We are delighted to officially launch the new Jisc open policy finder site today - bringing together the former Sherpa services into a unified and re-designed user-interface.

In addition to all of the updates made to date, this latest release includes some tweaks to the interface, including the menu and footers, and incorporates the new product name throughout the site.

If you would like to find out more about the re-development of the site, it is not too late to register for our launch webinar - please see details below.

We hope you find open policy finder helpful and easy to use - please do let us know any comments or feedback you have.

Open Policy Finder Launch Webinar

Join this webinar on Thursday 7 November to find out about Jisc's new open policy finder. The new platform, launching on 4 November, will combine the functionality of the three existing Sherpa services, Sherpa Fact, Sherpa Romeo, and Sherpa Juliet, helping authors and institutions with decision making in open access publishing and compliance.

We are pleased to share that we will be officially launching the new site in a few weeks' time (4th November) with our new name of 'open policy finder'.

We will also be holding a webinar on the 7th November to introduce the new site - please see details to book a place at this below:

Sherpa services to become open policy finder

Join this webinar on Thursday 7 November to find out about Jisc's new open policy finder. The new platform, launching on 4 November, will combine the functionality of the three existing Sherpa services, Sherpa Fact, Sherpa Romeo, and Sherpa Juliet, helping authors and institutions with decision making in open access publishing and compliance.

Our latest update to the new Sherpa site has been released, and incorporates a brand new ‘help’ area as well as a number of other improvements to the beta site.

• A newly designed help section, providing answers to our most frequently asked questions, and useful information such as inclusion criteria, contact details and a glossary.
• Improved funder record pages – we have spent some time reviewing our funder pages and adding in some missing fields, as well as amending labels and wording to ensure we are displaying the metadata in the clearest and most accurate way possible.
• Plus other incremental updates to improve overall functionality and security of our system.

As always, please do let us know if you have any questions or comments about any of the changes we have made – we value all feedback as we continue to improve the site moving forward.

We are pleased to be launching an updated version of our Transitional Agreement Lookup tool today! Not only will this new version bring a fresher look to the user interface, we have also improved the tool's data source to help provide users with better quality, more up to date information on Transitional Agreements.

In addition to this, the new release for Sherpa Services also includes the following updates:

• We've made it easier to see if a journal is included in the DOAJ with an additional badge in the journal information
• We've made it easier to identify where Sherpa Services has not recorded policies for specific output versions in our journal and OA Books policies
• We've standardised the ordering of output versions across policies for journals and OA Books
• We've tweaked and updated some of the metadata included in policies for journals to make information clearer

We're looking forward to sharing more information about future updates and enhancements to the new Sherpa Services in the near future!

We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with Mir@bel to increase the Sherpa Romeo dataset holdings with the addition of publishing and self-archiving policies for a range of French publishers and journals. This is part of our ongoing commitment to operate as a sustainable, inclusive and diverse resource for our users across the globe.

Mir@bel

Mir@bel provides a tool for declaring and consulting the publishing and self-archiving policies of French scientific journals. The project to create this service was carried out under the guidance of the Open Science Committee and its working group on publishing policies.

Mir@bel's mission is to “rethink how French journals' publication policies are collected, formatted and distributed in terms of the dissemination of articles and deposits in open archives” and to “give these policies international visibility” in partnership with Jisc and the Romeo service.

The Mir@bel site reports on over 20,000 journals, offering links to online content and the navigation of numerous complementary sites.

Our work with Mir@bel

We are delighted to report that over the last 6 months our ongoing collaboration with Mir@bel has enabled us to add over 150 French journal records and their associated open access policies to our database. This improves their visibility to global Sherpa users and helps fill in the gaps of our French publisher coverage.

Our collaboration with Mira@bel will continue further into 2024, when we will be looking at ways to automate the ingest of French publishers' journals and policies into Sherpa Romeo via the Mir@bel dataset.

Sherpa services data is used world-wide and therefore we place great value on the high quality international data that is supplied to our users as a result of engaging in these open access stakeholder partnerships.

Keeping up to date with Sherpa services

If you have any questions or comments on any of the above, or wish to let us know of anything else Sherpa related, please feel free to contact the Sherpa team via email at: help@jisc.ac.uk. Don't forget to mention Sherpa in the Subject line of your email.

