When Plan S was announced 18 months ago, requiring all publications from participating funders to be made open access from 2021, a new term – transformative agreement – entered the open access lexicon. The idea is to transform or transition journal publishing away from subscriptions towards full open access.

The Wellcome open access policy from 2021, and Plan S, allow authors to publish in three different types of journal. After their consultation on a new policy finishes, the UK Research Councils (UKRI) might well say something similar. Here are the three routes:

1. Fully open access journals. All papers in these journals are published open access, often for a fee. Examples are the PLOS and BMC journals, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, SageOpen, Wellcome Open Research, and UCL’s own UCL Open: Environment and UCL Child Health Open Research.
2. Journals that aren’t open access, but that allow authors to make their manuscripts open access in a repository like UCL Discovery, on publication, under the CC BY licence. Royal Society journals are an example.
3. Journals that are part of transformative agreements, or are themselves transformative journals, until 2024.

Most publishers still don’t allow immediate open access in a repository, and most that do don’t allow CC BY. Transformative agreements are increasing, though.

Jisc, which negotiates our subscription agreements, has some complex criteria for transformative agreements. Publishers must offer 100% UK open access publishing that’s affordable, sustainable and transparent. Large commercial publishers, as well as society publishers like Microbiology Society and Electrochemical Society, all have agreements.

What does this mean for me?

UCL is trialling lots of transformative agreements this year. These include our long-standing SpringerCompact, RSC and IOP agreements, smaller offers from Brill, Thieme, European Respiratory Journal and the societies we’ve already mentioned, and larger agreements with Wiley and Sage.

These agreements are restricted to UCL corresponding authors. Make sure you give your UCL e-mail address and affiliation when you submit to a journal; you should be recognised as eligible if we have a transformative agreement. See our step-by-step guide to open access funding for more information both about these agreements and about other open access funding arrangements.

Contact us if you’d like to arrange a virtual department visit from us to discuss these agreements.

Last week we wrote about how spending a few minutes setting up your ORCID record will repay you many times over, helping with grant applications, online profiles and the like. We talked about some of the nifty things you can do with ORCID, like creating a QR code to put in a poster or presentation. Most of you already know about “auto-claiming” publications containing your ORCID into RPS (and even “auto-rejecting” others), saving you having to review long lists of publications that match your name. A whopping 72% of UCL researchers, nearly 4,000 of you, have added your ORCID to RPS for auto-claiming.*

Even if you’re using your ORCID whenever you publish, until now it hasn’t been plain sailing getting publications into your ORCID record, especially since this was completely separate from adding them to RPS. There’s now a new tool in RPS that makes this much, much easier.

*By faculty, UCL Institute of Education researchers top the table at 81%.

The old way: using ORCID to record publications

Until now, you’d use “auto-update” in ORCID, from a third-party source like CrossRef, to import publications that contain your ORCID to your ORCID record. To add publications that don’t contain your ORCID, you’d select publications matched to your Scopus record and/or ResearcherID, add them manually, or upload a BibTeX file.

If this sounds like a lot of effort, read on.

The new way: send to ORCID from RPS

You’re already recording your publications in RPS so that you can make them open access, select them for REF, and include them in your IRIS profile. Now, you can send them to your ORCID record automatically. This gives you the added benefits of a permanent ORCID record of your publications, without any extra work.

Take a moment to enable send to ORCID in your RPS profile (see below); then make sure you’re using your ORCID, e-mail address, Scopus ID, arXiv ID and/or ResearcherID to auto-claim publications into your RPS record. Your auto-claimed publications from all of these sources, as well as any you claim yourself based on matches to your name, and any that you add to RPS manually will all be sent to your ORCID record. Job done.

How to do it

For privacy reasons, you need to authorise RPS to send to ORCID, even if you’ve already allowed RPS to talk to your ORCID record for auto-claiming. Even if you’ve forgotten your ORCID password, it should take no more than a minute.

• Click on the Menu tab near the top of your RPS home screen. In the My Account column, choose ORCID Settings.
• Click on Connect your ORCID iD.
• If you’ve previously recorded an ORCID in RPS, you’ll be sent to an ORCID login screen. If you haven’t, but you have an ORCID account, click on Sign into ORCID. (If you don’t have an ORCID at all, you can set one up by choosing Register now).
• Click Authorize to allow RPS to update your ORCID record.
• When you’re sent back to RPS, choose the first option, “read from and write”.

Your existing and new publications will be sent to ORCID automatically within a day or two. Clicking “Run Sync” on this page (see the image in the next section) isn’t necessary, but will speed up the sending. Once publications been added to ORCID, you’ll see an option on this page to remove them; you can also combine, delete and edit them in ORCID.

Extra send to ORCID settings

After you set up send to ORCID, the ORCID Settings page will give you a few options. By default, RPS won’t send journal articles with a status other than “published” or “published online”, nor publications you’ve marked as private (by clicking the eye icon in your publications list). Untick the first box and RPS will send journal article records regardless of their publication status. Tick the second and it’ll send publications even if you’ve marked them as private.

If you want to select specific publications to send, you can tick the option “Only send favourite publications”. You’d use the heart icon in your publications list to select favourites.

We’d suggest that you click “Send affiliation” at the bottom of the page: this will add your UCL affiliation to your ORCID record.

