Area Impacted:

Editorial

Request Summary: 

What would be superb, would be someway for us to track the various aspects of an OA proposal right from the proposal stage. Our proposals are rarely a binary “Definitely OA/Definitely not OA”…

Description/Use Cases: 

A brief summary of timeline of a potentially OA project might be helpful to illustrate this:

1. We receive book proposal (lots happens before this but not in Stison!)

2. We record proposal – at this stage the author may have told us they have OA money and asked for a quote, or we may have asked them if they have OA funding. It would be useful to record that the book MIGHT be OA, subject to quote acceptance, and have some way of tracking the details of this quote (amounts, dates, licenses promised etc), and who we have sent the quote to.  They may have told us they have funding for X amount of chapters OA, potentially from different funders, or we may have decided to offer them 3 free OA chapters as a way of justifying making the rest of the book HBK only – the possibilities are many…

3. The author comes back and says our quote has been accepted in which case move forward– or that they don’t have money. Or that they would like to try another funding avenue… in which case a new round of quotes.

4. Once the OA has been accepted, it would be useful to be able to record what we have agreed – again, licenses, amounts, dates that money would be available etc…

And it would be even better to be able to report all of this – so how many of our proposals are definitely OA and what stage are they at, how many have quotes outstanding that we need to chase up, etc…

Impact of limitation or missing feature:

The relatively limited OA features within Editorial limit the extent to which the process of deciding if a title will be OA or not can be recorded within Stison, which results in data being stored in more than one location, and inhibits the detail provided in reports drawn from Stison.

Other necessary information or resources: