“The PI Warrior and the Bag of Gold: Open Access Metadata and University Accounting Practice” is the title of the inaugural post recently released by Peter Burnhill, UK RepositoryNet+ Project Director at EDINA, at the new Gold Open Access Infrastructure blog. The post builds on the previously released RepNet discussion paper “A pedestrian view of the roads to Open Access” in proposing a mechanism to institutionally deal with [Gold] Open Access payments via the systematic use of Purchase Orders and to link the metadata filled into these POs to the institutional research information system (either a CRIS or a repository) from the very moment a research article is accepted (to later becoming completed once the publisher releases the DOI and the citation details for the work).

The Warrior PI post also builds on the earlier SONEX Work Group default use case for research work authorship: the multi-authored, multi-institutional output. This use case poses additional requirements on the information workflow for the accepted article metadata which may now start to be tested as a proof of concept.

Besides the intense and inspiring debate on whether Gold OA may or may not be the most appropriate way for realising Open Access that the default Finch, RCUK and BIS support to Gold Open Access has sparked, it is indisputable that it has also enormously raised the profile of Open Access at institutions (some of whose scholars are now suddenly becoming aware of their institutional repositories) and is enabling a pioneering discussion to take place in the domain of research information workflows and processes.