BMEc Guidance on Open Access Publication (May 2015)
Open Access (OA) is an initiative to make publicly funded research outputs in academic journals freely available at an international level, rather than restricted to those in institutions with subscription or licence. Making academic publications available through Open Access a requirement for an increasing number of research funders, with important implications, such as inclusion of outputs for the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Gold route or green route?
There are two options to make publications Open Access:
1. Green route: Some journals will allow authors to make their papers available via a repository, either institutional repository or a subject based repository. This is known as “Green” route. There should be no fee associated with Green routes to open access however green route will be subject to an embargo period required by the journal (short green = 6-12 months embargo; long green = 12- 24 months). It is the University of Sussex policy to seek to use green route OA where ever possible.
2. Gold route: Fees are paid to the journal in return for OA in the "author pays" gold route. Some journals will only allow the author pays gold route and some do not offer Gold OA at all. It is difficult to gauge costs but where authors are asked to pay the publisher for open access, fees are often in the range of £500-£3000 and the library quotes the average cost as being £1,500 per publication. These are normally payable by the corresponding author’s institution.
The institutional repository is Sussex Research Online https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/. Copies of your accepted journal articles should be deposited here. This can either be done by yourself or you can send journal details to the School Research and Enterprise Co-ordinator. The library will check for you any embargo restrictions imposed by journals on when papers can be made OA. The Library offers support for the release of such papers to the public domain via SRO. The University of Sussex open access guidance is available here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/research/openaccess
If staff are required to ‘go for gold’ by a research funder (see funder policies below) or can make a strong case that this is necessary, this will need to be approved by the School’s DRakE (see School policy below). Decisions to grant gold route open access should be made with reference to both funder and School policies.
It is the responsibility of staff to seek to make their publications open access and for them to seek advice from library staff at the time of a publication’s acceptance (at the very latest): . For a paper already accepted and/or published, the library can check whether it is RCUK compliant and give the appropriate advice.
There is more information (including about individual journal OA policies) to be found on-line, although it should be noted that the library staff are well positioned to provide the most up-to-date guidance as publishers’ guidelines are geared towards encouraging the paying of fees. The library webpages are: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/staff/research/openaccess and additional information on OA policies for specific journals are available via a link here:
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php NB: terminology used on the journal websites or Sherpa should be carefully interpreted –terms like “post-print” (meaning post article acceptance, but not post-publication) are not used in intuitive ways.
Policies guiding OA decisions for gold route
Academics and the public at large are increasingly keen to advance this agenda, as are the funders of research. Those accepting funding from these bodies are bound to follow the respective OA policies. Examples of policy from two major funders are provided below - HEFCE and RCUK (including all UK Research Councils), but this is not a comprehensive list.
School policy is reviewed first.
BMEc School policy
School policy is to ensure compliance with funders’ requirements and University requirements. University policy is to use green route OA as a default position in all but exceptional cases such as where funders require gold route OA fees to be paid or are willing to pay these (see below) or in cases where there is a substantive case for gold route.
A budget will be maintained at a School level for the payment of gold route OA fees, with the aim of maximising the number of staff eligible to be submitted to the next REF with the requisite number of qualifying publications across the School’s three departments. The budget is relatively small and must cover journal reviewing fees and open access fees. Funding for gold route OA is therefore very limited and the School DRaKE is not in a position to make optimal decisions across all three departments. Decisions about gold support for individual publications is therefore devolved to department-level DRaKEs.
Communication of decisions to the library about RCUK funded research outputs should be made via the School DRaKE. The allocation of funds should support gold route publication based firstly on funder requirements including REF compliance. Other considerations may include (inter alia) whether gold route access would promote substantially the impact of a key piece of work, or if the paper is a 4* output. Staff wishing to publish gold route publications as a matter of routine should build in the costs of open access fees when budgeting their research expenses.
HEFCE policy and its implementation at Sussex
Many academics are not aware that their research benefits from HEFCE funding. HEFCE funds institutions in proportion to the ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’ of research they submit to the REF.
HEFCE requires that all publications submitted to REF be deposited in institutional or subject repositories, within three months of the date of acceptance (not the date of publication). This applies to items accepted after 1st April 2016. In our case this is through Sussex Research On-line https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ All staff publishing research should deposit copies of their accepted works. Accepted journal articles are defined as the full text version of the manuscript after peer review including any final changes, but before any typesetting or copy-editing by the publisher. The Sussex library will check for them any embargo restrictions imposed by publishers and when papers can be made OA. Release via SRO is automatic after the embargo period ends.
HEFCE will require OA of all journal articles and conference proceedings that have an ISSN that are accepted for publications from 1st April 2016. But many research councils and many other UK research funders already mandate OA publication as a condition of the research that they fund – including research funded through RCUK studentships (e.g. ESRC studentships). HEFCE open access policy is available here: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/oa/policy/
RCUK policy and its implementation at Sussex
RCUK requires that research deriving from RCUK funding should be made open access within 12 months of publication (and within 6 months for STEM subjects - a target that will be difficult to work towards under green route as many publishers have embargo periods).
RCUK provide a (limited) block fund to support this process and the University is required to
report to RCUK on compliance with the OA mandate. For this reason, when providing outline publication details for Sussex Research Online and when depositing publications in the repository, it is essential that you provide details of the research funder (where relevant), to enable the University to monitor and report OA compliance with funder requirements.
If you have RCUK funding, before you submit an article to a journal it is best to email the Library at with the details of the journal to which you’d like to submit. They can tell you if it complies with RCUK requirements for OA, and through which route. If the Green route is not compliant, Library Research Support staff will ask the School’s DRakE for approval to go Gold (see School policy above), and organise payment if approved. There are no requirements for monographs or edited books to be OA at this stage.
Funds are held centrally for the whole university and allocated on a first come first serve basis (i.e there is no specific school allocation). RCUK open access policy is available here, and includes further details on requirements such as licence choice and funder acknowledgement:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/RCUK-prod/assets/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicy.pdf