The advent of technology and the World Wide Web has significantly changed the information landscape and the services around it. In one of these fields, library science, changes occurred during the emergence of electronic publishing, whereby information was hosted and disseminated in a new medium and a number of new tools were integrated with the existing physical library (Peek & Newby, 1996) forming the digital library (Borgman, 1999; Schwartz, 2000). Following the changes in the library environment new skills and qualifications were required from the librarians (Ashcroft, 2004; Biddiscombe, 2001; Kwasik, 2013; Sharp, 2001) who had to adjust to the new conditions, while modernised library titles were formulated, such as the “modern librarian” (Gerolimos & Konsta, 2008), “digital librarian” (Choi & Rasmussen, 2009), or “cybrarian” (Marion, 2001).

Another consequence of technology and electronic publishing was open access; Suber (2012) describes open access as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” The impact of open access was significant to academic and research libraries, especially when funders and institutions demonstrated their active support with the creation of open access policies. According to ROARMAP1 there are currently more than 80 open access policies introduced by funders and over 730 from institutions (Picarra, 2012), with the majority of them requiring both the open access availability of the research outputs and a level of compliance monitoring from the academic institutions (Pontika & Rozenberga, 2015). Funders extended their research support agenda and, apart from the mandated policies on open access, have also introduced terms in their policies around research data as well (Cox & Pinfield, 2013).

All these aforementioned developments introduced the use of the institutional repository (thereafter called only repository) in the academic libraries (Jones, Andrew, & MacColl, 2006), which would serve as the medium where the open access content should be stored both for dissemination and preservation purposes. In an effort to adjust to this fast shaping environment and be aligned with their role as experts in accessing knowledge (Ottaviani & Hank, 2009), academic libraries introduced new roles and offered new services. These relate to open access, research data management (RDM), and the implementation and integration of the repositories that would host research outputs and their affiliated data.

This research paper discusses and reveals the skills required in the UK Higher Educational Institution job market as they were advertised between the years 2015 and 2017. Even though there is published research that discusses how the library profession has transformed drawing conclusions from job descriptions (Blumenthal, Martinez, Murthy & Silver, 2006; Bychowski et al., 2010; McMullen & Felicia, 2013), there is no research with a focus on the range of specialisations in scholarly communications, i.e. open access, institutional repositories and research data management. Instead, the focus is on other fields, for example digital librarians (Choi & Rasmussen, 2009; Park, Lu & Marion, 2009) or digital curators (Kim, Warga & Moen, 2013).

Even though no study describes the role of the repository manager, as this is shaped via advertised job descriptions, there is available literature on the requirements of the repository manager role. For example, Swan (2011) states that the role of the repository manager is to collect, curate and disseminate research outputs, show the university’s research outputs to the world and demonstrate its impact. For the past ten years there has been a growth in the number of repositories – from 128 in December 2005 to 2,253 in December 2012 (Pinfield et al., 2014) – as these can successfully communicate the amount and quality of research conducted in a university to the outside world and serve as an active circulator of content (Walters, 2007). Since repositories began, efforts were made by SHERPA services to define skills of repository managers by (Robinson, 2008). SHERPA defined the capabilities of a repository manager, as developing strategies and workflows, managing collections and coordinating activities, whilst offering further information on technical matters, metadata, storage, preservation, content, liaising, advocacy and training skills.

An early study (Allard, Mack, & Feltner-Reichert, 2005) investigated the most prominent topics examined in the repositories’ literature and where the librarian’s role fits in it. The findings from the literature review illustrated that a clear connection between the repository and the library cannot be assumed, but librarians had often mentioned that their tasks not only revolved around working with repositories but had leading roles in offering repositories’ training in their own institution. A study (Wickham, 2010) conducted in the UK, showed that there are three main job roles specific to repositories, the (a) repository manager, (b) repository technical developer and (c) repository administrator. During the first years of the development of repositories there was a great need for technical staff, who would develop and install the repositories, but later on the role of the repository manager or administrator became more popular. Staff holding these roles would integrate the repository to the institution’s daily workflows by collecting new records, adding them into the repository, controlling the metadata and managing copyrights.

