Open Access Policy

The School of Advanced Study unites nine institutes at the University of London to form the UK's national centre for the support of researchers and the promotion of research in the humanities broadly defined. The School's mission is to promote and facilitate research for the benefit of the national and international research communities and for society at large.

Position Statement

• The School supports the principle that the outcomes of funded research should be made available and accessible to allow the best research to be made as widely available as possible, to encourage mobility of researchers, and to promote scholarly publishing in the UK and abroad.
• The School is committed to academic freedom of choice, and is equally committed to the dissemination of research outputs for maximum impact. The School's academic members are free to publish in the form of their choice, whether in a journal, monograph or scholarly edition, in print media or online, and the School has every confidence in its researchers' ability to make sensible decisions when considering the publication of their outputs.
• The School favours the Green Open Access route whereby authors' final peer-reviewed manuscripts are made available on the Institutional Repository and the School's digital resources infrastructure (SAS-Space, SAS Open Journals (OJS) and SAS Open Books) is available to support the Green OA route.
• Where funds are available, the School would like to encourage its researchers to use the Gold Open Access route whereby final published versions of papers are immediately accessible to the public free of charge. An Article Processing Charge (APC) might be payable to the publisher. Central funds are available to pay APCs for RCUK funded research as well as unfunded research, when appropriate, to ensure the output appears immediately in a leading publication in the field.

Scope

• The School policy aims to respond to the UK Research Councils' and EU major research funders' policies on Open Access, but is particularly aligned with the HEFCE policy for Open Access in the post-2014 REF, and focuses on discoverability and re-usability.
• This policy applies to peer-reviewed research papers and peer-reviewed published conference proceedings with an international standard serial number submitted for publication by all SAS researchers.
• Other research outputs, including monographs and research data are currently out of scope but the policy is a live document, which will need to evolve as research and publishing practice develops and funder and government policy changes.

Requirements

• This policy actively mandates all SAS researchers to make all eligible research outputs Open Access within three months of acceptance through a relevant publication record in the institutional repository SAS-Space.
• The mandate requires deposit, subject to copyright permissions, in the institutional repository of the submitted (preprint) version of the output immediately on acceptance, and the final agreed full-text version of the eligible research outputs, subject to the agreed publisher, government or funder embargo periods.
• The agreed version should be in PDF as the publisher's terms allow. If the PDF is not yet available, SAS researchers must submit the author-created final version within three months of acceptance. In any case, SAS researchers are strongly encouraged to deposit author-created versions on all other forms of research outputs in order to help maximise citations.
• If the paper is not published by the time it is deposited, SAS researchers are asked to choose the option 'under Embargo' and enter the embargo end date into the repository record when known (which in the case of the AHSS can be up to two years). This allows the School to respect embargo periods set by publications while making the outputs discoverable before the full text becomes available.
• This policy requires that the outputs are made available in a form that allows readers to search for and re-use content provided such as re-use is allowable (subject to third party conditions) and subject to proper attribution under appropriate licensing.
• This policy requires that all eligible research outputs had a 'Web-link' or a functioning direct link, preferably unique identifying markers such as DOls at acceptance and strongly recommends all eligible researchers to have an ORCID.
• School affiliation should be clearly stated on all publications.
• The policy acknowledges that there are a number of exceptions that are necessary and allowed. This institutional policy on exceptions is therefore aligned with the HEFCE post-REF policy.
• The policy does not specify a special licence in recognition of the current national discussion and the need to allow time to debate for the right policy position on the matter.
• In the case of multiple authors, we strongly recommend the output to be deposited by one of the authors and if possible into SAS-Space, as the most appropriate neutral space.
• SAS researchers are in addition required to observe specific research-funding bodies, such as the RCUK, for additional Open Access requirements for publications, which directly arise from their grant funding. Researchers are advised to check the funder policy position prior to publication.

