When to apply When the institution is setting or revising policy on diamond OA, APC waivers, Plan S compliance, transformative agreements, or bibliodiversity, and needs to capture the policy outcomes as structured CRIS metadata.
Before you start
Prerequisites
What needs to be in place before you operationalise Knowledge equity, diversity, global-south inclusion terminology in your CRIS or repository.
- A repository or CRIS with structured access-status capture (gold, green, diamond, hybrid, bronze, closed)
- Familiarity with Plan S, cOAlition S, and the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy
- A controlled vocabulary for APC and waiver status — paid, waived, partial waiver, sponsored, not applicable
- Awareness of the DOAJ inclusion criteria and the difference between DOAJ-listed and DOAJ-Seal journals
- A position on bibliodiversity: which non-English / regional / non-WoS journals are first-class in your CRIS and discovery layer
Deployment
Five steps to deploy
Each step is small enough to land in a single sprint or a single sitting with the relevant CRIS administrator. Follow in order.
Adopt a structured OA-status field
Distinguish gold (article-level CC-licensed in a fully-OA venue), diamond (no APC), green (deposited self-archived version), hybrid (paid OA in a subscription venue), bronze (free-to-read without a clear license), and closed. Use the Unpaywall-aligned vocabulary as the baseline.
Capture APC and waiver provenance
On every gold-OA output, record APC amount (currency-coded), funder, waiver_status, and the institutional / consortium agreement under which the APC was paid (transformative agreement reference, single-publisher deal, individual). This is needed for institutional OA-spend reporting.
Wire DOAJ and Sherpa Romeo lookups
On deposit, query DOAJ for journal status and Sherpa Romeo for the publisher policy. Surface the result on the deposit form so depositors do not guess; persist the lookup snapshot, do not just link out.
Configure bibliodiversity-aware indexing
In the discovery layer, ensure non-English-language outputs and non-WoS-indexed journals are first-class, not relegated to "other". Tag regional aggregators (SciELO, AmeliCA, J-STAGE) at the output level for downstream filtering and reporting.
Pilot transformative-agreement tracking
For one transformative agreement, verify that every eligible output published under that agreement is tagged with the agreement identifier, that the structured APC field shows "covered by TA", and that the year-end TA report can be assembled from CRIS data alone.
Worked example
Sample workflow
A realistic walk-through of a single record passing through the Knowledge equity, diversity, global-south inclusion pipeline once the checklist is in production.
Integration points
CRIS and repository systems
Vendor-specific notes on where this vocabulary fits in real research-information systems. Names appear here only where there is public field evidence — they are not vendor partnerships.
Native APC, OA-status, and Sherpa Romeo lookup; configure local agreement IDs as a controlled list and ensure the Pure Portal exposes structured OA status publicly.
OA-status workflow with Sherpa Romeo integration; the Elements Reporting Database can roll up institutional OA spend.
Configure access-status as a controlled metadata field; the OpenAIRE access-rights vocabulary is the safest starting point for federation compatibility.
Federation target rather than a repository; rely on the DOAJ API at deposit time to authoritatively determine journal OA status, and persist the DOAJ snapshot.
Useful for institution-wide OA-status enrichment and bibliodiversity audits; harvest OpenAlex per output to back-fill missing OA-status and non-WoS journal indexing flags.
What goes wrong in the field
Common pitfalls
The patterns that show up repeatedly when this checklist is skipped or misapplied. Address these before they become entrenched.
- Conflating "open access" with "gold OA only" and missing diamond, green, and bronze in policy reporting
- Recording APC as a sunk cost without provenance, so transformative-agreement budgeting cannot be reconstructed
- Down-ranking non-English or regional journals in discovery because the underlying ranking proxy is WoS-only
- Treating Plan S compliance as a single boolean instead of as a per-output determination with version and rights-retention status
- Leaving the OA-status field freeform and discovering at year-end that "gold open access" and "Gold OA" and "fully OA" are three values
Frequently asked
Implementation FAQ
- Who maintains this checklist?
- The Knowledge equity, diversity, global-south inclusion working group maintains the checklist alongside the dictionary terms in the same domain. It is reviewed each release cycle (March and September) and updated when a working-group consultation, a vendor product change, or a federation-partner schema update materially changes the operational guidance.
- What if my CRIS or repository is not listed?
- The integration points listed name the systems CASRAI has direct field experience with — Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, Converis, DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, EPrints, VIVO, Dataverse, Invenio-RDM. The CERIF mapping in the checklist is vendor-neutral and applies equally to other CRIS or repository products. If your system supports the underlying entities (Person, Project, Output, Funding, plus the domain-specific extensions), the steps transfer.
- How do I validate my implementation?
- Three validation surfaces. First, the deposit form should refuse a record missing required fields rather than warn and accept. Second, the resulting metadata should round-trip through the federation layer your institution uses (OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0 for European federation, DataCite Commons for DOI-anchored discovery, Crossref for article-anchored discovery) without upstream errors. Third, walk a real-world record through the sample-workflow path on this page and confirm the structured fields capture what the prose describes.
- Where do I report errors in the checklist?
- Open a comment via the dictionary-feedback flow at /dictionary/contribute. Editorial corrections — wrong vendor module names, deprecated standards, broken integration paths — are queued into the next release cycle. Substantive disagreements on the operational guidance are routed to the working group for review and may motivate a checklist revision.
- Is this checklist enough to certify my implementation?
- No. The checklist gives you the operational baseline; certification against federation profiles (CoreTrustSeal, OpenAIRE-compliant, COAR-aligned) is a separate process with its own audit. Treat the checklist as the engineering scaffolding and the certification as the institutional sign-off that the scaffolding is being used.
