HHuLOA Open Access Good Practice pathfinder project final report

The Universities of Hull, Huddersfield, and Lincoln are three medium-sized UK Higher Education institutions. Each university has a growing research portfolio and, like other universities, each has been active in supporting open access (OA) for many years. All are institutions seeking to develop their research capability and reputation further. Recognising this commonality between the three universities, a successful joint bid was made to the Jisc Open Access Good Practice Pathfinder programme as the HHuLOA (Hull, Huddersfield, Lincoln Open Access) project. The project’s aim was to work collaboratively to identify how OA support mechanisms can be used to assist with the development of research; we all also wished to develop our open access processes, comply with external policy drivers, and help to communicate and embed open access locally. Recognising the desire not to duplicate activity and also benefit from each other’s input, we sought to work together to achieve more than the sum of the institutions’ individual developments. The HHuLOA project addressed a number of themes, each a component of the broader aim: • Establishing a baseline of what institutions are doing to support open access, capturing information from a group of institutions and sharing this openly • Investigating a means of facilitating better navigation of funder open access policies so their terms can be met • Developing open access lifecycles from different stakeholder perspectives • Exploring how open access can be managed across institutional stakeholders, including research support offices • Understanding how open access might be embedded within e-resource management processes to aid local streamlining of workflows To achieve this, the project was broken up into a number of work packages. Each institution took the lead on two to three of these, taking on the bulk of the work but always with the ongoing input and feedback from the partners to crosscheck the direction of the work and co-review progress. None of the partners would have pursued the individual work packages outside the project without help from the others to encourage and support the effort undertaken. Throughout the project, the HHuLOA team also felt that many pairs of eyes were crucial to the project’s success. Therefore, a number of the work packages were crowd sourced. The team was influenced by other projects and used open access and project listservs, the project blog, a number of conferences and seminars, and two workshops held in June 2015 and May 2016 to harness this collective intelligence