Open Access – Page 3 – Opening Research

Rights Retention

Newcastle University has introduced a new Research Publications and Copyright policy which came into effect on 1^st August 2022. The policy is designed to ensure that Newcastle authors are in a position to follow good open research practice and comply with changing funder requirements around open access to research outputs. It does this by recommending that authors make their work open access via use of a Rights Retention Statement (RRS) and self-archiving into the institutional repository. Authors retain their own copyright throughout this process.

The University is working with our colleagues in the N8 Research Partnership to align our approach and all eight institutions will be formally launching their new policies from 1^st January 2023. Many other Higher Education Institutions beyond the N8 are launching, or have launched, similar policies.

Funders such as UKRI and Wellcome have new open access policies which aim to ensure that the results of publicly funded research are immediately available and not subject to paywalls or embargo periods. These policies have the potential to bring authors into conflict with publishers, some of whom currently prefer to retain more restrictive publication options. Rights Retention policies developed because they offered a way of resolving the growing tension between research funder policies and publisher models.

Background

Traditional publication models require authors to grant publishers an exclusive right to publish their work, or to transfer copyright to the publishers. Reuse of the published work is subsequently controlled by the publishers while authors retain limited rights about when, where, how and with whom their output can be shared. Access to published research output is in effect paywalled, with access controlled by the publisher.

For some time, major research funders have been unhappy about these restrictions on access to publicly funded research and have adopted increasingly robust open access policies to challenge this position.

Since 2018, many major research funders, including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust, have signed up to CoAlition S whose stated ambition is to ensure that publications resulting from public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. The strapline for Plan S, (the CoAlition’s action plan) is clear and unambiguous: “making full and immediate open access a reality.”

Wellcome implemented a new open access policy in January 2021, and as of 1^st April 2022 UKRI has followed suit. Both funders now require immediate open access to journal articles and conference proceedings resulting from research which they have funded. The policy for the next REF is also expected to be aligned with these requirements.

What does this mean in practice?

The new UKRI policy has extended the existing requirement for immediately-upon-publication open access to include author accepted manuscripts whereas previously an embargo period between first online publication and AAM availability was permitted. Funders will no longer pay fees for Gold Open Access to hybrid journals that lack a transitional agreement.

A further change in the new UKRI policy is that AAMs made available through repositories must be licenced with a creative commons attribution licence, preferably CC-BY: a licence that permits a broad range of usage.

Therefore, the challenge for authors and institutions is when the funder’s requirement for open access publication (immediately, without fees) conflicts with that of the publisher (after embargo, with fees) – whose policy do we comply with? And how do we manage the risks associated with non-compliance?

Rights Retention Policies at UK HEIs

In an attempt to resolve this conflict between funder and publisher policies, several research-intensive universities have started implementing their own rights retention policies, thereby ensuring their researchers are funder-compliant and the associated research outputs are disseminated as widely as possible, whilst retaining the freedom to publish in the journal of choice. The University of Edinburgh have pioneered this with their Research Publications & Copyright Policy 2021.

As mentioned earlier, Newcastle University’s policy came into effect on 1^st August 2022, but along with the other N8 institutions will formally launch its new policy on 1^st January 2023.

What will this mean for authors?

In practical terms, to comply with the proposed policy on Research Publications and Copyright authors will need to add a Rights Retention Statement (RRS) to the acknowledgements of submitted manuscripts, inform their co-authors about this policy at the earliest opportunity, and upload their Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) into MyImpact. Providing the RRS is included in the AAM this will be made open access upon publication under a CC BY licence.

The Research Services team in the University Library is developing and delivering a programme of resources and training events to support colleagues in transitioning to the new policy between now and the formal launch in January. More detailed guidance on complying with the policy, including FAQs can be accessed on the Library Research Services web pages, and there will be more blog posts reporting on the uptake of the new policy over the coming months.

Photo credit: Chris Bishop via the Newcastle University Photo Library.

Supporting the UKRI 2022 Open Access policy

Friday 1^st April sees the start of UKRI’s new Open Access policy. From this date, eligible UKRI-funded research papers must be made open access without embargo, under a CC BY licence (or, CC BY-ND by exception) and include a data access statement. A major change to the policy is that Gold open access in subscription/hybrid journals will be restricted to titles included in Newcastle University’s Transformative Agreements or journal titles that have committed to transition to open access (aka Transformative Journals).

Why has the open access policy changed?

