam.
All the rest of the authors are British, or
at least affiliated with UK universities.
The lead author is in the Netherlands, which is again interesting,
when you're looking into the funding,
the research funding streams into a unit,
the Jenner Institute, where this COVID vaccine
was produced at the University of Oxford.
And then the other very interesting outcome of this paper or conclusion,
is that they tried to collect the information on the project.
So this is all about return of investment for the funding for research.
So it's 20 years for many funding agencies, the European Commission,
remarkably, the British government, the
Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation,
many, many different funders, funding research on this vaccine,
on this kind of basic research that
would eventually result in this vaccine.
The authors complain that there is not
enough transparency about the funding.
They had to file freedom of information
requests to the University of Oxford
in order to collect information on what projects had been funded there
that would eventually result in this vaccine.
I mean, it's a really interesting insight they have.
They say, OK, we can find what the funders were.
So we can find the Wellcome Trust, the UK Research
and Innovation, funding this work on vaccines.
We cannot find how much money they put into specific projects.
We cannot find the Grant numbers.
And the way they did it is they downloaded
all the publications in the last 20
years before the vaccine was produced,
and they tried to analyse the funding acknowledgements over there.
So with regard to what I'm talking about today,
this is to say that this information should be kept
in an institutional research information system.
So there shouldn't be any freedom of
information request needed to collect
that information from the outside
because this is part and parcel of what
open science means, to make all the
information openly available in order
for anybody to be able to collect it and analyse it.
So with regard to current research information systems,
there's this Wikipedia page, only in English,
defining these databases to store,
manage, and exchange contextual metadata
to describe -- to comprehensively describe
the research activity that is typically carried out at an institution.
So this would be an institutional CRISP,
or perhaps funded by a specific funder.
There is a very nice gateway to research funder CRISP in the UK,
collecting all the information on
projects funded by the UK Research and
Innovation, with all the people involved, with all the budgets,
all the Grant numbers, abstracts, publications,
so everything connected to each other,
every research entity connected to each.
other, and providing a very thorough
snapshot of the research funded by the UKRI in this case.
The European Commission also has CORDIS, which
is sort of similar, for EU-funded projects.
The data model underpinning, this is also highlighted on the slide,
underpinning any CRISP systems as a rule is this CERIF,
Common European Research Information Format.
I will show you a snapshot of the data model.
It's a complex data model, but also very comprehensive.
And this allows the information to be
standardized and exchanged and aggregated across systems.
This is critical, because having the
information for one institution is great, but it's not enough.
If you want to look into a specific subject for research,
you would need to pull together all the input,
and this is typically done at a national level,
on national CRISP systems, or at a regional level.
And then you need this interoperability based on the data model.
There's a double function for these platforms,
for these research information management systems.
The first one is providing visibility.
This is kind of the open science side,
or the clearest open science side, of CRISP systems.
It's about showcasing, showing to
the outside world what information --
sorry, what research is being done by whom, funded by what projects,
resulting in what outputs, publications,
data sets, PhD students, you name it.
Anything -- sorry, instruments and
facilities used to provide support to that
research, to collect data sets that underpin publications.
So all these different entities can be
and should be made openly available.
There's a second function there, which is the internal analysis.
So there is a lot of information in these systems that the management
at institutions can typically use to make
decisions, evidence-based decision making.
It's the buzzword.
So if you want to buy new equipment,
you need to know what it is you have, how it's being used.
If you want to hire new researchers,
new staff, you can tell, I don't know,
productivity by a specific department at the university.
All that information is there.
There's a lot of economic information
as well, income from research projects.
It's all in there as a rule.
Not everything is public.
This bit for decision making tends to be hidden.
You don't need to tell people how much
you're spending on APCs, for instance,
even if the information is typically there as well.
These are, again, in a nutshell, the main uses.
CRIS systems are applied to, so research assessments, mostly internal,
research administration, so the proposals,
writing a proposal across departments,
for instance, with the involvement
of the institutional research office.
It's done by the CRIS.
This is another bit that is not public.
It becomes public when the project gets funded, if it gets funded.
And then you start having the early metadata for that,
which will be reused along the project lifecycle.
You have the open science implementation,
which is what I will mostly be talking
about today, so monitoring every single
publication, every single data set, working paper, you name it.
It's all in there.
