Enlightening the World: service developments in open access at the University of Glasgow

Abstract

The University of Glasgow’s institutional repository, Enlighten, has been providing open access to researcher’s outputs since 2002 through our Eprints platform of Enlighten Open services. As the landscape of open access has progressed over the last 10 years, the services and support offered to academic staff has grown. In 2007 there were 5 members of staff involved in supporting Enlighten with 443 records deposited compared to 2017 with 12,866 records deposited and 15 staff regularly working with Enlighten. The Enlighten team now regularly add records on behalf of academic staff from various sources such as author lists, ORCID and database searches which leads to a better experience for academic staff. Through our mediated deposit model, higher quality records are maintained by metadata and open access specialists, who are able to ensure accuracy, check publisher copyright policies and conform to funder open access requirements. The challenges faced with this method have been around for a long time including clarity of publisher copyright policies, date compliance issues and demands on limited resources. However, we have better support now from regular collaboration with colleagues at other institutions and the open access community as a whole, improved SHERPA services and greater author awareness. Enlighten has developed as the open access movement has grown to provide a user-friendly service and provide the world with full access to over 20,000 outputs. Future developments including greater interoperability with local systems to streamline the process for support staff and enhancing the value of information for academic staff are key to future service provision.