Research Councils UK (RCUK)'s revised policy on open access (OA) for publicly-funded research to be disseminated through OA routes is coming into force this month. A new metadata application profile called RIOXX has been developed by JISC and UKOLN to ensure that university institutional repositories can start to comply with this policy.
It has been observed that, currently, key information about research outputs is not systematically recorded and funders and universities face a challenge in tracking research across systems. The first release of RIOXX and the associated guidance focuses on applying consistency to the metadata fields used to record research funder and project/grant identifiers. This will allow research outputs to be consistently tracked between systems, thus saving time and effort for activities such as research reporting, compliance checking and gathering business intelligence.
RIOXX also takes into account the need for interoperability between repositories, current research information systems (CRISs) and the Outcome Collection Systems (ROS), and Researchfish operated by research funders. It has also taken into consideration other metadata schemas such as ETHoS and OpenAIRE. Future releases of the profile and guidelines will also include the agreed language to track OA publications, and support compliance monitoring with the Research Councils' policy on OA.
According to Dr Mari Williams, chair of the RCUK Research Outcomes Project, the RIOXX guidelines offer clear and practical guidance to organisations wanting to attribute research outcome information to specific funders and research grants in their repositories.
