Automatic publication claiming in RPS

This year’s Open Access Week runs from 23-29 October under the theme “Open in order to…” This is an invitation to reflect on many benefits of making research publications openly available. We are excited to present a series of blog posts celebrating the Open Access Week, starting with the announcement of new RPS functionality that is now available to UCL authors.

Most UCL researchers are used to the way Research Publications Service (RPS) searches external databases (like Scopus and Web of Science) to find publications that may belong to UCL authors, based on their search settings. By default, suggested publications are put in the pending publications list, where they can be manually reviewed and claimed (or rejected). Now, though, after a recent upgrade, RPS is even better at helping UCL authors record their publications.

We are very excited about the latest upgrade to RPS that introduced new tool that helps authors to identify their papers: auto-claiming. More than 2,000 authors at UCL already use their ORCID in RPS, but UCL’s Research Publications Service can now find and claim even more papers, using even more identifiers including e-mail address. When RPS can tell that a paper belongs to the author, it claims it automatically.

This new tool helps researchers to identify their papers and record them in RPS quickly, as it minimises number of publications that are sent to the pending list and need to be verified by authors. Now, all they need to do is to upload the final accepted manuscript for their research articles and conference proceedings, in compliance with the REF open access policy. Deposited manuscripts are then made openly available via UCL Discovery, UCL’s institutional repository (after a delay period, if publisher requires it).

Authors can set RPS to automatically claim or reject their publications, if they contain any of the following identifiers:

• e-mail addresses
• arXiv Author Identifier
• com account
• ORCID ID
• Researcher ID
• Scopus ID
• SSRN Author ID

By default, the author’s UCL e-mail address is entered automatically, but other e-mail addresses used by researchers can be added.

Another very useful aspect of this new RPS feature is automated rejection of publications based on an identifier. When authors declare that certain identifier is not theirs, all publications that include that identifier will be automatically rejected and no longer be offered to the user for verification. This is particularly useful for authors with common names, and minimises the number of publications that are sent to the author’s pending publication list.

There is a guide explaining how to set up automated claiming available here, but if you have any questions about this or other aspects of RPS, please contact UCL Open Access Team at open-access@ucl.ac.uk