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UCL open access output: 2023 state-of-play

By Kirsty, on 15 April 2024

Post by Andrew Gray (Bibliometrics Support Officer) and Dominic Allington Smith (Open Access Publications Manager)

Summary

UCL is a longstanding and steadfast supporter of open access publishing, organising funding and payment for gold open access, maintaining the UCL Discovery repository for green open access, and monitoring compliance with REF and research funder open access requirements.  Research data can  be made open access in the Research Data Repository, and UCL Press also publish open access books and journals.

The UCL Bibliometrics Team have recently conducted research to analyse UCL’s overall open access output, covering both total number of papers in different OA categories, and citation impact.  This blog post presents the key findings:

  1. UCL’s overall open access output has risen sharply since 2011, flattened around 80% in the last few years, and is showing signs of slowly growing again – perhaps connected with the growth of transformative agreements.
  2. The relative citation impact of UCL papers has had a corresponding increase, though with some year-to-year variation.
  3. UCL’s open access papers are cited around twice as much, on average, as non-open-access papers.
  4. UCL is consistently the second-largest producer of open access papers in the world, behind Harvard University.
  5. UCL has the highest level of open access papers among a reference group of approximately 80 large universities, at around 83% over the last five years.

Overview and definitions

Publications data is taken from the InCites database.  As such, the data is primarily drawn from InCites papers attributed to UCL, filtered down to only articles, reviews, conference proceedings, and letters. It is based on published affiliations to avoid retroactive overcounting in past years: existing papers authored by new starters at UCL are excluded.

The definition of “open access” provided by InCites is all open access material – gold, green, and “bronze”, a catch-all category for material that is free-to-read but does not meet the formal definition of green or gold. This will thus tend to be a few percentage points higher than the numbers used for, for example, UCL’s REF open access compliance statistics.

Data is shown up to 2021; this avoids any complications with green open access papers which are still under an embargo period – a common restriction imposed by publishers when pursuing this route – in the most recent year.

1. UCL’s change in percentage of open access publications over time

(InCites all-OA count)

The first metric is the share of total papers recorded as open access.  This has grown steadily over time over the last decade, from under 50% in 2011 to almost 90% in 2021, with only a slight plateau around 2017-19 interrupting progress.

2. Citation impact of UCL papers over time

(InCites all-OA count, Category Normalised Citation Impact)

The second metric is the citation impact for UCL papers.  These are significantly higher than average: the most recent figure is above 2 (which means that UCL papers receive over twice as many citations as the world average; the UK university average is ~1.45) and continue a general trend of growing over time, with some occasional variation. Higher variation in recent years is to some degree expected, as it takes time for citations to accrue and stabilise.

3. Relative citation impact of UCL’s closed and Open Access papers over time

(InCites all-OA count, Category Normalised Citation Impact)

The third metric is the relative citation rates compared between open access and non-open access (“closed”) papers. Open access papers have a higher overall citation rate than closed papers: the average open access paper from 2017-21 has received around twice as many citations as the average closed paper.

4. World leading universities by number of Open Access publications

(InCites all-OA metric)

Compared to other universities, UCL produces the second-highest absolute number of open access papers in the world, climbing above 15,000 in 2021, and has consistently been the second largest publisher of open access papers since circa 2015.

The only university to publish more OA papers is Harvard. Harvard typically publishes about twice as many papers as UCL annually, but for OA papers this gap is reduced to about 1.5 times more papers than UCL.

5. World leading universities by percentage of Open Access publications

(5-year rolling average; minimum 8000 publications in 2021; InCites %all-OA metric)

UCL’s percentage of open access papers is consistently among the world’s highest.  The most recent data from InCites shows UCL as having the world’s highest level of OA papers (82.9%) among institutions with more than 8,000 papers published in 2021, having steadily risen through the global ranks in previous years.

Conclusion

The key findings of this research are very good news for UCL, indicating a strong commitment by authors and by the university to making work available openly.  Furthermore, whilst high levels of open access necessarily lead to benefits relating to REF and funder compliance, the analysis also indicates that making research outputs open access leads, on average, to a greater number citations, providing further justification for this support, as being crucial to communicating and sharing research outcomes as part of the UCL 2034 strategy.

