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Saving Time for UW-Madison Grant Awardees by Helping Us Meet Public Access Requirements

Making Research Work

Saving Time for UW-Madison Grant Awardees by Helping Us Meet Public Access Requirements

We all bemoan the fact that the research community at UW-Madison and elsewhere is facing an enormous burden of compliance. Nevertheless, I have good news to share about a way to reduce one aspect of the burden of research compliance — the federal requirement for making all published results of federally-funded research available to the public in specific research repositories. This requirement is referred to as “public access,” and it affects about 2,800 Principal Investigators on the UW-Madison campus.

Here is a link to a document that provides the details (http://researchguides.ebling.library.wisc.edu/federal-agency-public-access-compliance). In this blog, I would like to introduce you to Ryan Schryver, our new Public Access Compliance Specialist, and to BuckySubmit, a free service that will save you time by helping you meet the public access requirements (and will make you smile).

For nearly 10 years, I and my colleagues who are funded by the NIH have been required to comply with the public access requirement, and it has been painless because of the tireless efforts and expertise of Julie Schneider, who recently retired from her position as Director of the Ebling Library for the Health Sciences on campus.  We are all extremely grateful to Julie for facilitating the open access submission of about 14,000 published papers during this period.

What was once an NIH-only requirement has now been extended to 24 federal agencies, many with different rules and procedures for uploading publications to distinct repositories. Truly, this is a bewildering mess of regulations.

BuckySubmit (http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/services/public_access/index.html) was launched in June and is a retirement gift from Julie to the campus, as she, and Ryan have created a system that is extremely easy to use and will work effectively with nearly all agencies requiring public access submissions. BuckySubmit was created based on input from PIs and research administrators on campus. Allan Barclay, Ebling Library Information Architecture Librarian, built BuckySubmit.

Researchers can now use BuckySubmit to submit their manuscripts once they have been accepted for publication. The exception is the National Science Foundation, which requires a PI directly to submit his or her manuscript to the NSF Public Access Repository via research.gov instead of allowing submission by a third party such as BuckySubmit.

I encourage you to invite Ryan to your department meetings, research group meetings, or any other gatherings of faculty and staff who are responsible for public access compliance.  Amazingly, he will sit with individual PIs in their offices and walk them through the process, including NSF submissions.

For questions about BuckySubmit, email Ryan at publicaccess@hsl.wisc.edu. BuckySubmit is a collaborative effort between the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, the campus library system, and the School of Medicine and Public Health.

And Ryan will make you smile!

All the best,

 

Marsha Mailick, Ph.D.

Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education

Vaughan Bascom and Elizabeth M. Boggs Professor

 

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