And then finally, this business intelligence bits,
which I wouldn't know how to translate in Spanish, actually.
If you want to know what companies you
are collaborating with in what economic
sectors, funded by whom, resulting in
what, all the information is there as well.
So that is really useful.
At Strathclyde, we have a lot of collaboration with pharma industry,
and you can look into that and see who is working with whom.
There's lots of postdoc students that
end up working with Glaxo or with Astra
and Seneca, and you can trace how all these
people are being trained by the teams,
and this is arguably a very relevant input from research to society.
So I'm going to be a bit quicker now
because there's quite some ground to cover.
So, again, the SETI data model underpinning
all these systems and enabling this system interoperability is here.
So you can see all these squares on the slide are research entities,
and all of them are connected to each other.
The three core entities, as they're
called, are the ones in green background.
So it's project, person, typically researcher,
and organization, typically the affiliation.
But it can be a funder, for instance, that is also an organization.
And then around that, these are the core
ones, all interlinked with each other.
Around those you have the publications, the equipment.
There's any kind of research-related activity is there.
For instance, yesterday when discussing Quora and research assessment,
there was a mention to lots of activities
that are not currently being taken into account or not too much.
It's all in there, citizen science,
dissemination, engagement with the media, you name it.
It's all in there.
I mean, the data model allows the information to be included in there.
And CRIS systems, so EuroCRIS is there
on the left-hand side of the slide.
Its mission is to promote collaboration within the research information
management community and to advance interoperability through CERIF.
We do events twice a year, membership meetings and CRIS conferences.
And there's a kind of ongoing discussion
on the key role that CRIS systems could
have in providing new indicators for research assessment.
Because all the research activity
peer-reviewed, organizing conferences or
events, lots of things that researchers
do that are normally not taken into
consideration because it's the publications, the Q1, Q2, whatever,
which is at the top of the assessment criteria.
So, yeah, there's been interesting presentations.
There's a repository for EuroCRIS
where all these presentations are kept.
So technical interoperability tends to
be a big topic with regard to CERIF.
If everything is standardized in terms of the data model,
you can easily bring together information from
different systems or exchange information.
So the idea being behind all these CRIS
systems that the information is typed in once only and then reused.
If you need to report to your funder and you're a researcher,
you need to report to the European Commission, what publications,
what data sets, are they open, and so on and so forth.
And you have already created a record
for those in your institutional system.
What's the point in forcing researchers
to do it again for the EC and again for
the UKRI and again for the ORCID profile?
So the idea is that everything can
seamlessly flow the information into the different systems.
On top of that or underpinning that
technical interoperability is the social
or the human interoperability as it's also called.
So CRIS systems typically have a CRIS manager,
but you can see how wide the collection
of departments or units within an
institution is that need to collaborate
in order to run these systems because
there's a lot of work around that.
The library has a lot to do and this
is what I will mostly focus on later.
But finance, all the economic information
goes in there, human resources, the researchers, the information on who
is working for an institution comes from
HR, IT, the project management office,
the research office, the management, and then at the bottom,
the researchers who will typically feed the information in the CRIS.
This is the technical, internal technical
interoperability, all the systems.
This is a Strathclyde snapshot.
We have PURE as our institutional CRIS systems.
This is the software solution.
But what I'm describing here is good for any software solution.
It's just my example from Strathclyde Uni.
You have on the top half all the
institutional systems that feed information
into the CRIS and on the bottom half
all the systems that collect information
from the CRIS, including Strathsbrink's repository.
So all the metadata are pulled from
the CRIS and the whole text as well for
open access implementation purposes.
But other funder portals, ResearchFish is the name of the UK research
and innovation reporting portal for researchers.
All these, as I said, should be interconnected.
We call the CRIS system the one-stop shop for researchers.
Researchers typically don't know that
there is such a thing as a repository.
They just deposit in the CRIS everything,
which is closed, so they don't need to
worry about things getting out there too early.
They just -- and then the library validates everything.
The library is a little bit the gatekeeper for the information.
We know when a specific bit of information can be released.
That was the internal interoperability.
There is also an external technical
interoperability, which typically works for national and regional CRIS.
And this is what I described.