UKRI is committed to championing open research as part of its strategy of advancing research culture change and to support the ambition set out in the government’s R&D People and Culture Strategy.

Open research improves research efficiency, quality and integrity through collaborative, transparent and reproducible research practices. UKRI’s priorities include open access to research publications and making research data as open as possible but as secure as necessary.
UKRI is building on the UK’s longstanding global leadership in open research with our new open access policy, which was developed through extensive consultation with the sector. The policy delivers on the ambition in the government’s R&D Roadmap, for publicly funded research to be accessible to all, and will boost the global impact of UK research by increasing opportunities for findings to be shared and used across all disciplines and sectors.
UKRI (2022) UKRI Strategy 2022–2027: Transforming tomorrow together. Available at: https://www.ukri.org/about-us/what-we-do/our-strategy-2022-to-2027/ (Accessed: 29 March 2022).

Where can I publish?

Fully open access journals and proceedings. Check the Directory of Open Access Journals (funds are available, apply here).
Subscription/hybrid journals that are in one of Newcastle University’s transformative agreements.
Transformative Journals. Subscription/hybrid journals that commit to transitioning to a fully open access journals (funds are available, apply here).
Subscription journals and proceedings that allow you to make your final accepted manuscript open access immediately on publication under a CC BY licence (e.g. Science).

If your journal does not meet any of the criteria above you may want to consider submitting elsewhere. Alternatively include a ‘rights retention statement’ in your submitted manuscript that allows you to make the author accepted manuscript open access in our repository. Contact the Open Access Team if you would like to know more about this alternative route to compliance.

Where can I get further advice and guidance?

Newcastle University’s Open Access team

You can find up to date information on our Open Access webpages
Open Access colleagues have presented policy briefings at a various meetings and events across the university and to all faculties. If you would like to request a briefing for your school or research group then please contact the Open Access team to request this.
Contact the Open Access team direct with your questions.

UKRI

UKRI have contacted grant holders directly explaining the policy changes and have published the following guidance:

UKRI Open Access Policy – https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy/
Publishing your Research Findings – https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy/
Shaping our Open Access Policy – https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy/
UKRI Open Access Policy: FAQs – https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy/
UKRI CC BY-ND licence exception – https://www.ukri.org/publications/no-derivatives-licence-exception/

Jisc

Find out how Jisc are supporting the research community to implement the UKRI open access policy – https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/implementing-the-new-ukri-open-access-policy.

Newcastle University and Elsevier

The contract between academic publisher Elsevier and UK Universities is due for renewal in December 2021.

Newcastle University subscribes to Elsevier’s ScienceDirect at a cost of £1.1 million for the current subscription deal which enables University members to access Elsevier journals online.

The UK Universities sector – on behalf of its researchers and students – entered negotiations with Elsevier with two core objectives: to reduce costs to levels UK universities can sustain, and to provide full and immediate open access to UK research.

Open access to research allows for greater impact, expanding access worldwide and the potential for collaborative work to benefit the national and international research community.

Elsevier is now the only major publisher that does not have a transformative open access agreement in place. Subscription costs to Elsevier’s journals are high and continuing to increase but do not include an open access agreement. Transformative agreements are also supported by cOAlition S research funders and, from April 2022, UKRI’s new policy is similarly supportive.

Therefore, a key practical aim of the negotiations is to secure a transformative agreement with Elsevier, which will support the core objective of immediate open access publishing.

UK Universities began negotiations in March 2021. Representatives from the sector will sit on the official negotiation team and Jisc facilitates the overall negotiations.

Jisc has produced the following video which highlights the key issues involved and has also produced some background information about the negotiations.

The Library will provide more detailed information about the aims of the negotiations and news of any progress over the coming months via this blog and on the Research Services website.

John Williams

Photo credit: King’s Walk June 2013 by John Donoghue.

New UKRI Open Access Policy published

After its long awaited review UKRI announced its new open access policy on the 6^th August. The policy will apply to publications acknowledging UKRI funding and aims to make UKRI-funded research freely available to the public. It aligns with Plan S and the Wellcome Trust open access policy, and there is a strong indication that the policy will align with the open access requirements for the next REF (due to be published in November 2021). UKRI have pledged continued and increased funding to support the implementation of the new policy.

The policy will apply to:

Peer-review research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022
Monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024.

