Librarians help researchers meet funding requirement mandates

With the rise of Public and Open Access, it’s more important than ever for researchers to understand and meet funding compliance mandates. Funding is competitive, and one of the first things funders look at is whether someone has complied fully with the terms of the application. It’s a complex issue with many layers, and helping navigate the system is a key way librarians are supporting their researchers.

“We help by understanding what the mandates are, what the requirements are, and how to look at publisher agreements,” says Margaret Janz, science and engineering librarian at Temple University. “If a researcher is looking at a certain publisher, we can look and see if they’re going to meet their mandates or not through that publisher, or what other extra steps are going to need to be taken.”

Librarians know the mandates for both the researcher and the compliance aspects, so they’re in a unique position to give researchers information specific to their needs and to truly partner with them in a powerful way.

Open Access complications

With the rise of Open Access, funding mandates have started requiring data to be accessible and shareable. With text and images having different requirements, and researchers often using confidential information, this mandate becomes very complicated. Because librarians have a long-term interaction with both the mandates and the researchers, partnering with a librarian can help researchers understand how the rules apply to their research.

The other question is of Public Access versus Open Access. Most mandates push Public Access, which requires that an article be made freely available within 12 months. Open Access, on the other hand, is immediately available. Even though Open Access has faster release of the information to the public, it may not meet the requirements of the funding mandate.

“Mandates make it important for researchers to understand Open Access better, because there’s some confusion of Public Access versus Open Access,” says Janz.

In addition to this partnership, libraries also work to adapt and implement institutional repositories, indexing and archiving systems which preserve the institution’s work and research. Building these requires librarians’ metadata and data curation skills. Institutional repositories also make this research more publicly accessible, which is an important part of meeting funding mandates.

Education and other services

Beyond building partnerships and cultivating institutional repositories, librarians also offer educational workshops, tutorials and tools to help researchers better comply with mandates.

Funding compliance, Open Access tools and increasing the impact of research all depend on librarians for support. Many librarians now are working to educate researchers and students about how to address these issues. For any researcher hoping to learn this, librarians are their front line of education and an invaluable resource.

Librarians can also use these digital tools to monitor the compliance of researchers’ applications and report back to them, allowing the researcher to fix any potential problems early on. Mandate compliance can make or break funding applications and varies from organization to organization, so having a knowledgeable person checking adherence to requirements can be a valuable thing.

Janz emphasizes that researchers should consider reaching out to librarians when seeking advice on funding mandate compliance.

“Libraries are really good at helping researchers, because researchers may not know about [mandate compliance] or what [they need] to do,” she says. “I think a lot of researchers go to their office of research or their funding agency if they need guidance, but they can also get help from librarians. We’re happy to do it and we know lots about it.”