Distributed DASH Deposit No Images? Click here October 26, 2017 Sharing the work of sharing Harvard’s researchIn early 2016, the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) launched a pilot project to recruit help from around the university to deposit faculty-authored articles in DASH, Harvard’s open-access repository. This project has the full support of the Harvard Library.In January of this year, the project emerged from the pilot phase, and was officially renamed the Distributed DASH Deposits program, or D3. All Harvard schools have made a start with D3, and the next goal is to scale up.D3 has two overriding rationales. First, without a distributed system like this one, Harvard simply could not implement the open-access policies adopted by faculty at every Harvard school. No central office, like the OSC, could do this job on its own, even with significantly increased funding or staffing. Second, implementing the open-access policies is worth doing. It benefits Harvard authors, by increasing their audience and impact, and benefits scholars and readers everywhere, by increasing their access to Harvard research. The D3 work is undertaken by three distinct cadres of helpers: depositors, catalogers, and Copyright First Responders. Depositors are subject librarians, department administrators, and faculty assistants. They help find new scholarly articles in their subject areas written by Harvard faculty; they obtain the right versions of the files; and they submit those files to the OSC for processing. When the authors have not already signed assistance-authorization forms, they help get their signatures. When the authors do not already have ORCIDs (a standard identifier for publishing scholars), they help them sign up. We have a growing number of depositors, as well as a related group of lookouts, who alert depositors or the OSC to potential new DASH deposits. Catalogers add and check the metadata for DASH submissions, and identify metadata problems that might arise in the records in the DASH queue. D3 benefits from metadata specialists in Harvard Library Information and Technical Services who work to process DASH records for all participating schools. In 2017, these catalogers have processed hundreds of DASH records and made recommendations to increase the efficiency of D3 itself. Copyright First Responders are librarians trained in Copyright 101 by Kyle Courtney, OSC’s Copyright Advisor and Program Manager. They vet the licenses on DASH submissions, and determine whether Harvard has permission to make those works open access. Even in its infancy, D3 is succeeding: it has increased the number of new deposits to DASH, reminded participating schools and authors of the benefits of open access, and positioned DASH as collaborative effort across Harvard University. |