Tag: Process & Policy

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.

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.  

Golden opportunities? Emerging opportunities to expand access to Gold open access (OA) publishing

3rd July 2020

The evolution of the OA policy landscape is showing no signs of rest. With the implementation of plan S just months away, many of the legacy academic and scholarly publishers are busy amending their agreements with universities to ensure that they are compliant with plan S. Since UKRI- including all of the UK’s Research Councils- and others funders such as the Wellcome Trust are signatories of plan S, there is a clear intention for integral stakeholders to progress the existing OA landscape that has already been heavily shaped by existing policies.

What does this mean? 

The plan S principles intend to bring about “make full and immediate open access a reality.” Whilst the Green route to open access is explicitly supported, much of the orientation of the initiative is framed around traditional publication through journals, and in particular through the Gold route. 

Various business models support Gold OA publication. The APC (article processing charge) model has been the most widely implemented model by many of the legacy publishers. This means that the funding of Gold open access publication often relies on a payment on a per-article basis.

However, as universities traditionally pay subscriptions to publishers for access to scholarly materials, such monies have not been relieved from existing costs in the scholarly communication workflows. Indeed, universities may well have an increased total cost by the inclusion of APCs due to the simultaneous payments for access and publication within the same hybrid title, a phenomenon often referred to as ‘double dipping’. 

For funded research, access to funds to cover APCs is often provided in order to meet their stated mandates around Gold OA publication. However, for research that is not produced as a result of grants from specific funders may feel have more limited access to publish via the Gold method in journals of their interest due to a lack of funding to cover high APC costs. 

Changing practices 

As such, plan S requires some publishers to amend their operations and the deals that they offer to universities. The University has started to take advantage of some of these ‘transformative agreements’ that cover both the traditional access aspect of the publisher’s offering, but also a Gold OA publishing aspect. Such transformative deals were already offered by publishers such as Springer, and the University maintain their read and publish deal.

The University has recently signed Wiley’s read and publish deal, meaning that we can support our researchers to publish via Gold OA with Wiley without incurring APCs (please follow the links for further details on some of the limitations of the deal.) This means that works published through these deals are freely available to all immediately upon publication without barriers to access via the internet. The works are published under Creative Commons licenses (which we will generally recommend a preference for CC BY 4.0 in order to maximise reuse value and optimise the potential for increasing impact, but we will have a new blog post on this for you very soon!)  

The University is currently addressing other appropriate read and publish deals that are emerging in order to offer greater value to our communities of researchers. Sage are currently offering such a deal and this is being appraised by colleagues with experience in both the library and within Research Development Services (GRE). 

A mixed landscape 

The funding of OA publication is still a very diverse landscape. Many creative and experimental operations that are aiming to find stable revenue streams that are more equitable. For instance, the Open Library of Humanities are a pure Gold OA publisher, and they have never been funded through APCs. Instead, they offer the opportunity for universities to participate in a low-cost ‘partnership scheme’. This has provided stability, and allowed great value for money to be offered. 

Gold open access publishing in other areas, however, is still a major challenge for many. The evolution of electronic books has been far more stymied than that of the electric journal or journal articles. Proprietary formats, access credit models, and digital rights management (DRM) are just some of the many differences. Scaling monograph and book publishing to Gold open access has, as such, been incredibly slow.  

The Open Book Publishers and punctum books are two open access book publishers that offer viable OA publishing a in this area, and the initiatives such as the COPIM project aim to investigate how this area may be developed to broaden and deepen the open landscape for scholarly publication. 

Stability in unstable times? 

The landscape for Gold OA is still nascent, and there are many reasonable critiques of of the emerging policies and commercial offerings from some publishers, along with the political context in which the shift towards open access publication is occurring within. 

The complexities surrounding all of this can seem alienating and even frustrating for researchers that simply want to share their work with various communities. We want support your scholarly communication activities, and as such, we are always available to ask about anything and help take some of the administrative load that the contemporary scenario may yield.    

Updated ‘Research & Enterprise Contracts: Financial Procedures’

30th October 2019

These procedures relate to all Research and Enterprise (R&E) contracts from public sector contracts/grants with organisations such as Research Councils through to commercial contracts with corporate organisations. The procedures are consistent with the University’s financial regulations, UKRI’s requirements (relating to transparent approaches to costing – TRAC) and decisions taken by the Governing Body and its sub-committees. All staff are required to adhere to the procedures when submitting bids for external funding.

Revised Form 1 & Form 2, and Statement of Intent

28th August 2018

Due to changes to procedural and information security requirements, the previous online system for Form 1 & Form 2 can no longer accept file uploads to accompany the submission of these forms.

While a new system is being developed, we have created a combined Excel version of Form 1 and Form 2 which PIs are required to complete and email (with relevant documentation) to researchservices@gre.ac.uk. GRE will seek the necessary approvals prior to submission on your behalf.

Please note that a completed Form 1 should only be submitted when an application is ready for submission to an external funder. Form 1 is the final approval stage for external submissions and is not the trigger for Research Development Services to develop a budget. We expect to receive Form 1 at a minimum of five working days prior to the funder’s deadline.

Additionally, GRE are introducing a new Statement of Intentform. This form should be completed as soon as an academic colleague has identified a potential external funding source for a research/enterprise project (prior to any applications being drafted).

  • The implementation of a Statement of Intent form is not intended to introduce a further bureaucratic process, but rather to enable the university to (i) develop processes to support the development of high quality external funding, (ii) to understand and report on the external research and enterprise bidding opportunities pipeline, and (c) to enable GRE to deliver the appropriate support to developing proposals.
  • Importantly, the Statement of Intent will be used by GRE to identify those research applications where Peer Review is required (i.e. for funders with demand management policies such as the Research Councils or the funder/scheme is limiting the number of applications that the university can submit as part of a managed programme. The RDOs will liaise with the Research Development Manager who will manage a central peer review process, to determine which of the potential applications will be the university’s preferred application.
  • Staff are encouraged to complete the Statement of Intent and engage with Research Development Services as early in process as possible and these projects will be prioritised as a matter of course. If the Statement of Intent submission and the final application submission deadline are unrealistic , there is no guarantee that Research Development Services will be able to offer support to the levels required.