Whilst this is an exciting time for Iowa State as it pursues its objectives of supporting open access research, the strategy is not without its difficulties, particularly in a world where scholarly communications business models are in a transitionary period.
Iowa State currently has around 20 open access agreements with publishers covering various models and there are challenges around reporting and communications.
Curtis noted that some publishers have their own open access dashboard where you can see what has been published under the various agreements, but many publishers do not and they rely on sending spreadsheets to their customers. He notes, “we currently have 20 agreements which cover about 20% of Iowa State’s corresponding authored article output. When we get to 100% the reporting and management of the agreements will just become untenable unless we have robust systems in place.”
That is where Curtis believes the OA Switchboard comes into its own.
