Life in the FASt Lane: Speedy Workflows for Providing a Faculty Assisted Submission (FAS) Service for Your IR

Including faculty papers in your repository is an essential function of an IR, but it can be tough to manage the solicitation and review of previously published materials. What can we legally add to faculty collections? Are there any requirements for posting? Can you rely on faculty to submit their work and comply with publisher policies? At the University of Pennsylvania, we have been developing workflows and processes to systematically run permissions on faculty CVs and upload them to Penn’s IR, ScholarlyCommons. Through our Faculty Assisted Submission (FAS) service, we are maximizing the libraries’ ability to support faculty works in the repository with as little effort as possible for the faculty member and the IR manager. Now in the second year of this program, we have quadrupled the number of faculty papers submitted since the first year, adding thousands to our collections. By leveraging free tools and common Library purchases, we have expanded the breadth of participation and fostered a growing sense of faculty interest in participating in Penn’s IR. All of this has been achieved by implementing a comprehensive training program for student workers and external administrators with oversight from a two-person scholarly communications team. While this program is by no means completely effortless, by investing heavily in the training of student workers up front, we have engaged students in scholarly communication literacy and provided the library with a mechanism for reliable ingestion of faculty materials into the IR. In this presentation, we will provide our shareable resources and give a step-by-step overview of our training module, permissions process, and ingestion workflows. We will discuss some of the challenges we still face and how you can leverage these approaches for your own institution