You can join the Sherpa Services User Group mailing list at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/SherpaUsers

You can join the Sherpa Publisher Group mailing list at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/SherpaPublishers

Find out more about the new features we're adding to Sherpa Services on our What's New page

Following our recent posts regarding updates to the new Sherpa Services site, we are continuing to release regular updates incorporating additions, tweaks and amendments to our new user interface.

In our latest release, we have made some changes including the following:

• Migration of our Transformative Journals (TJ) list to our new site
• Adding the Journal URL back into our journal records (this is now displayed under ‘Journal Details’)
• Tweaks and improvements to the search box on our homepage, to ensure consistency with other areas of the site
• Amendments to the OA Books landing page to ensure this page is kept current and easy to navigate (such as sorting the list of publishers into alphabetical order)
• Plus other incremental updates to improve overall functionality and security of our system

We hope the above updates will continue to improve our new site and your user experience - please do continue to try out the new site and let us know what you think, your feedback is gratefully received!

Since the pilot launch of our new dataset for open access book policies on Sherpa in January we have been busy collecting feedback and refining the data model and interface. Many thanks to everyone who has sent their comments.

Key improvements are:

• Funding model field has been added to standard open access policy, displaying BPC (book processing charge), CPC (chapter processing charge), diamond or other.
• We are able to display if a publisher has a preferred licence.
• Copyright field is now mandatory. If a publisher does not explicitly state the copyright owner in their policy the record reflects this. Also, we are now able to display if a publisher offers an exclusive or non-exclusive publishing licence to the author.
• Embargo field is also mandatory. If a publisher does not explicitly state the embargo period in their policy the record reflects this.
• DOAB link has been added to publisher information page.

Many of you have told us that it would be useful for you to see the processing charges listed in the records too. As most publishers operate multiple funding models and charges are subject to waivers, institutional agreements, manuscript extents etc we felt that it would be difficult to ensure that this information is accurate and therefore useful to authors and librarians.

We are currently working on adding publisher policies to the directory. The list of publisher records will be available from the OA for Books landing page. We will also share newly added book policies through the Sherpa user group and Sherpa publishers jiscmail.

Over the next few months we will also be working on the help and support pages.

Please continue to send feedback and report any errors if you find them. You can contact us through service desk help@jiscmail.com (with Sherpa in subject line) – your feedback is invaluable and helps us improve the site and the service we provide to you.

As we move closer to the official launch of our new consolidated Sherpa Services site our development team are busy adding to and improving features of the site in response to feedback we have received.

A new release has been made to the site today, and we are pleased to share the following updates:

• We have updated our OA Book policy records in a number of ways to make them more user friendly and to help present the policy data as clearly as possible, including:
  • Adding & clarifying licence information to help authors make informed decisions
  • Changing some of our labels to more accurately reflect the data
  • Addition of DOAB links to the Publisher Details section
• We have made changes to our search results pages, working closely with our UX designers to make sure the new site is as user friendly and accessible as possible, including:
  • A re-style of the search results to improve the appearance and usability
  • Automatically bringing the record type with the most results to the front (i.e. journals, publishers or funders), to help reduce the number of clicks users need to make, and changes to improve page navigation.
  • Adding more appropriate messaging to help users if no results are found, to reduce the likelihood of reaching a 'dead-end'
• As well as incremental updates to improve overall functionality and security of our system.

As always, please do continue to try out the features of our new site and let us know what you think - your feedback is an invaluable part of the process in creating our new site so we are hugely grateful for all feedback we receive!

Firstly, thank you to all Sherpa users who have been trying our new site and have provided us with feedback - all your comments are incredibly valuable and help us to improve the service we provide.

We've been busy over the last few months reviewing your comments and refining the design and functionality to help make the new Sherpa clearer. We're pleased to finally be able to release some of these changes to you:

• We've improved record pages across the site, making it easier to reach metadata and policy information.
• We've added a new 'Back to Search' link to our records to let you go straight back to your previous search.
• We've added links to our main menu to help you find key information and tools.
• We've improved messaging and notifications to help make the service clearer.
• We've removed repositories from our search on this new version in preparation for a forthcoming standalone OpenDOAR service. In the meantime, repository data can still be found on the existing Sherpa Services website: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/

We hope that these changes will further improve the new Sherpa Services website and we look forward to hearing your feedback. We are continuing to revise and refine as we move towards the full launch in autumn so please keep sending us your comments.

Thanks again for your continued support and feedback!