An investigation into Italian repositories (Cassella & Morando, 2012) and the skills of their library staff indicated that the repositories’ landscape is rich and requires a large variety of skills, different or specialised than the “traditional” librarian. A similar conclusion emerged from a survey conducted the same year, with Australian and New Zealand repository managers (Simons & Richardson, 2012). The results revealed a disparity in training that current repository staff had received during their first period of managing a repository, indicating that the library staff had inadequate skill sets for the role they were holding.

Two studies also looked at how the roles of existing librarians progressed and how their traditional duties shifted to serving the purposes of the new repository infrastructure in academic libraries. Chan, Kwok, and Yip (2005) showed how reference librarians were given early repository manager responsibilities, such as evaluating repositories prior to the adoption and installation of a repository, development of documentation and guidelines, metadata record checking and collecting research outputs for the enrichment of the repository. Similarly, the University of Oregon libraries (Jenkins, Breakstone, & Hixson, 2005) integrated into the duties of the reference librarians the selection of the repository software that would best fit the institution’s needs and its actual design.

Researchers have always produced data, to support their research results. Only recently though – primarily due to funders’ research data policies (UKRI, n.d.) – institutions realised the strategic importance of the data produced by researchers (Whyte & Tedds, 2011) and established services to support RDM (Jones, Pryor, & Whyte, 2013). Even though discussions have taken place evaluating whether a library could be the appropriate unit to provide this type of service (Gabridge, 2009; Henty, 2008; Monastersky, 2013), the nature of data processing – which entails familiarity with metadata, retrieval and curation-gave the library the advantage of taking the lead. Tasks such as organising research workflows, providing consultation, offering training to researchers and drafting policies (Lewis, 2010) were traditionally library staff roles.

Nonetheless, the RDM role is complex and the types of support extend to many levels. Auckland (2012) surveyed UK liaison librarians and discovered gaps in the skills of the existing staff that related to offering recommendations on preservation and curation and organising advocacy strategies. A US survey (Tenopir, Birch, & Allard, 2012), had similar results, and exposed a library inefficiency to prepare services in RDM, publish guidelines and offer technical services.

A case study with a UK focus (Cox & Pinfield, 2013) surveyed libraries investigating the type of RDM services, future concerns and fundamental provisions. The results showed that approximately one third of the institutions had an RDM policy in place, the majority of which were developed after an appropriate collaboration with the library’s RDM services staff. This clearly demonstrates that academic institutions recognise the connection between RDM and the research services staff. With regards to the skills of staff, only one third of the respondents felt confident that they had a sufficient skill set. The participants mentioned that even though their skills fulfilled some RDM needs, around half of them mentioned that they were doubtful about their capabilities and identified gaps in the overall skills spectrum preventing them from successfully committing to and performing the role.

This research attempts via an analysis of UK job advertisements to offer an understanding of the emerging trends in the roles and jobs of the open scholarly communications environment and to list the essential and desirable requirements of these jobs, so that professionals can equip themselves with appropriate knowledge and skill sets.

During the period March 2015 to September 2017, seventy-one UK job adverts relating to open research scholarly communications services were collected. The selection was done manually from job advertising sites, such as Jobs.ac.uk, CILIP Lisjobnet and the Times Higher Education. The author subscribed to these services and she received an email each time a position relating to open research services and scholarly communications was published. In addition, the author was a member of some open access and repositories lists, such as the ‘Jisc-Repositories,’ ‘GOAL,’ ‘OAGoodPractice’ and ‘UKCoRR-Discussion’ – a closed UK only list with members from UK research repositories teams.

To ensure that the jobs collected were within the appropriate range, the author decided on the wording selection criteria and saved job advertisements when the following words were present either in the title or the description:

When the job title included the words from (a) the job advertisement, all the related files would be saved. When the wording from (b) would appear in the job advertisement title, the full text of the job was further scanned and investigated. When a job’s full text included words from (a), then the job advertisement would be saved. Each job advertisement could have more than one associated file and when this was the case, they were all saved locally in one folder on the author’s personal computer. At the end, all the saved files were examined, a spreadsheet containing all the related data per job advert was generated and used for analysis purposes.

The author investigated the saved job advertisements and the associated job descriptions and presents conclusions on:

The analysis and results of these seventy-one UK job descriptions of open research services positions has shown not only a large number of general and specific subfield skills, but also a wide variety of different competencies. Due to the rapidly progressing and currently shifting open research environment the research services environment is becoming more complex, a finding that is in agreement with the discoveries of Cassella and Morando (2012). Even though library staff have always been part of the lively library communities with a focus on supporting their users, it is currently expected from them to extend their capabilities even further and master their communication and liaison skills, so they can not only “sell” the funders’ open access policies, but to influence them with their convincing arguments.

