Tag: Open Access

Transformative Agreements and affiliation with the university

3rd May 2022

As you will be aware from a number of communications and sessions, the university currently participates in several Transformative Agreements (TAs) with major scholarly publishers including Springer Nature, Wiley, SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, and Elsevier.

TAs are ostensibly those contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on subscription to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services. A major benefit for authors is that their work is published in an openly accessible form under a Creative Commons licence (and our institutional preference is for CC BY 4.0 through TAs, and any deviation thereof should be discussed with the <a href="http://<a href="mailto:ks8035h@gre.ac.uk">Scholarly Communications Manager.)

As part of the approval process for using a TA, we need to confirm that the corresponding author of the paper is a registered user with the university. This can be done through various means on the publisher’s end, but we check through various systems to clarify that the deal is being used as we have contractually agreed with each publisher.

In the spirit of this requirements, we expect all corresponding authors making use of their Greenwich affiliation to use the university email address as part of their submission for publication with a publisher. This will expedite approval on our side, and will also help publishers to offer the opportunity to use a TA.

London Open Research Week

2nd November 2021

A group of London-based peers working in the areas of scholarly communication, research data management, librarianship, publishing, and institutional repositories decided to collaborate across institutional boundaries for London Open Research Week 2021: having experienced frustrations with the fractures and divides across the topologies of openness, we have worked together to try and forge a broad event for practitioners and research communities.

Predicated by our experiences at and beyond the four institutions collaborating in London Open Research Week, and working with the theme of  this year’s International Open Access Week, It Matters How We  Open  Knowledge: Building Structural Equity, we curated a diverse and engaging programme of live, online sessions that were free to attend.

Feminist perspectives from Early Career Researchers, critical perspectives on openness, and the increasing tensions arising in the realm of research evaluation and (biblio)metrics and the various intersections with open research were included, amongst a wealth of international insights from scholars and professionals across the sector. 

We welcome you to join us to share in the ideas and benefits that come from commons approaches; as a rich field, working collaboratively and exchanging experiences and ideas beyond our usual operational, departmental, and institutional limitations, we explored the tensions that exist between our current conception and operation of openness in direct relation to structural equity in order to build upon and challenge the equitable premise that ‘open’ is often understood to imply. 

The videos for all sessions have now been uploaded and can be openly accessed via the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxncMX3s4tmKTqoHU3VT8-w

Plan S

25th June 2021

Plan S is an international and collaborative initiative that aims to to achieve full and immediate open access, based around a series of principles.

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

UKRI were an early signatory of plan S, meaning that all successful grant award winners from the UK’s seven research councils, along with many others funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are subject the requirements of plan S.

Sample of funders that are signatories of plan S
*A component of UKRI (formerly RCUK) which as signed at the top level

A major change for plan S from UKRI or REF 2021’s open access policies is around hybrid publication. Unequivocally, plan S does “not support the ‘hybrid’ model of publishing. However, as a transitional pathway towards full Open Access within a clearly defined timeframe, and only as part of transformative arrangements,” This is significant as some major publishers, including Elsevier, have still not agreed a Transformative Agreement, rendering their non-Gold open access titles as non-compliant with plan S. The Journal Checker Tool can be used to ascertain a titles compliance status with plan S.

Plan S does support the Green route to open access, however, it requires a CC BY licence and zero embargo, which is where the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) comes in. The RRS is handled by a pre-existing legal requirement from the funder to the grantee that supersedes any requirements between the author and the publisher (although it could lead to a breach of contract with the publisher depending on the requirements and actions.)

A table showing the current Transformative Agreements with some of the largest scholarly publishers and their current embargo policies

We encourage all researchers to familiarise themselves with plan S. We would also strongly advise all grant holders looking to publish articles to consult with the Scholarly Communications Manager prior to submitting any articles for publication to ensure that the requirements of plan S are met.

Thoughts for 2020 Open Access Week

20th October 2020

In recent years, the dramatic growth of open access to the literature has quite reasonably been hailed as a major success, which it most certainly has been in these terms. It is difficult to deny the impact that policies have had on facilitating this growth, not forgetting the investments that institutions have made is developing systems and cultures that support the stated purpose of open access.

In actuality, however, open access is far more complicated than this. Open access has a broad range of lineages and histories as Sam Moore has unpicked and emphasised. This disparate politics that these differences imbue is incredibly significant if we are to assess the contemporary successes and failures (and problems, etc.) of open access.

