As part of our ongoing review of processes around GALA, we have decided to try and make better use of some of the features of the software. We hope that a minor change to our existing review practices will improve the university’s management of compliance with internal and external policies, and help to increase the turnaround of items under review. 

With REF 2021’s submission date only six months away, there has been a not insignificant increase in the number of deposits to GALA. This has been experienced at other institutions, so we are certainly not alone in this. Indeed, we are excited that GALA is being used by a broad range of users, including many who have been recruited throughout 2020. 

However, with the increased volume of deposits comes and increased management of processes. As part of our review of all deposits into GALA, we perform a range of checks to ensure that the university is not breaching any copyright restrictions (e.g. the sharing of published Versions of Record which publishers have been given copyright of) and to try and support compliance with the university’s Publications Policy, the REF 2021 open access policy, and various research funder policies as applicable. 

This disparate range of criteria often require us to contact individual academics via email to clarify that certain aspects of metadata are accurate, or to ensure that the correct document version has been attached to the record. This has been an incredibly effective method and helped us to build and foster excellent working relationships, and to better understand experiences with GALA and research repositories more generally. 

However, at scale, moving communications outside of the software can become cumbersome and add delays to the processing of deposits. As such, we are instituting a minor change to our extant processes, and wanted to clearly explain what we are doing and why, hence this blog post. 

In specific and limited circumstances, we are going to use some functionality in the repository software to return records’ to a user’s work area. We will accompany return of records with a detailed message to explain what needs amending on a given record. For example, if a Version of Record that is under the copyright of the publisher and thus cannot be shared via GALA has been attached to the record, we may explain that you will need to attach your author’s accepted manuscript (AAM,) and where you may be able to obtain your AAM from if you do not have a copy to hand, before you re-deposit your record. 

Using this function of the software should better enable those depositing records to clarify or amend anything as appropriate in situ, expediting the process and resolving queries in a more effective way. 

Of course, we are always here to support you and ensure that your experiences with open access repositories are positive, so we need to be clear that you can contact us by any means necessary to help resolve any outstanding issues. However, by returning the output to the user’s work area, it will improve efficiency and enable depositors to better understand the requirements of depositing within GALA.