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Open Access Week: A year in review

By Kirsty, on 25 October 2023

It has become somewhat of a tradition now for there to be a post during Open Access Week that reviews the previous year. While the middle of October may seem like a strange time to take stock, it is after all the anniversary of the Launch of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship and we like to stop and celebrate another year.

This year we celebrated another successful conference and our first back in person for us! We also had another first with a workshop taking place simultaneously online and in person on the topic of equity in authorship. This work has been fed into a UCL statement on Authorship that will be released in the coming months.

We also released a brand new page bringing together all of the training and support information across all the Open Science affiliated teams to make it easier to navigate and get your questions answered.

In the past year all of the teams that form part of the office have worked hard on developing new services and making improvements to existing ones.

The Open Access team have been working hard updating RPS and the new Profiles tool to replace IRIS. They also support both Gold and Green Open Access Activity across the university.

Over 18,500 items have been uploaded to UCL Discovery in the last 12 months, bringing the total to over 166,000! Of these, there are over 23,000 theses to be explored. They have also made 3,383 papers Gold OA, 2,700 of which were using our transformative agreements with publishers.

The Research Data Management team have been working hard behind the scenes doing an overhaul of their support materials, testing new materials for training and supporting the ever-growing Research Data Repository.

In the past 12 months we have had over 1000 new datasets from 226 users. Quite notably, we have had over 200,000 downloads which just goes to show the value of sharing your data as well as your other research outputs!

The Citizen Science support service has moved on in leaps and bounds since this time last year, creating content, liaising with colleagues across the university, collaborating to launch the UCL Citizen Science Academy and this week we were able to launch the brand new Citizen Science online community.

Hopefully that gives you a taste of what we have been up to and the numbers of the last year, scroll back through the blog for more information and to get an idea of the detail of what we have been up to. It’s been a great year and here’s to the next!

Happy Open Access Week!

Office for Open Science & Scholarship 2022 review

By Harry, on 18 January 2023

A new exciting year is starting, and what better way to give the initial kick than celebrating the achievements and milestones of the multiple teams linked to the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS). We are proud to see how the OOSS kept growing and consolidating itself inside UCL’s institutional culture, supporting academic staff, researchers and students.

One of last year’s highlights was undoubtedly the UCL Open Science Conference, reuniting people from all over the world in sessions discussing Citizen Science, Open data and code, Open and the Global South and more. You can still watch the recordings of day one and day two on our blog! And get ready to participate in the 2023 version in late April. You will hear about it soon on our pages and social media. We are working to make the event hybrid to facilitate participation across territories, do not miss your spot!

After various months of revisions and collaborative work, we published new Open Science Resources for 2022-2023. The first is the video ‘Open Science and Scholarship as part of UCL Research Culture’ and ‘Open Science – a practical guide for PhD students’.

Our office connects to several other teams inside UCL that make an exquisite blend of services, skills and expertise, and we want to celebrate their achievements and news.

The UCL Open Access team has grown their range of transformative publisher agreements and upgraded Research Publications Services (RPS). Users will notice a refreshed look and feel, differences to the Homepage layout, and a new menu structure and navigation. Check the step-by-step guide if you missed it!

UCL Press has proven the importance of open-access scholarly publishers, reaching six million downloads last May (and close to seven million now!), reaching 246 countries and territories, and publishing 272 titles since its launch in 2015.

The Bibliometrics team now is able to support Altmetric, which will be useful for anyone interested in public engagement or research impact, as well as individual researchers looking at the response to their work online. Altmetrics are “alternative metrics” – measuring the impact of research beyond scholarly literature. Helping to get a wider sense of the impact of papers that might otherwise be missed were we to focus on traditional academic citations.

Our Research and Data Management team upgraded their webpages, reviewed dozens of data management plans, and created brand new online Data Management Plan Templates with DMP online. Their services and the Bibliometrics team were both classified as excellent regarding the user’s experience of our online support service. We are proud of such a hard-working and supportive team!

During the second half of 2022, the OOSS gained two additional members: a Citizen Science Coordinator and a Support Officer. Both new team members are currently working with the Office Coordinator on ambitious projects that will see the light later this year, aiming to diversify the support and resources of our virtual office for wider audiences.