Research staff are also expected to interpret complex policies, either internal or external, something that has been also mentioned by Chan et al. (2005). This implies that staff should be experts in the field, understand policies well, be proactive thinkers of the impact and consequences that the complexities of a policy could have to researchers. They should also be in a position to provide solutions to those researchers who, for example, have received funding from more than one funder with non-harmonised open access policies. They should also be keen to communicate and engage with colleagues in other institutions to adopt best practices and workflows and be able to discern the right research stakeholder per specific case.

The skills for the three subfields were mixed; for example, a job advertisement would request expertise on open access and research data management, or, advocacy on open access policies and management of the institutional repository. A possible explanation is that the open research landscape does not have clear lines per subfield and staff knowledgeable in one field could also serve in another field as well; for example, when compliance with funders’ open access policies is concerned or with creating advocacy strategies. Another explanation is that academic institutions do not operate with unlimited funding and are not in position to support as many job vacancies as they would wish, but due to the pressure from funders’ open access policies they are bound to offer research support. In general, the largest amount of “clean” job descriptions (17), i.e. jobs advertised for only one specific subfield, came from the Russell Group institutions; maybe because they serve a large number of researchers with various cases, their research services teams are large in numbers and they can afford it.

It has already been mentioned in the results section that the reason behind the low count of the RDM jobs in the competencies table was due to the fact that these jobs were often combined with another subfield. Based on the very low number of job advertisements with the title “research data management” – only one job advertisement used the title “research data management” and that was in combination with “open access” – allows us to question whether UK academic institutions have already covered these positions or if there is a gap? According to Cox and Pinfield’s (2013) findings, one third of the academic institutions surveyed reported that they had already a research data management policy in place, leaving two thirds without one. Another study (Cox, Kennan, Lyon, & Pinfield, 2017) indicates that even though libraries are in the favourable position to be more active in RDM, there are limitations prohibiting this effort. For example, lack of leadership, difficulty in establishing effective policies and locating funding and resources. To overcome these barriers requires further investigation. Based on the findings from the aforementioned studies and the fact that this research discovered such a low reference to this subfield we can assume that there is indeed a gap. This could be because either institutions are not aware themselves of the requirements relating to this post and neglect addressing it, do not consider it to be a priority, or do not feel the pressure from funders’ policies for compliance monitoring.

Finally, of interest are the findings relating to the degree level and the subject fields that are expected from those who apply for the open research services jobs. It is clear that the degree itself is not sufficient alone to prove knowledge and expertise is validated from the candidate’s previous working experience. Academic institutions do not consider a LIS degree, both at the undergraduate or graduate level, to be an advantage. On the contrary, an undergraduate degree in any subject field is expected to work equally well, while for some job advertisements a master’s degree in LIS was listed as ‘desirable’. These results may imply that the complexity of the field can be successfully addressed by other backgrounds as well. It may also reflect a delay from LIS degrees to embed in their course programme this open research expertise, which explains why a degree in the field is not valued as being important.

This research attempted via an analysis of the UK job advertisements to discover all the essential requirements that academic institutions expect from their prospective repository manager employees. The need emerged from the constant developments in the open research and scholarly communications landscape and the willingness to explore how these affect the academic institutions’ open research services. This article attempts to close the current literature gap regarding the general and specific skills that prospective job candidates should acquire. It also expects to place future professionals in the favourable position of being aware of the educational and professional choices and possible career path they need to make in order to succeed in one of these positions.

As these job descriptions could influence LIS future trends and skills, this paper can also serve as useful reading to those who participate in the design of the LIS degree programmes. The committees planning for the future capabilities of the LIS students could introduce to their curriculums the necessary courses that can strengthen the LIS students to become the future open research services professionals.

Further research could involve not only a larger sample of job advertisements originating from a longitudinal study, but also a larger variety of job descriptions advertised in more than one geographical area. These studies could explore both the general and specific skills but also the national funders’ open access policies and investigate whether there is a correlation between the required skill sets and the types of green or gold funders’ open access policies.