Summary of changes

Articles (from 1 April 2022)

Must be open access immediately upon publication
CC BY licence must apply (with some permitted CC BY-ND exceptions)
No embargoes
APCs for OA in hybrid journals no longer permitted
A data access statement is required (even if there is no data)
Biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding are required to be archived in Europe PubMed Central

Books, book chapters and edited collections (from 1 January 2024)

Must be open access within 12 months of publication
CC BY licence required
Open access can be either published open access or by deposit of the Author’s Accepted Manuscript in an institutional repository
Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the open access content however more restrictive licences can apply for third-party content.

The University will be providing training and guidance before April 2022 to support implementation of the policy.

You can read the full policy documents here: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/supporting-healthy-research-and-innovation-culture/open-research/open-access-policies-review/

Guest post: Why I support the ‘Wide in Opening Access’ approach

In this guest post Jan Deckers, senior lecturer in bioethics at Newcastle University, explains his vision of how a ‘Wide in Opening Access’ approach can allow all quality research to be published.

It is probably safe to assume that most authors like their work to be read.

The traditional model of publishing operates by means of the ‘reader pays principle’. In this model, readers must generally pay either to purchase a book or to subscribe to a journal. They might do neither. However, where readers do not pay themselves, others have to do so for them. Frequently, these others are libraries. However, most libraries that lend books and provide access to journals limit access, frequently requiring the reader to be a member of an institution and/or to pay a subscription to the library.

In the age of the internet, access to published work is much greater than what it used to be. Some books are available electronically, and many journals are. In spite of this rapid change, some things stay the same: publishers must still make their money. In order to provide open access to readers, many now demand that authors pay book or article processing charges. This disadvantages authors who seek to publish books and who cannot pay such charges, unless book publishers can rely on third party funds that cover publication costs for authors who cannot pay themselves. Where such funds are not available, other options are available. Authors can still find plenty of publishers who will offer contracts, free of any charge, to those who are able to produce good work. This option exists as many book publishers stand by the traditional model, at least in part because many readers still prefer the experience of reading a tangible book to that of reading a virtual one. Another option is self-publication, where authors can publish books at relatively low cost, essentially by taking on the publishing cost themselves. In sum, whilst open access book publication presents an ethical dilemma where it supports the ‘writer pays principle’, its benefits for readers and the availability of reasonable alternatives for authors who are excluded from publishing in the open access mode makes open access book publication, in my view, a relatively sound moral option.

Open access journal publication presents a different challenge. Some journals find themselves in a position where, rather than to adopt the ‘writer pays principle’, they are able to get the money from elsewhere, for example from governments and other institutions that are willing and able to pay. This is the ideal scenario and – in the current world – the exception rather than the norm. This is why open access journal publication raises a massive moral challenge: what does one do, for example, when the leading journal in one’s academic specialty decides to become an open access journal that charges authors, where neither the author nor the institution that they may belong to can pay? To address this challenge, the journal may be able to offer free publication to some authors, effectively by elevating the processing fee for authors who are able to pay so that it can cover the cost for authors who are unable to pay. Some journals do this already by offering either a discount or a fee waiver to some authors. The problem is that such discounts may not be sufficient and that the criteria for discounts and waivers frequently are too indiscriminate. For example, offering waivers indiscriminately to authors who are based in particular countries both fails to recognise that those authors might be relatively rich and that authors who live in relatively rich countries might be relatively poor.

The only way that I can see out of this is to ‘de-individualise’ the article processing charge completely. Journals would then be able to publish any article that survives the scrutiny of the peer-review process, regardless of the author’s willingness or ability to pay. Such de-individualisation would also address another concern that I have with the open access journal publishing movement: how can we prevent publishers from publishing work that falls below the academic standard? One might argue that peer review should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the problem is that the publisher is incentivised strongly to turn a blind eye to peer review reports, which – in the worst case – might be biased themselves by the knowledge that the author is willing to pay.

Journals that are unable to raise enough funds to publish all articles in the open access mode may provide an option for authors who can pay to publish in the open access mode and for other authors to publish in the traditional mode. Many journals now operate in this mode, and are therefore known as hybrid journals. I do not consider this option to be ideal as it sets up a two tier system, where authors who publish in the former mode are likely to enjoy a wider readership. However, it may be preferable to the traditional mode of publication as this model is not free from problems either, providing access only to readers who can pay themselves or benefit from institutions, such as libraries, that pay for them.

