For many years, the university has been actively supporting the general migration towards open access to scholarly research outputs and data.
Recent history
The main mechanism for making work produced by Greenwich scholars has been and remains in the form GALA. GALA is our institutional repository, and principally supports what was known as the Green open access, where upon acceptance for publication, authors deposit the accepted manuscript (post accepted peer review amendments but preceding any publisher-side typesetting) version and subject to any publisher-defined embargoes, the work can be made freely accessible.
The other main route to achieving open access is known as Gold open access, and this is where work is published in a way that is openly available at source. The Gold route to achieving open access would also include open licensing, that allow authors to retain the copyright of the work, but permit re-use of the work. The evolution of the Gold route led to many of the legacy publishers who tend to publish prestigious titles, using article processing charges (APCs) to sustain or generate new revenue streams in their publication endeavours.
In the absence of a never-ending pot of money to cover APCs and given the contemporary culture of scholarly publishing, depositing accepted manuscripts into GALA upon acceptance was the primary means of complying with the REF 2021 open access policy.
Shifts in open access
Whilst Gold and Green help to keep open access more comprehensible, they also iron out many of the nuances that exist. A common misconception remains that Gold open access necessitates the payment of an APC. However, there are other sustainable business models for Gold open access that are not based upon APCs. Library partnerships, such as that used by the Open Library of Humanities and university presses have demonstrated alternative means to pursue open access publishing without the need for article-level charges.
However, the Transformative Agreements offered by legacy publishers are proliferating at great speed. Such deals offer traditional digital access to academic journals, and also include a proportion of publishing opportunities for academics at a subscribing institution. As such, they are also known as ‘read and publish’ deals.
At the time of writing the university is participating in four such deals with the following publishers:
Whilst major questions remain around the economics and power dynamics in these deals, they offer routes to Gold open access publishing without APCs. They are proving remarkably popular with authors, and as per the university’s Publications Policy, authors should be selecting the most open licence available in order to help maximise impact potential and allow the university to actively contribute to the construction of the scholarly commons.
Open licensing and policy evolution
If authors are unsure of which licence to select when using a Transformative Agreement or in any ither such circumstance, open licensing opportunities should be agreed with Research Development Services. The Scholarly Communications Manager is available to support this directly.
The REF 2021 policy noted that Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative (CC BY-NC-ND) licence “would meet the minimum requirement” for compliance. As the post 2021 REF open access policy has not yet been drafted, we cannot speculate, but it seems likely that historic minimum requirements are likely to increase rather than decrease in scale. The university has a preference towards the most open licence available, not only with a view to future compliance issues, but also to contribute to the scholarly commons and provide optimal conditions for achieving impact. UKRI appear to be pushing back their open access policy review, and are not expected to produce their new policy until 2022.
It is important to remember that depositing your work into GALA upon acceptance is still required. The ever-diversifying realm of open access publishing opportunities are still not universal, and many publications will not be available for most authors to publish their work in through Gold open access without the payment of an APC.
Plan S
With the various institutional, funder, publisher, and REF open access policies co-existing, plan S is an international initiative that tries to unify various stakeholders through agreed principles. UKRI are a signatory of plan S, making all UK Research Councils subject to their principles and open access requirements. This somewhat complicates Gold open access publishing as traditional ‘hybrid’ publishing is excluded, and only Transformative Agreements are supported in this way.
However, the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is an aspect part of plan S that some of our authors may wish to take particular heed of. For those in receipt of plan S funder grants (Research Council, Wellcome Trust, etc.) that are not publishing via Gold open access, the Green route is still available. However, the RRS requires that authors issue their AAMs with zero embargo under a CC BY licence. Failure to do so will be a breach of the agreement with the funder, and this will be taken very seriously by funders and the university.
If you are impacted by plan S, please contact the Scholarly Communications Manager to ensure that compliance with your funder requirements is achieved.
Actions
Our Publications Policy will be updated as is required, but the current environment still requires you to deposit your AAMs upon acceptance, whether you are publishing through the Gold route or not. This is consistent with our operations from 2018 onwards, but if you have any questions, please bring them to us for discussion.