Applying Fair Principles to Scholarly Publishing Outputs to Improve Open Access Compliance

While the FAIR Principles were developed for research data, they can also be aptly applied to other research outputs. Applying FAIR Principles to scholarly publications ensures research can easily be found, accessed, used and re-purposed by others. Using these principles in the context of scholarly publishing helps facilitate access to publications by other researchers and the wider community. The existing services and infrastructure, provided by The University of Queensland Library Scholarly Communication & Repository Services (SCARS) team, supports practical implementation of some of the FAIR Principles in scholarly publishing. The Scholarly Publishing, Research Outputs & Impact, and UQ eSpace (institutional repository) teams from SCARS recently assisted a Research Centre with open access (OA) reporting. During the time the Centre was in operation the funder renewed their Open Access Policy mandating that all research outputs be made openly accessible within twelve months. This necessitated that the Centre had to approach the task of OA reporting retrospectively. The Research Outputs and Impact team provided metrics on how many publications by the researchers from the Centre were already available via open access at that time, predominantly via Gold OA. The Scholarly Publishing team provided advisory support on Green OA strategies to improve compliance. A project was undertaken by the Centre to identify and obtain author accepted manuscripts, which were then assessed by staff in the UQ eSpace team and uploaded to the repository in accordance with relevant copyright restrictions and embargo periods. As a result of the project, the Centre optimised their level of OA compliance, with over 92% of their publications recorded as OA at the time of completion of the work done with the UQ Library. This paper will demonstrate the practical methods employed by the SCARS teams that supported the Centre’s OA publishing efforts and the implementation of FAIR Principles. It will also discuss some of the work yet to be done to enhance Library systems and processes to better support all FAIR Principles