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Location
Room A
Presentation Type
Poster
Start Date
28-4-2022 3:50 PM
Description
In October 2014, the IUPUI Faculty Council adopted a rights retention, opt out, open access policy. In short, the faculty retained their rights to their scholarly articles and agreed to make the accepted manuscripts available in the institutional repository (IR) or to opt out for each article that they do not make available. IUPUI’s University Library was charged with implementing the policy. The library agreed to deposit works in the IR on behalf of authors when a suitable version can be found or when authors supply one. In 2015, the library developed an open access policy website that explained the policy and gave authors a streamlined web form for participating. Authors can login to the website and deposit or opt out to get a waiver. In addition, on the same site, the library developed a webform to enable the library to send email notifications to authors. These emails notify authors that their specific article has not yet been deposited or opted out and ask the faculty member to participate in the policy accordingly. If authors do not respond, they also receive two reminder notifications. For the first few years of the policy implementation, the response rate per article hovered above 40% but began to decline in 2019. In addition, many authors responded to the notifications incorrectly--for example, by sending the publisher’s final published article instead of the accepted manuscript. To address these issues, the library decided to revisit the language of the notification emails. This poster reports on the results of a randomized comparison of two versions of the notifications. We found that the new language increased the response rate to the notifications. Elements of the email notifications could be repurposed for any institutional repository’s outreach strategy. The specific differences between the old and the new email notifications will be shared and full text versions will be available for adaptation and reuse.
Poster
Open Access Policy Notifications: What Language Works?
Room A
In October 2014, the IUPUI Faculty Council adopted a rights retention, opt out, open access policy. In short, the faculty retained their rights to their scholarly articles and agreed to make the accepted manuscripts available in the institutional repository (IR) or to opt out for each article that they do not make available. IUPUI’s University Library was charged with implementing the policy. The library agreed to deposit works in the IR on behalf of authors when a suitable version can be found or when authors supply one. In 2015, the library developed an open access policy website that explained the policy and gave authors a streamlined web form for participating. Authors can login to the website and deposit or opt out to get a waiver. In addition, on the same site, the library developed a webform to enable the library to send email notifications to authors. These emails notify authors that their specific article has not yet been deposited or opted out and ask the faculty member to participate in the policy accordingly. If authors do not respond, they also receive two reminder notifications. For the first few years of the policy implementation, the response rate per article hovered above 40% but began to decline in 2019. In addition, many authors responded to the notifications incorrectly--for example, by sending the publisher’s final published article instead of the accepted manuscript. To address these issues, the library decided to revisit the language of the notification emails. This poster reports on the results of a randomized comparison of two versions of the notifications. We found that the new language increased the response rate to the notifications. Elements of the email notifications could be repurposed for any institutional repository’s outreach strategy. The specific differences between the old and the new email notifications will be shared and full text versions will be available for adaptation and reuse.
Comments
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0
This recording also includes the Q&A session for all SMIRC 2022 poster presentations.