Jisc and Elsevier collaborate on open access compliance

Jisc and Elsevier have signed an agreement setting out how they will work together to support institutions to comply with UK open access policies, as part of their Open Science partnership.

The two organisations share a commitment to help institutions implement the open access eligibility criteria for the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Using Elsevier’s ScienceDirect article and journal-level metadata, such as article acceptance date, embargo date, and grant/funder IDs, Jisc’s Publications Router service will be able to support UK institutions more efficiently and comprehensively identify UK-published articles at various stages of the publication process. 

Institutions will be able to access this metadata via Elsevier’s APIs directly within their institutional repository or can get tailored feeds via the Jisc Publications Router. Subsequently institutions can ingest metadata into library systems and repositories giving institutions greater insight into their researchers’ publishing activities—empowering them to take steps to comply with open access policies. Jisc and Elsevier anticipate further opportunities for this kind of collaboration.

'This agreement marks an expansion of our existing partnership with Jisc by working with them on another area of importance to UK institutions,' said Gemma Hersh, vice president of global policy at Elsevier. 'We are committed to working with all stakeholders to support platform interoperability and compliance with open access policies and are pleased to be able to use our technology infrastructure to enhance the discoverability of research outputs.'

Bill Hubbard, Head of Scholarly Communications Support at Jisc, added: 'Integrating ScienceDirect APIs into the Jisc Publications Router automates and accelerates what used to be a very manual and cumbersome process. The Router supports UK institutions to more easily comply with the approaching REF21 assessment – as well as with open access and funding body compliance more broadly. This project addresses several of our most pressing needs around identifying and gathering article metadata across UK research institutions. We’re pleased to work with Elsevier to deliver this service to our members.'