The world in which authors, editors, and peer reviewers must navigate is complex. In spite of this complexity, I call upon all to resist any involvement with journals that do not provide authors with the chance to publish good quality work. Whilst I hope that open access journal publishing will become the norm for all articles, I recognise that journals may not be able to publish all articles in the open access mode due to financial constraints. As long as these constraints are there, however, I believe that journals should continue to provide the option of restricted access publication according to the ‘reader pays principle’.

This is why I only publish with and do editorial or peer-reviewing work for journals that adopt what one might call a ‘Wide in Opening Access’ (WOA) approach. It consists in peer-reviewed journals being prepared to publish all articles that survive scientific scrutiny through an appropriate peer-review process, regardless of the author’s ability or willingness to pay. It guarantees that authors who produce good journal articles and who cannot or will not pay are still able to publish. In this sense, it is ‘wide’. It is wide ‘in opening access’ as it fully supports open access publication becoming the norm. Whilst it adopts the view that articles from those who cannot or will not pay should ideally also be published in the open access mode, it recognises that this may not always be possible.

With this blog post I call upon all authors to support the WOA approach in the world of journal publishing. You can do so, for example, by stating your support for it on your website. Without such support, writers who do not have the means either to pay themselves or to mobilise others to pay for them will be left behind in the transition towards greater open access journal publication. Without support for the WOA approach, those without the means to pay to publish will be disadvantaged more than they are already in a world in which the ‘writer pays principle’ is gaining significant traction. To debate the WOA approach as well as other issues in publishing ethics, I created a ‘publishing ethics’ mailing list hosted by Jiscmail. You can (un)subscribe to this list here.

Image credit: Arek Socha from Pixabay

Open Publishing Week

Our transformative agreements allow researchers to publish their articles as open access for free in thousands of journals from publishers including Wiley, Springer, T&F, OUP, CUP, BMJ and the Royal Society.

To help familiarise authors with the publishing workflows of these new agreements we are running an online ‘open publishing week’ where publishers will present details of how the agreements work in practice, explaining what authors should expect at each stage of the publication process.

The scheduled events are:

Royal Society (19/07/21, 11.00-12.00)
CUP (19/07/21, 14.00-15.00)
T&F (20/07/21, 10.00-11.00)
Springer (20/07/21, 14.00-15.00)
OUP (21/07/21, 11.00-11.00)
Wiley (21/07/21, 14.00-15.00)
BMJ (22/07/21, 11.00-12.00)

Book now

The broader aim of these agreements is to transform all subscription journals to full and immediate open access. You can read more about that in our post ‘Transformative agreements – an easier route to open access‘ or talk to us about them at open publishing week.

2020 in review: ePrints

Following on from our annual review of data.ncl this post highlights some key statistics from our ePrints repository where researchers share their publications.

Headline stats for 2020

5086 new publication records added (total of 124,957)

2989 new full text publications made available (total 26,582)

289,864 views

33,031 downloads

Our three most viewed publications were:

Author profile pages were also some of our most popular pages, so we’d encourage researchers to keep their publication list is up-to-date.

Adding publications to ePrints makes them eligible for REF, but also means they are more visible and can have more impact. We optimise ePrints for research discovery and syndicate content to aggregation services such as CORE and unpaywall. That helps people find free versions of research that would otherwise be inaccessible to them as well as making text and data mining more feasible.

Our aim for 2021 is to increase the proportion of research outputs we make open access in ePrints. That will be helped by our new transformative agreements with publishers that make open access free for our authors and by funder policies like that of the Wellcome Trust and Plan S that increasingly mandate this.

Guest Post: Rethinking What Data Is

This is our first guest post on the Opening Research blog. We are keen to hear from colleagues across the research landscape so please do get in touch if you’d like to write a post. But the honor of debut guest blogger goes to David Johnson, PGR in History, Classics and Archaeology.

The trainings on open publishing and data storage fundamentally changed my perspective on what constitutes data.

Coming to start my PhD from a background in history and the humanities, I really didn’t give the idea of data much thought. I knew I was expected to present evidence about my topic in order to defend my research and my ideas, but in my mind there was a fundamental difference between the kind of evidence I was going to work with and ‘data’. Data was something big and formal, a collection of numbers and formulae that people other than me collated and manipulated using advanced software. Evidence was the warm and fuzzy bits of people’s lives that I would be collecting in order to try and say something meaningful about them, not something to ‘crunch’, graph, or manipulate. This was a critical misconception that I am pleased to say I have come to terms with now.