If you are the source of truth for the
information on researchers because you're
hiring them, so it's the university that
knows who is working in what capacity
for them, typically the information should
flow bottom up to feed, for instance,
a national portal or kind of a ministry
portal from the institutions upwards to
an aggregation where duplicates are removed and so on.
And then if the funded projects are
awarded by a national level agency, that's the source of truth.
And then it flows downwards, bottom -- I mean,
top down, into the institutional CRIS system.
So there's a kind of double direction
information exchange between national/regional
research information systems and institutional ones.
This is an interesting -- all this
happens thanks to the standardization.
The SERIF model, anything that allows
the metadata schemas to be common for all
systems, otherwise it's a nightmare to exchange information.
This is an interesting workflow for
research information exchange because it
could also apply to European university
alliances like the one we heard about
yesterday, this Open EU alliance of open universities across Europe.
In this case, it would not be a national/regional CRIS.
It would be an alliance CRIS where you
would have at the bottom the repository
for the open universities in the
Netherlands and open universities in Milton
Keynes in England and UNED and OVERTA Catalunya and so many others.
All of them have repositories.
It would be a question of having a top
aggregation of those repositories, of the
content, to showcase the strength of the alliance as a team.
This is something that other alliances are already exploring.
It can be a CRIS, it can be a repository.
It doesn't really matter.
I would argue that CRIS systems are
better because you can show the expertise
and you can show the people if you
have the information, the profiles, the expertise.
Again, it's more comprehensive, the
projects highlight the projects that the
partners are running together, but a repository is as good as that.
You will focus on publications.
If you have a repository, it's not difficult.
It's just being aware of your strength as an alliance.
So that's an idea I'd like to leave with you.
This is an example for a regional CRIS.
In this case, this is from Flanders,
the Flanders Research Information Space,
FRIS, with the entities they have
collected at a regional level in Belgium.
You can see there, this is the set of
research entities, the researchers, the organizations, the projects,
publications, patents, infrastructures,
equipment, facilities, and data sets,
all pulled together from the different
universities, research centers that feed
FRIS, that feed the regional portal.
There is a hundred-page document
explaining how the information exchange
workflows work, so what metadata elements
are required for each of the research entities, and whenever a Flemish
institution wants to become a data provider,
for FRIS, they have to read those hundred
pages and make sure they will provide
information in the required format.
Not very different from the collector over here or from OpenAIR.
It's a question of standardizing the way
the information is collected and exchanged.
There is this very interesting portal in Spain from the ministry.
It's called SICTI.
As you can see on the slide, it's a very long URL.
I'm not sure I put it in there.
I'd like to highlight these innovation indicators.
This is not strictly a CRIS system.
You don't have a collection of all researchers working in Spain, where,
what projects, but you have other things.
It's more like a top-down approach where
the ministry has a lot of information
and they are making it available openly,
a very good kind of open science practice.
In this case, if you look at these
innovation indicators, they're showing,
for instance, how many spin-offs or
startups are being launched in Spain from
the research institutions or environment.
There's a lot of them.
There's a very nice analysis by regions,
by economic sector, and arguably, I would dare saying this is the
future of the economy in the country.
It's not tourism.
It's this.
So it's really good that some system out
there is collecting this information.
It's a little bit outdated.
Arguably, the ministry knows a lot, but it doesn't know all.
Arguably, the information should be
provided by the institutions themselves.
You could collect that information in
your press, so tell the researchers,
if you've launched a startup, put it in there.
This is really valuable as a research
indicator for an outcome of research
activity, and then feed it to the national
portal, and the information will be
far more comprehensive than what the
ministry is able to collect on their own.
There's much more stuff in there.
I would invite you to take a look if you don't know this portal.
I know patents and how much funding has been
invested in what really, really good stuff.
This is part of the CRIS landscape in Spain.
EuroCRIS maintains this DRIS, this
Directory of Research Information Systems.
You have the URL there.
It has nearly 1,500 systems worldwide.
If you search, I mean, this is the DRIS
map showing where the CRIS systems are.
Mostly you can see Europe there in red.
India is also in red, incidentally, but
there are CRIS systems all around the world.
This is kind of the European snapshot.
Every country has its CRIS infrastructure.
And then this is Spain with an example of
how, when you hover over a given dot on.
the map, you see what CRIS system, what
institution, what URL that dot belongs to.
And this is the search in the DRIS for
Spain, showing 66 CRIS systems as of today.
