Open Access Policy Notifications: What Language Works?

In October 2014, the IUPUI Faculty Council adopted a rights retention, opt out, open access policy. In short, the faculty retain rights to their scholarly articles and agree to make the accepted manuscripts available in the institutional repository (IR) or to opt out for each article that they do not make available. IUPUI’s University Library was charged with implementing the policy. The library agreed to deposit works in the IR on behalf of authors when a suitable version can be found or when authors supply one. In 2015, the library developed an open access policy website that explained the policy and gave authors a streamlined webform for participation. Authors can login to the website to either deposit, opt out, or complete a waiver. In addition, on the same site, the library developed a webform to enable the staff to send email notifications to authors. These emails notify authors that their specific article has not yet been deposited or opted out and ask the authors to participate in the policy accordingly. If authors do not respond, they receive two reminder notifications. For the first few years of the policy implementation, the response rate per article hovered above 40% but began to decline in 2019. Compounding this, many authors responded to the notifications incorrectly--for example, by sending the publisher’s final published article instead of the accepted manuscript. To address these issues, the library decided to revisit the language of the notification emails. This poster reports on the results of a randomized comparison of two versions of the notifications