What I had to do was get away from the very numerical interpretation of the term ‘data’, and start to think in broader terms about the definition of the word. When I was asked about a data plan for my initial degree proposal, I said I didn’t have one. I simply didn’t think I was going to need one. In fact, I had already developed a basic data plan without realising what it was called. My initial degree proposal included going through a large volume of domestic literature and gathering as many examples of emotional language as I could find to create a lexicon of emotions words in use during the nineteenth century. In retrospect, it’s obvious that effort was fundamentally based in data analysis, but my notion of what ‘data’ was prevented me from seeing that at the time.

What changed my mind was some training I went to as part of my PhD programme, which demonstrates how important it is to engage with that training with an open mind. The trainings on open publishing and data storage fundamentally changed my perspective on what constitutes data. Together these two training events prompted me to reconsider the way I approached the material I was collecting for my project. My efforts to compile a vocabulary of emotions words from published material during the nineteenth century was not just a list of word, but was a data set that should be preserved and made available. Likewise, the ever-growing pile of diary entries demonstrating the lived emotional experiences of people in the nineteenth century constitutes a data set. Neither of these are in numerical form, yet they both can be qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated like other forms of data.

I suspect I am not alone in carrying this misconception as far into my academic work as I have. I think what is required for many students is a rethinking of what constitutes data. Certainly in the hard sciences, and perhaps in the social sciences there is an expectation of working with traditional forms of data such as population numbers, or statistical variations from a given norm, but in the humanities we may not be as prepared to think in those terms. Yet whether analysing an author’s novels, assessing parish records, or collecting large amounts of diary writings as I am, the pile of text still constitutes a form of data, a body of material that can be subjected to a range of data analysis tools. If I had been able to make this mind shift earlier in my degree, I might have been better able to manage the evidence I collected, and also make a plan to preserve that data for the long term. That said, it’s still better late than never, and I am happy say I have made considerable progress since I rethought my notions of what data was. I have put my lexicon data set out on the Newcastle Data Repository, so feel free to take a look at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.11830383.v1.

Image credit: JD Handcock Photos: http://photos.jdhancock.com/photo/2012-09-28-001422-big-data.html

Wellcome Trust policy briefings

We will be running a series of online briefings between November and January 2021 to help researchers understand the requirements of the new Wellcome Trust open access policy.

This new policy is significantly different in that from January 1, 2021 all research articles supported by Wellcome must be either:

Published in a fully open access journal or platform, OR
Published in a subscription journal, with the author making the accepted manuscript freely available in Europe PubMed Central from publication, OR
Published in a subscription journal, but made open access through a transformative agreement held by the university

Authors will also be required to apply a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence all their accepted manuscripts and inform the publisher of this when submitting articles to journals. This is intended to allow authors to retain rights to comply with the policy in otherwise non-compliant journals.

To find out more about the new policy and how we can support you with it, register for one of our online briefings.

Thu Nov 19, 10.00 – 11.00
Mon Nov 23, 14.00 – 15.00
Wed Dec 2, 14.00 – 15.00
Thu Dec 10, 10.00 – 11.00
Mon Jan 11, 10.00 – 11.00

COAF ends this week, but not all break ups have to be painful

The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), a block grant provided through a partnership of health research charities to enable publications to be immediately open access, ends on 30 September 2020. All COAF partners remain committed to open access and will continue to fund associated costs, but how they do so will vary.

COAF was established in 2014 and since then has awarded block grants annually to 36 institutions. As one of those institutions, we have allocated £1.5 million of COAF grant funds to make over 600 papers open access and help increase their visibility, reuse and impact. So, from our perspective it is a shame to see COAF end, but we understand why it must as the funders start to adapt their previously shared policy to Plan S at different rates.

However, this does not mean that researchers funded by the former-COAF partners can no longer make their papers open access. The Wellcome Trust, CRUK and BHF will be providing separate block grants to the university to support their researchers. Blood Cancer UK and Parkinson’s UK will now allow open access to be costed into their grants or applied for directly from the funder. Versus Arthritis researchers can also request funds for open access directly from the charity.

We’ve updated the funders’ information on the open access website to reflect this and are adapting our processes to support researchers funded by the different charities. If you have publications you plan to submit or that have already been accepted and want to discuss how this might affect your paper, please do contact the open access team.

As you may have picked up from reading this, many funder are changing their policies to implement Plan S. For the Wellcome Trust, that will be from Jan 01 2021 and for CRUK from Jan 01 2022, but that’s a topic for another blog post.