Open Access Assist System

The Open Access Assist System notifies of information about journal articles written by affiliated researchers as well as their OA status, which shows whether the articles are currently OA or not, and the copyright policy (archiving policy) of the journals that need to be checked before the articles are made OA in an institutional repository. This notification enables institutional repository staff to easily check whether the articles should be made OA or not, and thus make it possible to promote OA in a labor-saving way.

For institutional repository staff to make journal articles written by affiliated researchers OA, they need to check the publication status of the articles their OA status, and their archiving policies. The first two require searching on bibliographic databases and the latter requires checking the homepages of the journals they are published in: these have to be done manually and are labor intensive. By using the OA Assist System, these processes can be automated, thus reducing the burden on institutional repository staff in making the articles OA.