On the right-hand side of the slide, you have the software solutions.
Everyone is obsessed with the software solutions, as you know.
It's not that important.
The social interoperability is far more important.
To manage to put together an effective
collaboration within the institution
across the people who are dealing with
this so that everyone understands
what the other teams are contributing.
The software solution is, of course, important, but arguably all software
solutions, including the open source
solutions such as Vivo or DSpaceCRIS,
are able to provide the functionality, better or worse.
So there are 66 of them.
Dialnet CRIS is very widespread these days.
It's over half, rather two-thirds of the
systems in Spain, but you have a very
wide collection of systems, of softwares
underpinning these CRIS systems in Spain.
It's not fully comprehensive because we rely on institutions telling us,
"We have launched a CRIS. Can you please put it into the DRIS?
" So if you check and your university is
not there and you have a CRIS system,
there is an online DRIS form on the
EuroCRIS website where you can send us the
basic, the minimally sufficient metadata
for a new entry to be added in there.
This kind of regional CRIS systems
are a portal a la recerca, Catalunya.
It's one of the kind of most inspiring CRIS systems.
There is also this one.
In terms of regional CRIS systems, this is fairly new.
I would say it's perhaps the best CRIS in Spain.
It's from Andalusia.
It's about health.
It's a subject-based CRIS, and you
can see again on the slide the sort of
information they are collecting across the region.
So the organizations, the centers, as
they call them, the research groups,
researchers, projects, clinical trials, publications, and patents.
And then you can see at the bottom of the
screenshot, it says, "Reports and data,
access of the global data for research
and innovation in health within the
public health system in Andalusia from 2018 to 2023.
" This is really gold dust.
There's a lot of very valuable information, again, on startups,
startups launched by academics, collaborations with industry,
who is using the equipment, what degree
of openness there is around clinical trials, everything is in there.
And then if you have this sort of
news, as they are happening ever more
frequently because of the climate change
or whatever, this is the portal where
you can find who is doing research on
this kind of African virus in the region
in order to make sure there is some awareness about who could work to
provide a solution for this issue with infections.
Same as I was mentioning at the beginning around COVID.
It's hospitals in there.
It's not just a university.
OpenAIR tends to focus on universities, research centers.
Here, because it's health, you have
primary care, primary care establishments.
You have hospitals.
You have a wide range of institutions
that are providing the data for this CRIS system.
So in terms of the use of CRIS to
support open access and open science, this is a bit of a snapshot.
I'm not going into too much detail
around this, starting with Eva Mendez's
drawing, data 2017, on what open science encompasses.
You know what it is, but it's in there.
So citizen science is there at the top, but open
access, open data, open software, text and data mining.
So the CRIS will support some of this,
perhaps not all of this, or not yet,
but it's providing, as I'll show, a fairly comprehensive
record of the research activity at an institution.
So regarding records for publications, which are critical,
these are created by researchers very early
on in the process, often before submission.
You have statuses for publication records
in the CRIS that read "In preparation.
" So they know what they are going to submit.
They know the title, the working title, at least for the manuscript.
They know who the authors will be,
and you can often see that very early,
drop them a line to tell them, "Hey, depending on where you're planning
to submit this, these are your options for open access," or,
"Please make sure you deposit the data
sets there as well, if there is a data set.
" So these records are closed, as a rule.
Thank you.
They're always validated by librarians
within the institutional open access
teams, and the validation typically
includes completing a lot of metadata
elements that researchers don't know about or don't know how to add,
such as link to funded projects, to
data sets, to equipment and facilities, et cetera.
So this is an example.
I'm going to go quite briefly through here for a publication.
This is a scientific reports paper with date of acceptance.
There is a mandate for deposits in the UK connected to the REF,
to the Research Excellence Framework,
whereby the deposit of the accepted author manuscript, the IAM,
is mandatory no longer than three months from acceptance.
This is the paper in scientific reports.
It's an open access paper.
This is typically the authors.
This is a different paper, but I just wanted to show you.
This is a collaboration with industry.
Actually, you have Scottish Power.
You have the last two authors are in our ocean engineering departments,
but then you have a number of companies, energy
companies, typically in Scotland, in Germany.
This is the sort of research graph you can analyze to see the academia
industry collaboration, where is it happening.
