sept17_b.indd C&RL News September 2017 432 In February 2016, the Florida State Uni-versity (FSU) Faculty Senate passed an institutional Open Access (OA) Policy by unanimous vote,1 following the lead of many public and private universities across the United States. This was the culmination of many years of outreach and advocacy by OA champions at FSU, with a diverse, talented team of faculty and librarians mak- ing significant contributions along the way. This was also just one instance of a growing trend across North America and globally, with impressive growth in the number of OA policies and mandates adopted by re- search organizations and funders over the past decade. The adoption of an OA policy still presents many challenges with respect to policy compliance,2 and there are open questions about the long-term impact of different OA policy requirements and imple- mentation models.3 At the same time, OA policy adoption remains an important goal for many institutions, a symbolic affirma- tion of faculty support for the principles of OA. An OA policy can help an institution raise the profile of its institutional repository (IR), invigorate outreach efforts and content recruitment, and, in the case of Harvard Model policies, safeguard the author rights of its faculty.4 Leaving aside the challenges and open questions for a moment, I’d like to share a little bit about the road to OA policy adoption and implementation at FSU. By reflecting on some of the factors that paved the way to our successful vote, as well as the nature of the work that followed, my hope is that our experience might help or encourage those who are considering or working toward adopting a policy at their own institutions. Outreach Outreach and advocacy are the bread and butter of any effort to pass an OA policy, and remain critically important even af- ter a policy has been adopted. There is a wealth of literature on successful outreach strategies, including the concise, bulleted wisdom distilled in the Harvard Open Ac- cess Project wiki,5 a variety of in-depth case studies,6 and a comprehensive cross-institu- tional survey.7 At FSU, OA policy outreach efforts date back at least to 2010, when Micah Vandegrift led a team of faculty and librarians to draft and advocate for a Faculty Senate OA Reso- lution, which was adopted by unanimous vote in October 2011. The resolution was mild by design: purposely intended to raise awareness and whet the appetite for OA Devin Soper On passing an open access policy at Florida State University From outreach to implementation scholarly communication Devin Soper is scholarly communication librarian at Florida State University, email: dsoper@fsu.edu © 2017 Devin Soper September 2017 433 C&RL News at FSU, it was the opening act of a longer play that was always building toward the adoption of a more fulsome rights-retention policy. The resolution was followed by five years of strategic OA outreach and advo- cacy, spurred largely by the establishment of a strong scholarly communication program at FSU Libraries.8 Our Faculty Senate task force on scholarly communication also con- tinued to meet annually, working on policy development and outreach materials while the university awaited the appointment of a new provost. In light of this strong foundation, when it came time to mount a final charge in the fall of 2015, w e s a w n o n e e d f o r a campus-wide outreach ini- tiative, decid- i n g i n s t e a d to focus on e n g a g i n g with key in- dividuals and groups, and calling on our many faculty champions to h e l p g a l v a - nize their col- leagues. We made sure to present and clear the policy with FSU’s Faculty Senate Library and Steer- ing Committees, provost, legal counsel, and Faculty Union Executive Committee, and we sent targeted outreach emails to individual faculty senators and longtime supporters of OA on campus. When the day of the vote arrived, we felt confident that almost everyone in the room had been apprised of the proposed policy and given all the information they needed to make a decision. In the end, while the success of our initiative owed much to the strong background of OA advocacy on our campus, it all came down to a few key meet- ings with the main stakeholders, and to the crucial moment when we took the stage to present the policy to Senate. Community-driven momentum Throughout our efforts to adopt and im- plement a policy, we benefitted immensely from the scores of institutions that have passed campus OA policies since 2008. These policies have been around for a while, and the pioneers have shared a rich trove of information on how they made it happen and how they plan to make it work.9 The community of OA policy insti- tutions has expanded to include all kinds of schools, with steady growth in the number of schools with rights- r e t e n t i o n policies spe- cifically, and even stron- ger growth in OA policy a d o p t i o n rates across the United States more generally.10 Important to mention is the Coalition of OA Policy I n s t i t u t i o n s (COAPI), which has 94 members to date and is dedicated to sharing information and expertise to support institutions at all stages of OA policy development and implementation.11 FSU has been a COAPI member since 2012, and the generous support of our fel- low members has been invaluable, provid- ing expert guidance on many aspects of our work to adopt and now implement a policy. In September 2016, COAPI launched a pub- lic toolkit of OA policy resources,12 which includes a wealth of reusable materials and documentation, making it easier than ever for interested institutions to bootstrap their own OA policy initiatives. The sheer size of Data adapted from HOAP list of Harvard-model, rights-retention OA