A handy benchmarking tool for OA in the UK…

CIAO is a benchmarking tool for assessing institutional readiness for Open Access (OA) compliance … produced as part of the JISC OA Pathfinder…”

Looks good, but omits the utterly vital element of ‘Public, Peer and Government Discovery’. I’d suggest adding an extra strip with the following wording/steps…

ENVISIONING: We do not know what proportion of our OA repository contents can be found via public search-engines, or the quality of the search results that link to our repository.

DISCOVERING: We are considering the most effective steps to improve our repository coverage in public search-engines, and are taking advantage of guides and free consultancy work offered by staff at major search engines such as Google. We will rank the priority of these steps by both their likely impact on discoverability and ease of implementation.

DESIGNING & PILOTING: We have committed funds to implement and test at least ten commonly recommended methods that will increase our repository’s coverage in the public search-engines. Graduate interns have been recruited to aid the repository staff during this period.

ROLLING OUT: The planned measures have been turned on or implemented. Systems and staff are in place, and best practice workflows have been clearly documented and disseminated. Search engine indexing of our repository content is being tested to gather reliable metrics on: increased indexing coverage; time to index new content; and search result quality. We are also internally monitoring visitor traffic and open/dwell rates.

EMBEDDING: We are examining further measures to boost the quality of the public search results for our repository content, such as ensuring that the document title is used in the results Web link. We are considering acquiring funds to undertake certain large-scale measures once deemed too expensive to implement, such as retrospectively re-working the university-branded cover-pages applied to our PDFs. Senior staff have recognized that Web traffic to our OA repository represents a valuable branding, outreach and recruitment opportunity. The repository is no longer seen as drain on resources or as general-use web storage for the university.