Challenges in Coding Information on Article Processing Charges (APCs) into Institutional Systems

Abstract

An increasing number of research funders in different countries are choosing to support the Gold Open Access (OA) route (i.e. obtaining immediate access to research outputs through their publication in Open Access journals) via the allocation of Gold OA Funds to institutions. This has led institutional libraries and Research Offices to undertake a new role within their wide research support activity, namely providing researchers the required information on the available funding for OA publishing and the ways to meet the funders' requirements. The payment of Article processing Charges (APCs) to publishers as a means to ensure that the research outputs are made OA is a key part of this support process that institutions are gradually adding to their previous work for supporting the Green route to OA, i.e. the population and maintenance of their institutional repositories.

This contribution aims to present the EC/OpenAIRE Gold OA Pilot, a new Gold OA funding instrument that has very recently been launched across the European Union. The international scope of this new OA Fund -- which will provide funding to post-grant FP7 projects -- means there will be a need to address very different funding landscapes in as balanced a way as possible, ranging from countries where the APC-based Gold OA model is very well-established to whole regions where it will be a rather new model.

One of the main challenges that APC management in pioneering countries like the UK, The Netherlands or Germany has raised is the extreme difficulty of coding the APC information into existing research information management systems at institutions. Neither repositories nor CRIS systems are currently able to process an information that combines the bibliographic and the financial data, thus requiring a very solid system interoperability with the institutional Finance Module that is simply not there at the moment. Most institutions are subsequently choosing to code in their APC information into bespoke spreadsheets and databases, which will often turn APC management into a time-consuming exercise.

As part of the work aimed to promote technical alignment in APC management across countries and institutions, the OpenAIRE Gold OA Pilot has brought together a pool of institutions from different countries in order to examine how to best address this issue.