policies. ROARMAP: http://roarmap.eprints.org/view/coun- try/840.html. C&RL News September 2017 434 the OA policy community can itself be an effective talking point when promoting a policy, with the growing list of institutional policies providing ample precedent and a range of peer and aspirational comparators —another recurring theme during our final push to pass a policy at FSU. And, of course, all of this is playing out in the midst of federal public access policies coming into force, at once raising aware- ness across the board and spurring unprec- edented institutional interest in public access compliance. This momentum at the federal level also feeds nicely into efforts to promote and implement campus OA policies, which provide an opportunity to develop public access compliance as a service, encouraging faculty to submit their accepted manuscripts to the IR and have the library take care of depositing in funder-specified repositories, as needed. Policy implementation The year following the adoption of our policy was full of exciting projects, partner- ships, and accomplishments that contribut- ed to the growth of our repository services. Many of these developments would not have been possible without the adoption of our policy, and the others would not have been accomplished in such a short period of time without the impetus of en- acting our implementation plan. The scope of this column precludes a detailed discus- sion of our policy implementation efforts, but here are the highlights: • formation of a new faculty advisory board to ensure ongoing faculty oversight of implementation efforts; • ongoing outreach and promotion, including visits to department meetings, video interviews with faculty champions, and news items in campus communication channels; • updating legal documentation, includ- ing author deposit agreements, repository legal agreements, copyright transfer adden- dum, and policy waiver letter; • launching a new website to house policy-related information and resources ;13 • collaboration with FSU’s Office of Re- search on a complementary university policy on public access to research publications (adopted July 2016);14 • notifying more than 500 academic publishers to strengthen the license granted to FSU by our faculty, and also to give publishers the opportunity to adapt their own policies; • expanding our team to handle in- creased faculty deposits, culminating in the recruitment of a new repository specialist in February 2017; • collaboration with FSU’s Office of Faculty Development and Advancement on web services that enable faculty to initiate IR deposits directly from their faculty CV system; • developing workflows to harvest bibliographic information for FSU-authored articles, automatically check publishers’ article-sharing policies, and either ingest final versions or solicit accepted manuscripts per terms of applicable policies;15 and • automated harvesting of article manu- scripts available in funder repositories, such as PubMed Central. Although these projects were couched in terms of OA policy implementation, they all contributed to our libraries’ longstanding goals of increasing faculty awareness and use of our repository services. In the 12 months following the adoption of the policy, the number of full-text articles added to our repository (626) surpassed the total number of articles added prior to the policy (406) —a 54% increase in the total collection and a 364% increase over the average annual deposit rate of 172 articles. This growth is still just a drop in the bucket. According to data from FSU’s fac- ulty CV system, our faculty published 2,354 articles in 2016, so the 626 articles added to our repository in the year following policy adoption represents a deposit rate of approximately 27%. That said, it is still early days yet, and we are confident that September 2017 435 C&RL News our deposit rate will continue to improve once we fully operationalize the workflows we have developed to identify, harvest, and solicit articles at scale. Implications In the United States, where institutional OA policies typically have no compli- ance mechanisms and are not linked to the research evaluation process (the Liège model),16 merely adopting a policy is un- likely to dramatically increase article deposit rates, as faculty have little more incentive to comply than authors at schools without policies. When policy adoption is followed by concerted efforts to support successful implementation, however, our experience suggests that OA policy initiatives can sig- nificantly increase deposit rates and lead to a variety of other positive outcomes. Although many of the initiatives that con- tributed to our increased deposit rate could have been undertaken in the absence of a policy, the adoption of our policy provided a strong impetus to advance these initiatives in a short period of time, in addition to giving us previously unprecedented access to campus- wide communication channels, attracting in- terest in collaboration from campus partners, and securing much-needed resources to grow our repository services. Perhaps the most significant of these poli- cy-dependent outcomes is the license granted by our faculty that permits FSU to exercise the copyright in their articles, which was an important enabling factor in the development of our new deposit workflows, and which presents an opportunity for our institution to play a more active role in safeguarding the author rights of its faculty in future. Some might question whether these ben- efits are worthwhile, given the time required to develop, promote, and implement a policy. In our experience at FSU, however, the time commitment for policy development and promotion was far from onerous, and our implementation efforts merely accelerated and extended work we were already doing to grow our repository services. All of which brings me back to my main point, that those in the midst of or even just interested in pursuing campus OA policy adoption should take heart: the path is smoother now than it was for the pioneers, there’s a strong community there to support you, and, with the momentum in the OA policy space more generally, the timing could hardly be better. Notes 1. Full text of policy available at http:// openaccess.fsu.edu/policy-text. 2. Shan Sutton, “Compliance Consider- ations as Institutional Open Access Policies Grow,” In The Open (blog), May 9, 2016, http://intheopen.net/2016/05/compliance -considerations-as-institutional-open-access -policies-grow/. 