Undoubtedly, the diversity of professionals, backgrounds and interests made our small office inside Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science (LCCOS) a prosperous place to develop services, ideas and projects for wonderful audiences inside and outside our university.

Last year’s achievements were only possible due to the support of the university to embrace an open culture, thanks to the collaborative work between the teams, and always supporting each other and the office users. We will keep working together to democratise knowledge and keep UCL one of the Open Science & Scholarship leaders worldwide.

New Elsevier transformative agreement

By Catherine Sharp, on 25 April 2022

Following a two year negotiation between Jisc, on behalf of UK institutions, and Elsevier, the UK has reached a transformative agreement that allows UK corresponding authors to publish open access in most Elsevier subscription journals. This is the largest UK transformative agreement yet negotiated.

UCL has a number of other new transformative agreements this year, including with society and not for profit publishers, across a wide range of disciplines. These include Cambridge University Press, Royal Society, Bristol University Press and John Benjamins. Details of UCL’s 32 agreements are on our transformative agreements webpage.

The negotiations

In 2021, the UK’s total spend with Elsevier totalled more than £50m, but only 25% of UK-authored articles were published Gold open access. The negotiations focused on reducing costs to sustainable levels, and providing immediate open access (on publication) to UK research. The new agreement has achieved significant savings, while allowing 80% of UK research in Elsevier journals to be published Gold open access at no additional cost, thus raising the visibility and impact of UK research. This also provides UKRI- and Wellcome-funded papers in most Elsevier journals with a publishing route that complies with their funder’s open access policy.

Using the agreement

To use the agreement, your paper must be of an eligible type, your journal must be covered by the agreement, and the submitting corresponding author must be affiliated with UCL or another UK institution.

The agreement covers most Elsevier subscription journals, including Lancet and Cell Press titles. There is a list of journals in UCL’s agreements on our transformative agreements webpage. Research and review papers are eligible (along with certain other types – see the same webpage).

The submitting corresponding author should use their UCL affiliation and email address in the manuscript and in Elsevier’s submission system. After acceptance, they will receive a link to Elsevier’s ‘post-acceptance author journey’, where they will be given the option to choose Gold open access under the agreement. Research funders require the CC BY licence, so this option should be chosen as appropriate.

We look forward to supporting UCL academics with this agreement.

UKRI open access policy – slides and recording

By Catherine Sharp, on 4 March 2022

UCL’s Open Access Team has been glad of the opportunity to give presentations on the new UKRI open access policy to nearly 2,000 staff at more than 60 department and faculty meetings this session. We were recently joined by Lara Speicher (UCL Press Publishing Manager) for two more UCL-wide briefings on the new policy that were attended by nearly 150 UKRI-funded researchers. The recording and slides from these sessions are below. We’d encourage all UKRI-funded PIs, and anyone involved in submitting UKRI-funded articles, to take a look at them so that they’re prepared for the start of the policy on 1 April.

We’re grateful for UCL authors’ engagement with the policy, and for the questions that we’ve been asked about particular non-compliant publishers, including Nature (for Nature portfolio journals), IEEE, American Physical Society, American Chemical Society and Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Central UK negotiations are happening with all non-compliant publishers, and we are sharing your feedback with the negotiation teams. We hope to have more information about these and other publishers over the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime we will provide support for authors who wish to submit to these journals/publishers after 1 April. Please check our UKRI/Wellcome open access webpages and our What do I need to do? quick guide for more information.

New UKRI policy: key information

As well as our briefing sessions, we’ve recently contacted all UKRI and Wellcome PIs with the following key information.

UKRI-funded research articles, review articles and conference papers that are submitted from 1 April 2022 must be made open access on publication, under the CC BY licence (or, if UKRI grants an exception, CC BY-ND). A key change is that Gold open access in subscription (hybrid) journals will only be funded if the journal is in one of UCL’s transformative agreements.

