Back in April, we wrote about the CDR’s project to make publicly available the scholarship of UNC-Chapel Hill faculty working on coronavirus-related research. This project was also profiled in The Well. We’d like to provide an update on our progress.

The Project

In April, the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine published a list of researchers who are doing work in areas impacted by COVID-19. We felt that the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) could assist in the effort by making the scholarship of these researchers publicly available. Additionally, we’ve reviewed UNC-Chapel Hill news stories to identify other researchers who are doing work related to COVID-19. Since COVID-19 is still a novel disease, we decided to evaluate all scholarship from these researchers for deposit, even if the scholarship was not directly related to COVID-19. Not only would this approach increase the amount of research that we could make publicly available and preserve, but it would contribute to the Library’s Sustainable Scholarship initiative.

The Numbers

• Researchers evaluated: 85
• Articles reviewed: 10,699
• Articles eligible for deposit: 4,455

The actual number of articles deposited into the CDR will be lower than 4,455, as we are still accounting for duplicates and researcher opt-out.

Labor

It’s important to be transparent about the time and labor that is present in this project. For each of the 85 researchers, we had to:

1. Locate and download citation information for each researcher’s scholarship in Scopus.
2. Format ISSNs of each article.
3. Run a script to query Sherpa/ROMeO for publisher permissions.
4. Evaluate each article for appropriateness for deposit, taking publisher permissions, embargo dates, duplicate entries, co-authorship and the Open Access Policy into account.
5. Create a spreadsheet for each researcher that is formatted nicely and free of library jargon.
6. Contact each researcher for permission to deposit, including the researcher’s spreadsheet.
7. Locate PDFs of each article on the spreadsheet and make sure that they are appropriate for upload.
8. Format metadata for upload, including author names and affiliations.
9. Create an upload package and upload.
10. Apply embargoes if needed.
11. Quality assurance of every article.

This list does not include the substantial work that went into developing and testing the CDR’s bulk upload tool, which was an incredibly important component of this project.

Sustainable Scholarship and Open Access

Out of the 4,455 articles which were eligible for deposit, 3,139 were eligible due to UNC’s Open Access Policy. In fact, 69% of those 3,139 articles could not have been made publicly available without it. The Open Access Policy is key to our efforts to make publicly-funded scholarship freely available.

The CDR is one part of the UNC University Libraries’ efforts to promote sustainable scholarship. For more information on the University Libraries’ Sustainable Scholarship initiative, see the Sustainable Scholarship website.