EPSRC mandate - working closely with Research Office staff

Research Office staff can play an important role in publicising repository deposit. The relationship between repository staff and research support staff is a key one which should be nurtured. It's great that we have direct research support representation on the RePosit team (Ellie from Keele) as this brings an important different perspective to our work - but also provides a good route to information which may naturally come the way of the Research Office but may or may not make it as far as the Library. The recent EPSRC mandate is a good example. The EPSRC open access policy is not new, but it has been revised recently. There is a prominent and imminent date on the policy which has made institutions sit up and take notice (true of EPSRC's open access publication policy and their data management policy). There's some interesting psychology in that. In addition, the EPSRC has written to all University VCs to publicise their policy.

From a deposit/RePosit point of view at the University of Leeds, the Research Office has take the opportunity to publicise the EPSRC policy on the staff intranet and in a direct email to all EPSRC grant holders. We (repository staff) were able to confirm deposit via Symplectic meets the green route requirements and we provided relevant text for the email to grant holders. Because the EPSRC policy is flexible and allows recipients to choose whether to comply via the gold route or green self-archiving route, we can gave a straightforward message to grant hodlers. Yes, deposit into White Rose Research Online meets your funder requirements. There is no cost to you . Here's how you do it. The EPSRC email provided a great way to reach academics directly and show our relevance to them - and to work closely with our Research Office. Whether it will have a significant impact on deposit - we'll see!