Sherpa Services (Sherpa Romeo, Sherpa Juliet and OpenDOAR)

We allow most of our website and its contents to be reused under the terms of a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA).

Some of our content may be labelled under CC BY-NC-ND.

Link to ways that the community can become involved in Jisc's overall remit of activities: https://beta.jisc.ac.uk/get-involved

Sherpa services itself has a User Group that anyone can sign up to: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=SHERPAUSERS

POSI Audits have been carried out internally - but the results of these are not public. Sherpa Services Product management will be looking at how we can move forward with the POSI principles as part of a new Sponsorship/Governance model that is being investigated. Sherpa Romeo was a pilot for SCOSS involvement. But we are looking at how we can make our Jisc Sherpa services financially sustainable in a post-SCOSS environment.

Sherpa Services is an initiative of Jisc, which is governed by a Board of Trustees.

Sherpa, founded in 2002, initially operated from the University of Nottingham in the Centre for Research Communications. Following several years of development and growth, the team and its suite of services were transitioned to Jisc in 2015. This move aligned with changes in the organisational structure, marking a strategic shift in the management of the Sherpa project. The team is presently integrated into the Research Management Team within Digital Resources at Jisc. Changes to the organisational structure over time came due to evolving sector goals, operational needs and were influenced by broader shifts in the landscape of research and academic support services. Our journey from the University of Nottingham to Jisc reflects a strategic realignment influenced by the changing landscape of digital resources and the need for a more expansive and centrally managed approach.

The Sherpa product line is currently overseen and operated by Jisc on behalf of the global OA community. While Jisc has allocated resources for the implementation and maintenance of these products, they remain operationally under-resourced given the extensive data curation and collection management tasks they handle. Automating these operations poses a challenge due to the absence (and reluctance) of interoperable links with publisher systems.

Although Sherpa services receive some global funding through the SCOSS initiative, for which we are grateful, this funding is voluntary and does not establish a sustainable, long-term support framework. We are seeking assistance in establishing a global membership-based funding model. Future funding will enable us to develop intuitive interfaces for our data, benefiting the global OA sector. This will enhance our data collection efforts, allowing us to expand both the quantity and types of data collected, such as lists of institutional rights retention policies, global transitional agreements, and providing data/statistics to support global horizon scans on policy changes resulting from open access initiatives.