What the policy means

The following types of journal comply with the policy:

  1. fully open access journals and proceedings (funds are available through UCL’s Open Access Team): check the Directory of Open Access Journals
  2. subscription (hybrid) journals that are in UCL’s transformative agreements: check UCL’s list of transformative agreements
  3. subscription journals and proceedings that allow you to make your final accepted manuscript open access on publication under the CC BY licence (e.g. Science, Association for Computing Machinery)

If your journal is not in these categories, you may want to consider submitting elsewhere. Alternatively, you will need to retain the right to make your final accepted manuscript open access on publication under the CC BY licence, by including UKRI’s submission wording when you submit, and negotiating a compliant publishing agreement.

See our What do I need to do? quick guide.

Other information

UKRI does not support publication charges (for instance page and colour charges). Authors should ask their journal about publication charges, and request a waiver of any mandatory charges, before submission.

The UKRI open access policy for long-form outputs applies to monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024. More information will be available in due course.

New dates for UKRI open access briefings

By Catherine Sharp, on 20 January 2022

2022 sees the start of the new UKRI policy, and big changes for researchers whose work is funded by the UK Research Councils. By April, when the policy starts, all UK Research Council PIs, and in fact anyone whose papers include funding from one of the UK Research Councils, need to understand how the policy will affect them. Submitting and corresponding authors need to take particular note of the requirements before making any new submissions after 1 April.

Why not come to one of our UCL-wide briefing sessions to find out more? Register for a session below, or read on for information about what they’ll cover.

The new UKRI policy applies to articles (and, from 1 January 2024, monographs) funded by AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, Innovate UK, MRC, NERC or STFC. At its heart is the requirement to make research articles, reviews and conference papers open access as soon as they’re published, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY)* – and monographs, book chapters and edited collections open access 12 months after publication under a CC licence. However, there are different ways of meeting this requirement, depending on where you publish.

*a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-ND) may be requested for journal articles.

Following their popular briefing in Open Access Week last October, Catherine Sharp (Head of Open Access Services) and Lara Speicher (Head of Publishing, UCL Press) will be running two more briefings on the policy this term. These sessions will cover the key policy requirements, but will also include practical advice and guidance that’s been developed in recent months. Catherine and Lara will discuss compliant and non-compliant publishing routes for journal articles and conference papers, as well as UKRI’s requirements for monographs. They will explain how you can get funding to publish in fully open access journals, who can use UCL’s transformative agreements (including new agreements for 2022), and what to do if you want to publish in a non-compliant journal.

These are repeat sessions. They will cover the same content as the department briefings that we’ve been giving recently, but we will have more time to discuss specific publishers and the wider implications of the policy, to hear your thoughts and to answer questions. If you’ve attended a presentation recently, you’re still welcome to come along for a refresher, and to raise any questions. We’re also happy to answer questions about the Wellcome policy, and the new Cancer Research UK and NIHR open access policies.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Wellcome, transformative agreements and rights retention

By Catherine Sharp, on 5 March 2021

With the start of the new Wellcome open access policy this year, we began to see a change in the way UCL’s Wellcome-funded authors think about open access. Wellcome authors have always been very well-informed about the Wellcome’s policy. Now they’re taking note, before submission, of which journals have adopted a Wellcome-compliant policy. They’re telling us that this is playing a key part in their choice of journal.

Although this post is about the Wellcome policy, we expect other funders to introduce similar policies, and our transformative agreements are available to most UCL corresponding authors.  A number of European funders have already adopted the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, which we’ll explain below.

Wellcome authors: can I publish gold open access?

Wellcome-funded papers can be published gold open access (open access on the publisher’s website, with the CC BY licence) where the journal is:

  1. fully open access (see the Directory of Open Access Journals)
  2. in one of our transformative agreements, or
  3. a transformative journal.

Other research papers can be made open access on publication, but most need to rely on the Wellcome’s Rights Retention Strategy.

To find out what options are available to you, and whether you can publish gold open access, start on our new Wellcome webpages, using the tools there to do a few quick checks.

  • If you’re thinking of submitting to a fully open access journal, the key thing is to make sure that it’s listed in DOAJ.
  • For subscription journals, start by checking our list of transformative agreements. We now have 25 agreements with a range of publishers, including small/society publishers like Bioscientifica, Portland Press, Company of Biologists and Future Science. They cover more than 6,200 journals.

The Journal Checker Tool that’s being developed (it’s available in beta at the moment) can help you to understand whether particular journals offer a compliant option, and if you need to rely on the fallback of the Rights Retention Strategy (see below).