Definitions

• SAS Researchers are:
  • All members of staff employed by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, including Emeritus professors who are working for the School on particular projects;
  • All research students registered at the School
• All Research Fellows who list the School as their host institution should be strongly encouraged to deposit outputs in the same was as member of staff, in particular if taking part in SAS research quality assessment exercise.
• This policy does not apply to Honorary or Visiting Fellows; however they are encouraged to add publication records and deposit outputs in the same way as member of staff.
• Eligible research outputs are: all peer-reviewed research and review articles normally published in academic journals or conference proceedings with an International Standard Serial Number in all disciplines where a SAS member of staff is listed as an author.
• The 'agreed version' is the final peer-reviewed full-text version of the research output without the publisher formatting, unless this is allowed by the publisher. This is often referred to as the Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM).
• 'Agreed publisher or funder embargo periods' refers to the publisher or funder embargo periods, which determine the time delay between depositing the output on the repository and the Open Access release of the output.
• The date of acceptance is the point at which the author is notified that:
  • their output has been reviewed by the journal or conference (normally via peer review)
  • all academically necessary changes have been made in response to that review
  • the article is ready to be taken through the final steps toward publication (normally copy-editing and typesetting).
  • By this point, the paper should have been updated to include all changes resulting from peer review as well as any changes of an academic nature requested by the journal editor or conference organiser. At this stage, the journal editor or conference organiser normally notifies the author that their paper has been 'firmly' accepted (as opposed to any earlier point of 'provisional' acceptance e.g. conditional on major or minor revisions being made) and the paper is ready for copy-editing or typesetting; it is the date of this notification that should be taken to mean the date of acceptance.
  • The author's final, accepted manuscript is the one that has been agreed with the editor at that point. The accepted manuscript is not the same as the copy-edited, typeset or published paper — these versions are known as 'proofs' or 'versions of record' and publishers do not normally allow authors to make these open-access.
  • Where the journal or conference publishes papers 'as submitted', the date of acceptance is the date that the journal or conference confirms that the article has been received from the author and will subsequently be published in the journal or proceedings.
  • Where papers are peer reviewed but not copy-edited or typeset, the point of acceptance is the point that the peer review and editorial process has completed.
• 'Web-link' is a functioning direct link (including DOI) through the institution repository to the final agreed version of the eligible research output hosted on an external subject repository or publisher website. It is asked that deposited manuscripts have a complete metadata record that matches the publication's metadata. However the journal title, paper title and author name(s) should be enough to allow discovery, to prevent or resolve duplicates. The author can complete these fields easily when they deposit the paper or after it has been deposited if needed.
• 'Affiliation' on the publication refers to the inclusion of affiliation to the School of Advanced Study, University of London on the publication record. This is required so that all eligible outputs can be identified in bibliographic research tools. Staff and students can include more than one affiliation.
• Exceptions include:
  • Deposit exception:
    • The researcher has experienced difficulties in securing the final peer-reviewed text (which may happen with multiple authors)
    • It would be unlawful to deposit the output
    • The output would represent a security or personal risk
  • Access exception:
    • The output depends on the reproduction of a third party content for which the open access rights cannot be granted
    • The publication concerned requires embargo period that exceeds the stated maxima and was the most appropriate publication for the output
    • The publication concerned actively disallows open access deposit in a repository and was the most appropriate publication for the output.
  • Technical exceptions:
    • System failures in circumstance beyond those covered by backup and recovery provisions"

Roles & Responsibilities

Under the terms of this policy, individual researchers are responsible for:

• Providing and maintaining details of their publications eligible under this policy in the institutional repository, through deposit of the full-text in SAS-Space on acceptance.
• Ensuring that full text outputs in the institutional repository are compliant with publisher policy and permissions;
  • Meeting particular funders' specific Open Access requirements.

Under the terms of this policy, the institution is responsible for:

• Providing support, guidance and training to individuals in how to deposit research outputs on the institutional repository and how to comply with the specific requirements of publishers, HEFCE and/or funder policies.
• Implementing the policy and monitoring its impact;
  • Providing reports, including usage statistics, on individuals' publication activities, with information also available on the Directory of Research and Expertise, to inform the School Advisory Group every year as well as the quality review assessment which takes place every three years;
  • Update details of SAS policy in ROARMAP: the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies.
  • Maintain institutional funds to cover APCs