There are going to be several areas where education and awareness are going to be potential snags:
- Authors interpreting eligibiltiy of their work for submission to SOAR
- What version of your paper is allowed to be submitted? User confusion on terms.
- Version of record - version on the publisher's site with all publisher branding and logos.
- Post-print/Accepted version - After all peer-review has occurred. Final version accepted by the publisher for inclusion in journal. No publisher branding/logos.
- Pre-print/Submitted version - First version submitted to the publisher. Before peer-review has occurred.
- Creative commons license assigned to submitted works.
- Journals can require a specific type of license for works deposited in institutional repositories.
- Process of submitting - testers not excited about walking through the submission form. Required to have a record of author's permission. Perhaps move to RedCap for submission collection?
- Potential bottleneck - ME! One person mediates all eligiblity and submissions. Hope we're successful enough to have this issue!
- Unknown! - Issues will raise their head as we begin the rollout and submission process.
How to ease these pain points?
- Continue building awareness and continue the conversation to perfect the process.
- Build enthusiasm for participation in SOAR as creating a collection of the body of research of the institution.
- Continued development of the libguides on SOAR and Scholarly Publishing in response to issues.
- Create and offer online short courses on submitting to SOAR and issues around it.
Our Elsevier partnership on the scholarly publication process can be a good jump-off point.