Once you’ve used these resources, do get in touch with us if you’re not sure how to proceed.

“I want to submit to…”

Here are a few real-world examples of journals that authors have asked us about recently. Thanks especially to authors from ICH for most of these.

  • Nature Communications. This is a fully open access journal, listed in DOAJ. We can pay the charges, provided the paper meets our eligibility criteria.
  • Human Mutation. This is a subscription journal that’s included in our Wiley transformative agreement. You’ll find it in our list of journals in transformative agreements. We can pay the charges, provided the paper is eligible to use our transformative agreements (based on corresponding authorship and type of paper).
  • Genetics in Medicine. This is a subscription journal that’s just been added to our Springer transformative agreement.
  • British Journal of Psychiatry. This is a subscription journal. Although we don’t have a transformative agreement with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, the journal is listed as a transformative journal. We can pay the open access charges for Wellcome-funded papers that meet our eligibility criteria.
  • Archives of Disease in Childhood. This is a subscription journal that’s in our new BMJ transformative agreement. This agreement only applies to papers funded by UKRI, Wellcome or a small number of other medical funders.
  • Human Molecular Genetics. This is a subscription journal that’s included in our new Oxford University Press transformative agreement.
  • Bioscientifica journals, e.g. Journal of Endocrinology, Journal of Molecular Endocrinology, Endocrine-Related Cancer, European Journal of Endocrinology and Reproduction. These journals are included in our Bioscientifica transformative agreement.
  • Lancet subscription journals. Most Lancet journals are subscription journals. Although they don’t allow authors to make their accepted manuscripts open access in Europe PubMed Central on publication, Wellcome-funded authors retain the right to do this under the Wellcome’s Rights Retention Strategy (see below).

What are transformative journals? Are they the same as transformative agreements?

cOAlition S recognises journals as transformative if they meet specific criteria for transitioning to open access. This includes an annual increase in open access content of 5%, and a commitment to becoming fully open access when 75% of the content is published open access.

If a subscription journal is in one of our transformative agreements, the costs have been paid up front and authors can publish open access (provided the paper is eligible: this depends on things like the corresponding author’s affiliation and the type of paper.) If the journal isn’t in an agreement, but is considered a transformative journal, we can pay the open access charges if the paper is funded by a Wellcome grant held at UCL. This applies to 160 Elsevier journals, as well as Cambridge University Press journals.

How does Rights Retention work?

If you’re publishing in a subscription journal that isn’t in one of UCL’s transformative agreements, and isn’t a transformative journal, you’ll probably need to rely on Rights Retention. This isn’t necessary if your publisher allows immediate open access to the manuscript in an open access repository under the CC BY licence. Royal Society is an example of a publisher that allows this.

The Wellcome and Plan S Rights Retention Strategy gives authors a prior right, regardless of any publisher terms and conditions to the contrary, to make their accepted manuscripts open access on publication in an open access repository like Europe PubMed Central, with the CC BY licence. Contrary to what some publishers have been telling authors, it’s not possible for a publisher to override this permission, or for the author to waive the rights.

The author includes the Wellcome’s new mandatory text in their submission. If the article is published, the rights apply, and the author can deposit the paper in Europe PubMed Central on publication with the required CC BY licence.

All Wellcome-funded papers must now include the following statement when they submit to a journal. (You’ll find this on our webpages, too.)

This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

What about other funders?

UKRI will be announcing their new UKRI open access policy soon. There will be a review of the open access policy for the next REF (or a different future assessment exercise), but the current requirements will continue to apply until any new policy is announced.

We’ll keep advising authors on our transformative agreements, and on all types of open access, through all these changes. Our webpages have been completely overhauled to try to communicate, as clearly as possible, all the many policies, funding and opportunities to publish open access that affect UCL authors. We’ve just put the icing on the cake by launching a new home page that we hope will help you find your way around all this information as easily as possible.

New Year open access reflections

By Catherine Sharp, on 11 January 2021

Fireworks over Eiffel Tower.Whether you were tucked up in bed early on New Year’s Eve 2020, or come midnight enjoyed what limited indulgences are available nowadays, there’s no doubt that many of us are keen to put 2020 firmly behind us. Here in UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship (OOSS) 2021 appears bright, with lots of exciting developments in open research and open access coming up; but we wanted to spend our first post of the new year unfashionably looking back, and highlighting some of the great things that happened in open access in 2020.

