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Using the HARVEST Upload Service to advocate for sustainable open access

Emily Hopkins, Repository Coordinator

University of Saskatchewan

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Repositories: What is the status quo?

  • Most medium to large post-secondary institutions in Canada have a repository already or are working to establish one – the need to share institutional research outputs online is not going away.
  • Scholaris!
  • New Tri-Agency OA Policy…

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Gold and Diamond and Green…

  • Gold:
    • Free for readers at the time of publication
    • Journal may charge authors a fee (Article Processing Charge – APC)
  • Diamond:
    • Library or scholarly society funds journal infrastructure
    • Free to read at the time of publication AND free to publish

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Repositories: Essential for Green OA

  • Green Open Access is a very old and important form of open access, but it’s also not obvious or intuitive!
  • Authors can share the "author accepted manuscript" (AAM) in a repository
    • After peer review, before final publisher copyediting/branding/proofs
    • May require embargo period or statement from publisher
  • Free for readers – no subscription fee
  • Free for authors – no “Article Processing Charge” (APC)

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Example AAM in HARVEST (green OA)

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Self-archiving vs. mediated deposit

Many repositories were originally imagined with self-archiving in mind (“If we build it…”)

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Current services vary:

  • Self-archiving only
  • Self-archiving with review process/quality checks
  • Mediated deposit
  • Some combination of the above

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Self-archiving: �Why hasn’t it been more successful?

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Self-archiving: �Why hasn’t it been more successful?

Some common sentiments:

  • Authors are lazy
  • Authors are busy
  • They’ll get the hang of it with a little bit of education

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Self-archiving: �Why hasn’t it been more successful?

Some common sentiments:

  • Authors are lazy
  • Authors are busy
  • They’ll get the hang of it with a little bit of education

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However, authors do complicated, time-consuming things all the time, either because they see the value or because they are forced to. So, this can’t be the whole explanation.

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Self-archiving: �Why hasn’t it been more successful?

Some other explanations we’ve observed:

  • Authors are scared of violating copyright or getting in trouble from publishers
  • Commercial publishers put a lot of energy and money into promoting APCs/Gold OA as the best/only form of open access
  • Green OA can be confusing. People worry that it’s illegal, they can’t find the right version, and they get nervous about embargo periods.

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How do we actually get more papers?

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How to actually get more papers

  1. Make them see the value (carrot)
    • Promoting Open Access
    • Promoting Green OA as a way to not pay APCs
  2. Force them to do it (stick)
    • Tri-Agency OA Policy changes (maybe?)

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How to actually get more papers

  1. Make them see the value (carrot)
    • Promoting Open Access
    • Promoting Green OA as a way to not pay APCs
  2. Force them to do it (stick)
    • Tri-Agency OA Policy changes (maybe?)
  3. Make it faster and easier
  4. Make it less scary

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Getting in to the publication workflow

  • Targeting individual authors as they publish specific papers is important – they will continue to publish even as they are too busy for other new things
  • They are more likely to consider their options or understand what we are talking about in relation to a specific paper, rather than the general question of how to share their work
  • Every paper shared is a win – we don’t need them to be fully on board right away, and they may learn to save their accepted manuscript for next time even if they don’t have it anymore

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Mediated Deposit Pilot (May-Oct 2023)

  • Targeted the Water “Signature Area” at USask
  • Hired one grad student assistant (from the water area)
  • Key results:
    • Items deposited: 191
    • Authors involved: 35
    • Getting the area involved
      • Centre for Hydrology
      • Global Water Futures

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Mediated Deposit Pilot: Conclusions

  • Publishers are not incentivized to make Green OA easy!
  • This is not a quick and simple learning curve! It is unsurprising that authors are not confident about their rights.

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Mediated Deposit Pilot: Conclusions

  • The regular outreach involved in offering the upload service also leads to other education and advocacy opportunities:
    • Sharing grey literature
    • Supporting workshops and conferences
    • Helping labs/grants transition to sharing work in HARVEST instead of on their own website
    • Adopting Creative Commons licenses
    • Using persistent identifiers (ORCID, DOIs)
    • Planning good research data management practices

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Upload Service

  • Launched July 2024
  • Repository coordinator
  • Open Scholarship Librarian and Copyright Coordinator advise as needed
  • Three library assistants (very little time each week, probably <1h each)
    • Communication and relationship-building with faculty and support staff
  • Three part-time casual grad student assistants (12h/week each)
    • Deposit and permissions checking work
    • Educating grad students and doing outreach to different areas

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Student education too

“I feel like I have developed a different understanding about academic publishing and licensing than before. It was an eye opener really, about how less I knew about academic publishing, different legal restrictions, open access policy, tools and resources associated with this topic. I have learnt a lot.” 

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Student assistant Anukul Basnet, reflecting as part of our report on the pilot project

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Weekly Scopus/WoS

Alerts received by repository coordinator

Students review publications and add version and contact info

Mail merge to email authors

Authors fill out authorization form and submit their file(s)

Library Assistants and repository coordinator check that the correct version has been received/troubleshoot as needed, then hand off to students

Students upload papers and inform authors once those are done

Outreach to conferences, workshops, research groups, and other sources of grey literature

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Template for �mail merge

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https://library.usask.ca/

harvest-deposit

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2025 Upload Service Summary

  • 762 items (including all articles and grey literature, excluding graduate theses and dissertations) were added
  • 87% of new items came from the Upload Service, with the rest added by authors and support staff (9%) and automated publisher workflows (6%, from MDPI).
  • We have authorizations from 307 authors to upload their work on an ongoing basis

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Gold OA (2025)

  • Why do we bother to deposit articles that are already open access?
  • We started out contacting authors only for Green OA, but switched to contacting everyone even if their final version was technically already OA
    • People who are currently paying APCs are an important target audience for education about AAMs, and this service is a clear way to target them
  • Redundancy is good
  • Tri-Agency OA Policy changes likely to require deposit for everything

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Accepted manuscripts (2025)

  • 619 items uploaded in 2025 were journal articles, 90 of which were accepted manuscripts
  • Our mean APC from 2024-2025 was $4600 CAD
  • Using that to estimate, it’s likely those APCs would have cost over $400,000 CAD if authors had paid those fees to make their work open access instead of sharing their work in HARVEST.

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Highlight: Communications with publishers

  • When policies are unclear or require contacting the publisher, we follow through every time
  • Even if we get no response, or are refused, we consider regularly making these specific requests to be a form of advocacy itself
  • We have received several positive responses too, such as publishers agreeing to update or clarify policies to encourage future sharing

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Feedback from authors

“Thank you for reaching out! I have known about HARVEST and wanted to use it for the last few years. I haven't had that extra push until now, however ...”

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“Thank you […] I am new to USask so I had not heard of HARVEST. I have 7 publications and you are welcome to put any of them on HARVEST for which you have publisher consent.”

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Feedback from authors

“We opted for the subscription version because we did not have funds for open access fees and would therefore like to publish our non-copy-edited version in HARVEST to ensure it is readily accessible (it is NSERC funded).” 

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Upload Service as Advocacy

  • Green OA is pretty confusing, and we have better odds of success if we are able to intercept people during the publishing process, rather than attempting generalized support and training
  • A handful of folks actively dislike open access/the repository/etc, but most are well-intentioned and would like to participate and just have it sitting at the bottom of a to-do list
  • The weekly alert emails serve as specific, targeted promotion even when they don’t result in a paper
  • Similarly, consistently emailing publishers serves as targeted ongoing advocacy to them

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Thank you!�

Emily Hopkins, Repository Coordinator, Emily.Hopkins@usask.ca

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