Some advocates of open access refer to open access as a “movement.” This can seem simplistic as it homogenises the disparate politics of various stakeholders. Issues such as pedagogy, gender, race, coloniality, and economics sometimes propel a particular drive or approach towards open access. Conflating the rationales of these heterogenous entities into one singular movement seems somewhat limiting, and fails to understand the legitimacy of different routes that any of these could take towards achieving their goals. This is where the benefits that of open infrastructures may be forgotten in the quest towards simply ‘achieving’ open access: distributed infrastructure of open repositories, and open publishing platforms afford opportunities to have multiple open accesses. It is important to remember that different forms of open access are a strength rather than a weakness.

The theme of this years open access week is  ‘Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion’. This gives pause for thought on the politics of open access. I have previously spoke to the problems with how contemporary usage of “open” within our extant political and governance systems is fraught with issues that have allowed openness to be appropriated for many of the purposes I have championed it as a move against. As we consider the role open access in relation to challenging structural inequality- something I earnestly believe it can- we must ask ourselves what open is before we can understand how it might challenge social and political inequity.

For instance, colleagues at Kent have recently published their access statement for their repository, KAR. This is a comprehensive statement articulating the roadmap that KAR is on towards making KAR more functional to a wider range of users. Importantly, it is not about ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ things per se, but it is about honestly and openly discussing the intention and the current issues in the process of making their repository more inclusive. We are similarly progressing this with GALA, and are currently liaising with our vendor to help identify the current status of GALA in this regard and I look forward to sharing something more concrete on this with you in the future. This is important because it highlights that we are thinking beyond operational issues in relation to open access policies with a more considered focus on people, and I would like to take this forward in a range of broader and deeper ways.

I have a strong interest in digital privacy as a human right. This may seem antithetical to open access, but openness and privacy are the obverse of one another, and thus one necessitates the other. I have previously discussed the issues of digital surveillance in relation to open access repositories, and have tested EOTK on various open services to make them available as onion services. Recent issues around personal data from social media has been used have made more of us aware of the underlying risks that exist as a result of merely using online services, and scholarly autonomy, privacy, and security necessitate that we consider how we might be able to support this to ensure that open access is inclusive and safe.   

For open access to build structural equity and inclusion, it needs to be more than achieving compliance rates of 80% against a policy. We need to articulate the politics of our respective personal approaches towards open access and openness, and how this interacts with out institutional approaches to open access.

Reviewing our conveyance of academic outputs in GALA

5th October 2020

As part of our ongoing review of processes around GALA, we have decided to try and make better use of some of the features of the software. We hope that a minor change to our existing review practices will improve the university’s management of compliance with internal and external policies, and help to increase the turnaround of items under review. 

With REF 2021’s submission date only six months away, there has been a not insignificant increase in the number of deposits to GALA. This has been experienced at other institutions, so we are certainly not alone in this. Indeed, we are excited that GALA is being used by a broad range of users, including many who have been recruited throughout 2020. 

However, with the increased volume of deposits comes and increased management of processes. As part of our review of all deposits into GALA, we perform a range of checks to ensure that the university is not breaching any copyright restrictions (e.g. the sharing of published Versions of Record which publishers have been given copyright of) and to try and support compliance with the university’s Publications Policy, the REF 2021 open access policy, and various research funder policies as applicable. 

This disparate range of criteria often require us to contact individual academics via email to clarify that certain aspects of metadata are accurate, or to ensure that the correct document version has been attached to the record. This has been an incredibly effective method and helped us to build and foster excellent working relationships, and to better understand experiences with GALA and research repositories more generally. 

However, at scale, moving communications outside of the software can become cumbersome and add delays to the processing of deposits. As such, we are instituting a minor change to our extant processes, and wanted to clearly explain what we are doing and why, hence this blog post. 

In specific and limited circumstances, we are going to use some functionality in the repository software to return records’ to a user’s work area. We will accompany return of records with a detailed message to explain what needs amending on a given record. For example, if a Version of Record that is under the copyright of the publisher and thus cannot be shared via GALA has been attached to the record, we may explain that you will need to attach your author’s accepted manuscript (AAM,) and where you may be able to obtain your AAM from if you do not have a copy to hand, before you re-deposit your record. 

Using this function of the software should better enable those depositing records to clarify or amend anything as appropriate in situ, expediting the process and resolving queries in a more effective way. 

Of course, we are always here to support you and ensure that your experiences with open access repositories are positive, so we need to be clear that you can contact us by any means necessary to help resolve any outstanding issues. However, by returning the output to the user’s work area, it will improve efficiency and enable depositors to better understand the requirements of depositing within GALA.