Without further ado, here’s a rundown of some of UCL’s 2020 open access highlights.

Finally – not a number, but an achievement for the Open Access Team nonetheless – we overhauled our open access funding webpages, Wellcome and other funders webpages, and in fact most of our online guidance. Since open access continues to be rather complex, to say the least, we also added a glossary to the webpages. We’ll be making more improvements soon, but hope that you’ve found these ones useful so far.

I’d like to say a thank you to my magnificent colleagues, who’ve processed such huge numbers of papers and kept on top of the ever-growing numbers of enquiries about open access: hard to count, but probably up to a hundred questions every day, many of them very complicated. Thanks also to everyone in the UCL community who works with us to make open access happen. Look out for new transformative agreements coming soon, and very best wishes for a good 2021.

Wellcome Trust OA policy and DORA webinar – summary and links

By Kirsty, on 17 December 2020

On Wednesday 16th December the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar focussing on the forthcoming Wellcome Trust Open Access policy, with particular reference to DORA, as well as how we are making progress towards fully being able to meet its terms.

Our first speaker was David Carr from the Wellcome trust who talked about the development of the Open Access focussed teams inside Wellcome Trust before outlining the new policy in full and describing in detail the elements which are distinct from the previous policy as shown in the image below.

David then moved on to describing the background to Wellcome’s commitment to responsible research evaluation, and the decision to include DORA in the new policy. He also described the feedback and redrafting process that it went through thanks to the feedback from the community.

Following on from David, we had a talk from Dr Ralitsa Madsen, who shared her experiences as a junior researcher around the issue of research evaluation and especially its relationship with transparency and Open Science.  She has worked with Chris Chambers of the UKRN to develop a policy template for funders to try and encourage more adoption, but also make it easier for them to adopt, by providing a ready-made solution!

We then turned to the Library Services contingent of the webinar speakers, starting out with Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost for Library Services and the Office for Open Science and Scholarship. Paul walked us through the development of the UCL responsible metrics policy and the ways that it is being implemented in HR, recruitment and promotions processes.

Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services followed up with a whistle-stop tour of the changes that have been made to the Open Access processes in order to support academic staff to meet the terms of the new policy, including numerous transformative arrangements with different publishers.

At the end of the webinar we had one remaining question which we put to David after the session:

What do ‘appropriate sanctions’ look like?

David’s response: There’s actually no change on this – the sanctions are actually already in place, and will remain as are when the new policy comes into effect in January.

Essentially we monitor compliance at end-of-grant reporting stage and when researchers apply for new funding.  If a researcher has non-compliant papers, then we will not activate new grants or funding renewals until any non-compliant Wellcome papers have been made open access.  Where papers reported in an end of grant report are not compliant, we will also not accept any new grant applications from that researcher until this has been resolved.  In extreme cases, we also have the option to suspend funding to a whole organisation.  See: https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/guidance/open-access-guidance/complying-with-our-open-access-policy

The recording is available below and also on MediaCentral.

Open Access Week: Policies to free your research

By Kirsty, on 22 October 2020

What’s new in Open Access?

2020 has been a bumper year in open access. There have been policy developments, new opportunities for Gold open access and more open access outputs than ever – and there’s even more to come in 2021. This week we’ve launched completely updated funding and REF sections of our website to support authors with all these changes, and there will be more new guidance soon. For now, though, we’d like to share a roundup of what’s been going on in open access recently, and to make a special request to SLMS researchers (scroll to the bottom) for advice on a new transformative agreement for PLOS journals.

Policies: Wellcome and Rights Retention

We’ve been talking about Plan S for a couple of years now, since it was announced in September 2018. Now, though, we’re preparing for the first Plan S policy to come into effect. Wellcome Trust-funded research papers submitted from New Year’s Day 2021 need to be made open access as soon as they’re published. 

If you have Wellcome funding, this won’t be news to you. Read on, though, for something that is completely new: Rights Retention, allowing you to publish in any journal and make your papers open access straight away.

