Who requires Open Access?

Aberystwyth University Research Committee and Executive have mandated that all new Journal contributions, including Conference Proceedings published in a journal edition, should be made available through Green OA. Open Access and PURE submission policy.

Within AU, the Green OA route can be achieved by the deposit of research output records in PURE on publication acceptance, along with a full text of the item once available. Once verified, output records will then be made visible via the Aberystwyth Research Portal.

Please note that the deposit of papers on social media sites such as ResearchGate, Mendeley and Academia.edu will not meet with UKRI Open Access requirements, either in terms of metadata content or capacity for the records to be aggregated and harvested - and may be in breach of copyright. Please always submit your papers to PURE as your primary Open Access deposit method.

 

Research Funders’ Open Access Policies

UK Research & Innovation expect that all research articles derived from their funded projects and submitted for publication within a journal or conference proceeding be made available by OA. These articles must include details of the funding that supported the research and, if applicable, a statement on how the underlying research materials, such as data, samples or models, can be accessed.

UKRI’s preferred OA route is Gold to allow immediate access to the published research, but they also support the Green route: deposit of the author’s accepted manuscript (post-print) within an institutional repository immediately upon acceptance (within 1 month) in an institutional repository.

For Green OA you need a rights retention statement to go with your submission. This applies to any cOAlition S funders, including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. Please see AU's Rights Retention Policy.

Funding for Gold OA article processing charges (APCs) is not an allowable expense within UKRI grants, with funding instead being provided through block grants to institutions for dissemination.  Full information on how to access the AU's block grant from UKRI can be found on the "Open Access - Where" page in the section on Gold/Hybrid OA.

You'll need a CC-BY licence for Gold OA but an Open Government Licence is acceptable. If the publisher will not allow this, you can request a waiver from UKRI to allow a CC-BY-ND licence. If CC-BY-ND is not acceptable to the publisher either, please contact openaccess@aber.ac.uk for further advice.

Other funders such as The Wellcome Trust and the European Commission do allow the cost of APCs to be included within grant bids. However, they do also support the Green route. The Wellcome Trust requires deposit of the author’s accepted manuscript (post-print) immediately upon acceptance (within 1 month) in an institutional repository. The Horizon 2020 embargo periods are 6 months for STEM subjects and 12 months for Arts & SSH.

Details of other funders’ OA policies are available to view within the SHERPA Juliet service: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.

Details of research funders requirements for research data availability can be found at: Data requirements from funders.

 

REF Open Access Policy

UKRI (on behalf of HEFCW) publish an open access policy in relation to research assessments for a future REF exercise. To be eligible for submission to REF, a record for any journal article or conference proceeding submitted to a publication bearing an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) should be created within an institutional repository within a maximum of 3 months from the date of acceptance for publication. The post-print of the output should then be made available via OA within a maximum of 12 months if it is to be submitted to Panels A and B (STEM disciplines) or within 24 months if it is to be submitted to Panels C and D (Arts and SSH disciplines, including Geography). However, if your research is funded by UKRI, please note that you should deposit within 1 month as noted above.

Further details and definitions regarding postprints and embargoes can be found on the Open Access - When? page at: https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/research/good-practice/open-access/when/

Full compliance with this policy is expected but a series of possible exceptions have been stated within the policy as eligible reasons why an output could not be made available via the open access route specified. Outputs cannot be made open access retrospectively for the purposes of REF.

Retrospective open access for outputs accepted after 1st April 2016 is not permitted for eligibility.

How to be Compliant with REF Open Access Policy at AU

At Aberystwyth University, this means that for peer-reviewed journal outputs to be eligible for REF, a record of the paper with the post-print attached must be deposited in PURE (http://pure.aber.ac.uk) within three months of acceptance (but research funded by UKRI must be deposited with 1 month as noted above). This ruling applies to all peer-reviewed journal articles and to conference papers published in journals with ISSNs. Open Access and PURE submission policy

When the paper is actually published (i.e. appears on the publisher’s website or appears in print), the final details of the output (volume, issue, page numbers, a link to the publisher’s version of the paper etc) will be checked and added to the PURE record. Any appropriate embargo period will be set for the accepted version of the paper.

Embargo periods can be checked on the Sherpa/Romeo site at: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php

You can also use the Journal Checker Tool (JCT) to check whether your preferred journal supports compliance with the policy and whether publishing in it is eligible for UKRI funds.

The research record will be made available via the Aberystwyth Research Portal. The full text of the paper will not be released in the Aberystwyth Research Portal until any embargo period has been completed.

Gold Open Access Papers

Please note that deposit of post-prints for REF is not required for papers made open access by the Gold route, i.e. where payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) makes the final version of the paper open to all readers immediately upon publication. Deposit of the final published version of Gold OA papers is required in PURE as soon as possible after publication.

Open Access FAQs for the REF are available at: https://www.ref.ac.uk/faqs/#OA. For further advice, please contact openaccess@aber.ac.uk.