Towards Easy Deposit: Lowering the Barriers of Green Open Access with Data Integration and Workflow Automation for an Institutional Repository

Background:Ineffective marketing and the lack of author participation are the most significant barriers that hinder green open access. Introduction: Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries are tasked to implement university's open access policy via its institutional repository. In previous, OSU Libraries dedicated an entire staff position to the solicitation and deposit of faculty research articles produced by OSU faculty. In order to free up these staff resources for other work, we implemented a semi-automated deposit system called Easy Deposit 2. Methodology: Easy Deposit 2 harvests metadata for journal articles authored by OSU faculty using Web of Science API, parses and fetches metadata, and sends a solicitation email to the corresponding author for each article, including a link to a deposit form in Easy Deposit 2. The author can then use the link to deposit a copy of the article manuscript into university's institutional repository. Conclusion: Since launched in October 2018, Easy Deposit 2 has harvested 1,172 journal articles and 176 out of them have been self-archived by the authors - a rate somewhat lower than when we manually solicited articles from faculty. We will continue to improve the system and have a further analysis after collecting more data.