If some of your journal article records in RPS were created manually, they might not have a status. If you don’t want to change the default send to ORCID settings, you can add the “published” or “published online” status to individual records.

More about RPS and ORCID

You’ll find more on our ORCID webpages. For guides to auto-claiming using ORCID, e-mail address, Scopus ID, arXiv ID and/or ResearcherID, and information about how RPS selects publications it thinks are yours, see the section on our RPS training page called “Recording publications in RPS”.

Look out for future posts on RPS and ORCID. To get an alert when we post new articles, fill in the “Subscribe by Email” section on the right of this post (or below, if you’re reading on your phone).

So you have an ORCID – now what?

Of course taking the time to set up and populate your ORCID is a great first step, but there are so many things that you can use an ORCID for. Today we are going to talk about just a few:

1. Stand out from the crowd

Having and using your ORCID is a great way to distinguish yourself as a researcher. Using an ORCID makes sure that all of your works are correctly attributed and that no-one but you gets the credit for them.

2. Easily collect your work

Did you know that a lot of the work updating and maintaining your ORCID record can be done for you? Using ORCID’s in-built tools you can connect up your ORCID to a huge range of other tools and systems. We would recommend starting with CrossRef and DataCite as they supply DOIs to publishers and other providers. It might also be worth connecting other profiles such as Scopus and ResearcherID. All you need to do is spend some time linking the systems together at the start, and check on it occasionally, like when you have a new paper out.

Another way to collect your work together easily is to use your ORCID wherever possible when publishing works. A lot of publishers are using end-to-end workflows. This means that if you use your ORCID when submitting a paper, once the paper is published they will send it to CrossRef, which populates your ORCID record for you. PLOS, Hindawi and Springer are just a few examples of publishers who use this system.

In the next couple of weeks you will also be able to use RPS to update your ORCID record too – watch this space!!

3. Curate your online presence

Your ORCID record is very versatile. It allows you to list not only your articles and book chapters but any kind of output, be it data, a conference presentation or poster, or something less common like patents or publications written by students you have supervised.

More than that, you can also list employment, funding, memberships, awards, and even your peer review contributions if you want to share them.

Each item on your ORCID profile is completely controlled by you. Each individual item can be assigned one of three visibility settings.

• The first is everyone. This means that information is public and anyone who looks up your ORCID record can see this, from a prospective collaborator to a funding body. For the most part, this is what you want to use. There is little point curating information that nobody can see!
• The second is trusted parties. This means that you can give rights to individuals or systems to access that content. For example, if you link your ORCID to RPS (keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post about that!) you give RPS the right to edit your ORCID record for you.
• The final one is only me. Ideally you would only use this to protect information not for the public domain, such as your personal email address (though you should consider displaying at least one) or details of a publication that isn’t ready yet.

4. Your online CV and bibliography

Ever been asked to populate a publication list for an online profile, role or funding bid? If your ORCID is up to date, you can use your ORCID instead!

Copying the full link from the box under your name in your profile allows you to share a permanent link to your ORCID record. There is even the option to create a QR code to put on a poster or in a presentation. There are so many different types of information that you can include in your ORCID, from publications and funding to awards, editorial board memberships and voluntary activity such as organising a conference. Everything you would want in one place.

5. Share your work far and wide

The great thing about using ORCID is that you have one number, one tiny URL that can be used to represent you and your work anywhere you want. You can use your ORCID in your email signature, in your social media accounts, and in your profiles on other services.

Curate your ORCID effectively, and it’ll be a great time-saver, avoiding your having to enter the same information over and over, and standing for you all through your professional life.

Send us your ORCID stories and find out more

If you like ORCID, or have stories about how ORCID helps with managing your research, we’d love to hear from you. Comment below or tweet us at @UCLopenaccess.

Look out for our post next week on sending publications to ORCID from RPS. To get an alert when we post new articles, fill in the “Subscribe by Email” section on the right of this post.

On 20 March, days after lockdown began, JISC and partners issued a statement calling for Publishers to help in the global effort to combat COVID-19 and support institutions and students to continue their education by making resources available where possible. Since that day, numerous publishers have made temporary changes to their policies, and have begun to make more content freely available online. The Library has been maintaining a list of these newly open resources on the website, along with other help and advice for finding and using resources remotely. There are also lists of resources available from the British Library as well as a brilliant collated list of data and computational resources from the National Institute of Health.

The Copyright Licensing Agency has also made some temporary adjustments to the licence that allows books to be scanned and shared. Please contact the Teaching & Learning Services team for more information.

In addition, there are now tools that allow you to search the web for trustworthy Open Access versions of content from inside your web browser. Just searching Google can bring up not only illegal copies of material, but also inadvertently support predatory and fake journals. The recommended tool is called Open Access Button. More information about Open Access Button is available here

Open Access choices

Just because publishers are making things open for the time being, doesn’t mean they will stay that way. Be careful about the choices you make for your research – in the long term, will the publisher of your chosen journal stop access to your paper? When you are choosing the journal to submit your research to, take a look at the guidance provided by the Open Access team, and also check Sherpa/Romeo to find out whether you are allowed to share your work on RPS, or even on a pre-print service to get it out there even faster!

Don’t forget that you can use the Research Publications Service (RPS) as well as the Research Data Repository (RDR) to take advantage of Open Access to share all of your research outputs to get them out to the rest of the research community.