Software will allow universities to ensure compliance with looming funder rules
University IT firm Jisc has unveiled a repository system for research papers and data that it says meets all the requirements of the major open-access initiative Plan S.
Funders backing Plan S will require all researchers they support to make their papers available open access in approved journals or repositories from 2021.
Plan S comes alongside a growing push from funders for ‘responsible research’, which has seen some funders demand that institutions embrace initiatives such as the ‘Dora’ declaration on research assessment.
Jisc says the repository software it launched on 8 December will “allow institutions to meet all Plan S mandatory requirements and other funder and publisher mandates for open scholarship”.
It will allow “long-term management of all…digital research outputs, from articles, datasets and theses to metadata-only records and outputs that normally can’t be added to subject or funder data repositories”, said Liz Bal, Jisc’s director of open research services.
Although currently being marketed as a ‘software as a service’ for individual universities building their own Plan S-compliant repositories, Jisc says it could form the basis of a central repository for all UK universities in future if there was funding for a national-level solution.
Jisc is a not-for-profit company that counts the Association of Colleges, GuildHE and Universities UK organisations as members.