This is the link within the record to the
funded project there and to the data set.
So all is in there, all is linked to everything else,
and this is what allows you to capture that research graph.
This is an example for the interlinking of
the set of entities, in this case projects.
We're pulling the thread of the projects.
This is a Verizon 2020 project in electronic engineering.
You have the project information there, including
the budget, including the research partners,
and then you can check the publications
in the CRES that the researchers have created as a rule upon
acceptance, typically or even before.
There are 56 papers.
It's both articles and conference papers and other things that can be
transferred to the Cordis, to the participant
portal at the European Commission.
And then you have the data sets as well.
Often the data sets are common for
different papers, but they are there,
and they should also be -- it should also be
possible to transfer them to the funders portal.
Research facilities is another piece of
the research graph where you can pull.
This is a hydrodynamics laboratory at Strathclyde,
and you can search in the CRES what
publications are acknowledging the use
of that specific research facility.
And you find student theses and you
find articles and you find data sets.
So all is there.
And making it openly available is kind of open science at its best.
In terms of supporting open access, the read and publish deals are
increasingly used by researchers to make
their papers go to open access at no cost for them.
And there is an example here.
There is a database where you can see
for a given journal title whether it's
covered by any of the read and publish
deals that you're running at the university.
So we're seeing ever more frequently researchers,
especially early career researchers, writing to
us and saying, "I want to publish this paper.
Can you tell me where to submit the
manuscript in order to get go to open
access at no cost because I have no money?"
And then they send you five titles and you can tell them these ones are
covered by the read and publish agreements.
These ones would require payment.
So you can tell them and recommend them where
to publish, which is arguably really useful.
An example of the sorts of monitoring we do,
this is the Springer Compact running for nearly ten years already.
This information on what departments are publishing in what journals,
all of that is available for every
read and publish agreement that we run.
And then you have a bit in the bibliographic records for a publication
where you can collect the APC, the money that you're paying for a given
publication so that you can collect information from the CRIS.
Willem mentioned rights attention yesterday.
We have an institutional rights
attention policy, same as, I don't know,
about 30 universities in the UK, meaning
that when gold open access is not
an option, we apply immediate green, no embargo periods anymore.
It has kicked in on the 1st of January
this year and it's fascinating to be
able to do it and to talk to researchers about this.
I mean we're forcing researchers in
social sciences and humanities to wait
two years before making their AAM openly available.
That's unacceptable.
And it's their papers, as Willem mentioned yesterday.
So we haven't had any backlash from the publisher so far.
Not good.
There is a way to classify the rights
attention papers so that we can know what it is we're publishing.
It's roughly 100 papers already this year that are being made openly
available, the accepted manuscript, the post print as it's also called,
on day one upon publication, which is arguably good news for the
researchers, especially if they cannot
follow the gold open access route.
The data access statements are also in there.
There's a way to collect information in CRIS systems.
This is one example for rights attention,
the general one, as we call them.
There is a funder rights attention, the Wellcome
Trust or the UKRI impose rights attention as a route.
So we're kind of piggybacking on top of the funders policies.
This is plan S, essentially.
Finally, this is I think my last slide, a few conclusions.
CRIS systems are key instruments to
implement open access and open science,
particularly from a reporting perspective.
So all the information is in there.
The library has this comprehensive overview on what's happening,
where in terms of publications, very early,
we use from academics saying can you pay this if I get this manuscript
submitted there and it gets accepted.
So you build a trust relationship with researchers.
If we eventually at some point in the
future want to tell them to please
publish more often in Open Research Europe or in Diamond journals,
this trust relationship will be critical
where academics trust the library
because we have been counselling them for years.
So this ability to see the information is very useful.
Some of the main strengths of CRIS systems are summarised there.
The closeness in this case is paradoxically useful because researchers
are not afraid of depositing very early manuscripts.
You need to keep in mind they're building
their career on these publications.
So if they give you a submitted manuscript
that hasn't even been peer reviewed,
they need to be sure that this will not be shown because of the priority
considerations that Remy mentioned yesterday.
Because the library validates everything,
it's easy for us to keep track on what is open and what is not open.
But they are happy to share very early stage outputs with us as a rule.
The Serif data model is critical for allowing
these research graphs to be put together.
The interoperability that Serif makes possible is also critical.