3. Alma Swan, Yassine Gargouri, Megan Hunt, and Stevan Harnad, “Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness,” in Pasteur4OA Work Package 3 report: Open Access policies, http://eprints.soton. ac.uk/375854/. 4. Harvard Model Open Access Policy: https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/modelpolicy/. 5. Harvard Open Access Project wiki, http://bit.ly/goodoa. 6. L i s t o f r e l e v a n t c a s e s t u d i e s available at https://osf.io/vhw6d/wiki /Relevant%20Studies%20and%20Publications/. 7. Christine Fruin and Shan Sutton, “Strategies for Success: Open Access Policies at North American Educational Institutions,” College & Research Libraries 77 (2016). 8. Micah Vandegrift and Gloria Colvin, “Relational Communications: Developing Key Connections,” College & Research Li- braries News 73, no. 7 (2012), http://crln. acrl.org/content/73/7/386.full. 9. COAPI toolkit, https://osf.io/vhw6d/. 10. See Suzanne A. Kriegsman and Ellen Finnie Duranceau, “Campus Open- Access Policy Implementation Models and Implications for IR Services,” in Making (continues on page 463) September 2017 463 C&RL News treatment (library users) and control (library nonusers) groups with similar background characteristics and college experiences. The results suggest that using the library at least one time in the first year of enrollment signifi- cantly increased the odds that students would graduate in four years or remain enrolled after four years, as opposed to withdrawing from the university. First-year students who used electronic resources and books also had significantly improved odds of graduation over withdrawing, while students who used electronic books and took a library instruction course had significantly improved odds of remaining enrolled over withdrawing. • Carol Tenopir, Elizabeth D. Dalton, Lisa Christian, Misty K. Jones, Mark McCabe, MacKenzie Smith, and Allison Fish. “Imagining a Gold Open Access Future: Attitudes, Behav- iors, and Funding Scenarios among Authors of Academic Scholarship.” Abstract: The viability of gold open access (OA) publishing models into the future will depend, in part, on the attitudes of authors toward OA. In a survey of academics at four major research universi- ties in North America, we examine academic authors’ opinions and behaviors toward gold OA. The study allows us to see what academ- ics know and perceive about OA models, their current behavior in regard to publishing in OA, and possible future behavior. In particular, we gauge current attitudes to examine the per- ceived likelihood of various outcomes in an all OA publishing scenario. We also survey how much authors at these types of universities would be willing to pay for article process- ing charges from different sources. Although the loudest voices may often be heard, in reality there is a wide range of attitudes and behaviors toward publishing. Understanding the range of perceptions, opinions, and be- haviors among academics toward gold OA is important for academic librarians who must examine how OA serves their research com- munities, to prepare for an OA future, and to understand how OA impacts the library’s role. • Sarah Thorngate and Allison Hoden. “Exploratory Usability Testing of User Interface Options in LibGuides 2.” Abstract: Online re- search guides offer librarians a way to provide digital researchers with point-of-need support. If these guides are to support student learning well, it is critical that they provide an effective user experience. This article details the results of an exploratory comparison study that tested three key user interface options in LibGuides 2—number of columns, placement of the navi- gation menu, and visual integration with the library website—to understand their impact on guide usability. In addition to informing our own design choices, our findings can serve as the basis for further investigation into the connections between student learning and the usability of the LibGuides user interface. Notes 1. https://www.aaup.org/our-work /protecting-academic-freedom. 2. www.chronicle.com//interactives /greatcolleges17?cid=cp128. Institutional Repositories Work (Purdue University Press, 2015), https://dash.harvard. edu/handle/1/23503499. 11. R O A R M A P, U . S . P o l i c i e s b y Quarter: http://roarmap.eprints.org/view /country/840.html. 12. See http://openaccess.fsu.edu. 13. More information on COAPI is available at https://sparcopen.org/coapi/. 14. Full text of policy available at http://regulations.fsu.edu/sites/g/files / u p c b n u 4 8 6 / f i l e s / p o l i c i e s / r e s e a r c h /FSU%20Policy%207A-27.pdf. 15. See Aaron Retteen, “Automagical Repository Harvesting,” March 9, 2017, https://fsulib.wordpress.com/2017/03/09 /repoharvest/. 16. Bernard Rentier, “The Liège ORBi Model: Mandatory Policy without Rights Retention but Linked to Assessment Pro- cesses,” November 8, 2011, http://orbi.ulg. ac.be/handle/2268/102031. (“On passing an open access policy . . .,” continues from page 435)