As a reminder, from 2021 Wellcome authors can publish in:

  1. fully open access journals or platforms (such as Wellcome Open Research).
  2. subscription journals that allow them to make their final accepted manuscript open access in Europe PubMed Central at the time of publication.
  3. subscription journals that are included in UCL’s transformative agreements – more on these below.

Wellcome will provide a Journal Checker Tool (coming shortly) to help authors work out where and how to publish. We’ll support Wellcome researchers with our new Wellcome webpages, payments for journals in categories 1 and 3 above, and advice on individual papers and journals. The big change, though, is…

Rights Retention

This might not sound exciting, but it could be a hugely important shift that’ll enable researchers to keep control of their work, and make it open access when it’s published. The Wellcome is the first funder to adopt it. Here’s how it works.

  1. A Plan S funder like Wellcome changes its grant conditions to include a new provision that grantholders automatically grant a CC BY public copyright licence to their accepted manuscripts.
  2. The funder notifies key publishers (Wellcome has contacted 150 publishers) asking them to allow all authors to make their manuscripts available on publication with a CC BY licence. Even if a publisher doesn’t do that, the letter gives them notice of the funder’s open access requirements. This means that the CC BY licence on the accepted manuscript takes legal precedence over any later licence to publish or copyright transfer agreement that an author signs.
  3. The funder requires authors to include a statement in all submissions that notifies the publisher about the funding. Here’s the statement that Wellcome authors must now use:

Wellcome statement required on submissionThis allows Wellcome authors to publish in any journal, even if it’s not a fully open access journal and there’s no transformative agreement. There’s more information about this on the Wellcome’s webpages, and on Plan S’s Rights Retention page.

Other open access and open data policies

Other funders’ open access policies are likely to change in the near future. We’re expecting a new UKRI open access policy next year, and a new REF policy after that. Cancer Research UK has said that it’ll require immediate open access from January 2022. Plan S members, including the EC as part of Horizon Europe, are implementing Rights Retention. So stay up to date with your funder’s requirements – there’s a tool called Sherpa Juliet that helps with this – and check our webpages for all the latest information.

Both funding agencies and publishers also have open data policies setting out expectations, and in many cases requirements, for researchers. It’s a good idea to be aware of these when submitting a paper, or a grant proposal. These policies have the general theme of ensuring that when research is published all of the raw data which underpins the main results and conclusions is made available to as great an extent as possible.  Funding agencies and publishers want to ensure that data is open in order to maintain high standards of reproducibility and transparency. Open data allows published results to be confirmed and tested by others, a much more stringent check of research quality than can realistically be offered by the peer review process. For a publisher this can also help to uphold their reputation and avoid scandals or high-profile retractions. Funding agencies also have an interest in ensuring maximum return on their investment, and encourage data sharing partly so that the output of the research they funded can be re-used as widely as possible by other researchers and beyond academia.

When you publish with a particular journal or submit a funding application to a particular agency always check their specific policies carefully to avoid any problems or delays. Information on funding agency policies is available on our webpages.

Transformative agreements

We’ve written about them before, but we make no apology for repeating ourselves. These new agreements are designed to help with the transition to full open access that funders want. UCL’s agreements currently cover just over 5,000 journals; they enable all, or most, research papers in those journals with a UCL corresponding author to be made open access on publication.

In these agreements, upfront payments fund publishing as well as access to content, helping universities and publishers move away from the old subscription model. The rub is that most agreements still cost more than subscriptions did, but funders are supporting them for a transitional period. We’re currently assessing new agreements for 2021. Can we afford these agreements long-term? Will they lead to journals becoming fully open access? We’ll see.

SLMS researchers: can you help us to help you?

By and large, researchers like the opportunities for open access publishing that transformative agreements provide. However, the agreements tend to favour traditional subscription publishers. The latest development, though, is a new model that might redress the balance a bit: PLOS’s Community Action Model for publishing in PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology. This is a collective, potentially more sustainable way of funding two highly-selective open access journals without individual open access payments (APCs). We need to decide whether to be part of it, and we need your help. If you publish in biomedicine or medicine, please tell us: if we support this new model, and guarantee funding to publish in PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology, would you be more likely to submit there? Get in touch with us to tell us your view, or to find out more.