I mean you would have regional or national
portals built on top of the institutional ones.
And finally, there are research portals,
there are expert finder systems.
Typically, if you want to find somebody
to collaborate with in the topic,
say antimicrobial resistance, you're working in that area,
you can see who is an expert at whatever
institution you're interested in by looking into the CRIS.
And this allows these research
collaborations to happen also with industry.
If companies are able to see what instruments you have,
they may knock on your door for their tests.
They want to test their product or whatever.
They will knock on your door, "Can I use your equipment, please?"
Which is something that funders who have paid a lot of money for these
equipments will be very happy to see.
So you will eventually need to report to funders who have paid for the
equipment on the facility who is using these equipments.
That's it from me.
Thank you so much and happy to take any questions now.
[Pause for responses]
Well, I have two questions.
The first one is the pros and cons of using
-- I've seen you in the slide use Pure.
Pure is a commercial one.
And the pros and cons of using the commercial software for the CRIS.
And the second question, and this is more important for me,
is that what has been the experience
regarding the retention rights policy of the York University?
Because -- or how have you implemented?
Because, I mean, you can see a publisher,
yes, I have this policy, but how?
Thank you for the question.
So on the first one, it's a good product.
That's my main concern.
If we have -- so I mentioned the open source solutions, Bevo, DSpace,
and DSpace-CRIS, they're not -- at
the moment, they're not yet as good as Pure is.
There was a project in Spain, Hercules, trying to put together a public
CRIS system that would be used by all universities.
This was Gruet.
And a lot of European money to fund for that -- to fund that project.
Nothing came out of it.
This is the issue with -- so from a pragmatic perspective,
I would rather use a commercial solution.
I will make sure it's not a black box.
So we have means to make everything open.
Arguably, all these publications,
all these publication records are our records, it's our information.
Why do we need it to buy from Scopus or from the Web of Science?
It's our information.
If we were able to find a way to put this information out as a community,
this would be -- and this is what OpenAlex is about, actually.
So I'm fine with the Elsevier product because it's a good product.
If there is a better -- not all my colleagues are that happy with Pure.
If we get to a point where we have a similarly good approach from the
public sector, be it open source or
otherwise, I'd be more than happy to switch.
But for the moment, I'm happy about that.
On the rights attention, there is a
workflow that all universities in the
UK that have an institutional rights attention policy have followed.
So you need to notify the publishers
officially that you are adopting this policy so that they know.
No one typically replies, but you send them the notification,
and then you start implementing this.
You tell your researchers that they can opt out.
Bill mentioned yesterday three or four opt-outs in Tromso.
In the first two years, we have seen none.
No opt-outs.
You need to explain to them that the Plan S, the coalition as funders,
including the UKRI and the Welcome in
the UK plus the European Commission, are all behind this approach.
So it's -- I mean, the funders' policies.
There's nothing the publishers can do about that.
They're not happy.
Not all of them are happy.
But we make sure that researchers know
what it is we're doing and why we're
doing it, and typically they will be on your side.
And do the researchers tell the
publishers at the submission or when they are accepted?
So originally, you know how rights
attention was adopted by coalition as funders.
There was a two-line rights attention statement.
For the purposes of open access, the author applies a Creative Commons
CCBY license to any manuscript arising from this submission.
So this is something they would typically include when they had funded
projects by the UKRI, by the Welcome, by the European Commission,
or any other coalition as funder that has adopted these policies.
Once you have an institutional rights
attention policy, that's not needed anymore.
It's something we are applying by default.
This is Edinburgh Uni pioneering the work.
There are presentations online by Theo and Drew, by Dominic Tate,
including at Tromso Uni, explaining
how this works in detail and critically
providing some information on how many
publications they have applied this to in the first year, what license.
Sometimes, especially in the social sciences,
you know, CCBY is a little bit controversial.
So if they want a CCBY-NC, it's fine.
If they want a CCBY-CND, it's fine.
What we want is the accepted manuscript
to be available out there from day one.
No embargo period.
It's nonsense, the embargo period.
Thank you.
Nice to see that it works.
I hope there will be examples in Spain as well, eventually.
I don't know if there are any more questions.
Nothing?
No one else wants to speak right now?
Okay.
Then we'll continue.
Thank you very much, Pablo.