A collaborative journey to enhance a 360-degree Open Access (OA) strategy and support the end-to-end author experience!
The University of Lausanne (UNIL) is a mid-sized university based in Switzerland and home to approx. 15,600 students and seven faculties. UNIL is a research-intensive institution, especially aimed toward three overall subject areas: human and social sciences, life science and medicine, and environmental science.
UNIL is devoted to the Open Science (OS) movement to improve the quality of science and making research more transparent and inclusive. As such, the university’s approach to develop Open Science encircles clear OA efforts for both publications and research data – this includes the aim of creating an outstanding 360-degree support throughout its different OA roads that include gold, green, platinum, and hybrid.
OA is transforming the research environment, affecting the possibilities for sharing and accessing research. New challenges are emerging, new questions are being raised. At UNIL, the challenges were evident as different requests started coming in, interfering with workflows, and creating time-consuming obstacles.
The researchers were overwhelmed by different deals and agreements, making it particularly difficult to see through which agreements they were eligible for:
Weighed down by these challenges, UNIL searched for a more optimal solution to better manage its centralized OA funds, automate the monitoring of its OA agreements, and obtain better, all-round OA support to simplify and ease the workflows for the researchers.
Put differently, UNIL was on the lookout for a proper OA friendly solution or service that could cater for all types of Open Access and help substantiate seamless workflows, save time, and, most importantly, allow the researchers to focus all their attention to their work.
In late 2021, UNIL embarked on a collaborative journey with ChronosHub to help with more efficient management of UNIL’s OA funds and efforts. As part of the initial phase, ChronosHub will assist UNIL with a public Journal Finder featuring more than 45,000 journals. With the Journal Finder, UNIL’s researchers have the opportunity to browse through various journals to see which publishing routes are compliant with funding policies relative to UNIL’s own publishing agreements. As such, a part of the first step in the collaboration is to manage requests and eligibility of UNIL’s gold OA fund that they have the ambition to optimize.
The next step in the collaboration is to help reduce UNIL’s administrative workload further by using ChronosHub to fully automate data collection and eligibility checks of accepted articles that are part of UNIL’s OA agreements.
This will provide the administrators with a simplified approach and a collective platform to monitor and manage publisher agreements as well as gain access to important data and analytics on all published articles. Moreover, ChronosHub will also assist UNIL with article processing charges (APC) handling to help automate payments and enhance management of repository submissions which, ultimately, will eliminate the burden of costly administration and free up the team to lots of other important activities.
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