Research and Scholarly Communications - Blog

On this Friday of #OAweek, we will share the work of our fourth and final research assistant, Daniel Dunlavey. Daniel decided to consider they key benefits of Open Research. 

Through a series of images and short videos (see below) for social media campaigns, he captured some of the key benefits of Open Research.

These are wide and range from breaking down barriers in research and promoting equity in the research ecosystem, to fostering collaborations and innovation, to enhancing the visibility of research. Open Research contributes to accelerating research through sharing methodology, data, research results through pre-prints (even negative ones that are often overlooked in formal publications), and publications. There is also an argument that Open Research is just research done properly and that it improves trust in research from the public. 

Serendipity wants that this year International Open Access Week partly coincides with Global Media and Information Literacy Week. This seems appropriate at a time when disinformation and misinformation circulates widely. This crisis is heightened by the proliferation of AI tools, opening research is one of the mechanisms to curb this proliferation. 

Have a look at some of the messages included in these short videos and think about how you could participate in Open Research. You could also read the recently adopted  Open Research Statement that shows the University of Sunderland's commitment to opening research.

Today’s blog shares the work produced by Heidi Guest, another of our research assistant. Her work in education inspired her to look at Open Research from the point of view of an educational Researcher. 

She developed a range of resources to demonstrate how Open Research can enhance the impact of educational research. 

In her first resource she asked What can you do to make your research Open?

Her second resource looks at the benefits of making educational research Open Access. 

While her final resource looks at five ways to make research open looking at methodology, data, analysis, professional connections and publications. 

Contextualising and understanding how Open Research can benefit your own discipline is important. Different disciplines will be confronted to different issues and barriers when it comes to adopting Open Research. 

However, what can be open should be to enable other researchers, policy makers, school leaders and teachers, parents and maybe the children themselves to engage with that research. The principles of Engaged Research might be interesting to explore in the context of Open Research. To learn more about engaged research check out the Wellcome Institute and UKRI information.

In today's blog, we are continuing to showcase the work of our research assistants. They produced a range of resources to support our collective understanding of Open Research. Today, features the work of Barbara Long-Flint about Creative Commons licenses (CC) and the part they play in Open Research. 

In an earlier blog, we had highlighted how the use of CC licenses was part and parcel of the Open Access and Open Research movement.  

Most Open Access articles are now published with an CC license. The preferred license for most funders and the REF is CC-BY. This license allows for the work to be distributed, reused, remixed without the need to ask permission. However, there are other more restrictive versions of CC licenses that might be used. In the current system, the publisher often becomes the copyright holder and charges people for the reuse, remixing and distribution of the work.  If you are funded, it might be that your funder requires a specific CC license to be applied to your work. Awareness of what CC licenses are and how they work is important. As an author choosing a CC license can empower you to decide  what people can do with your work.

To help us with our understanding, Barbara produced a series of resources showcased below: 

A guide introducing Creative Commons Licenses

A guide about Data and Creative Commons Licenses

A poster entitled the Copyright Dilemma exploring the factors that might lead the choice of copyright.

We hope these resources are useful and that they can help guide your choice and increase your understanding of this key element of Open Research and Open Access. 

Earlier this year, the Research and Scholarly Communications team was awarded funding to support and enhance the research culture at the University of Sunderland, particularly in relation to Open Research. This funding meant we could employ 4 postgraduate researchers, each of whom created a variety of materials that will enrich future advocacy and training sessions.

One of these researchers, Lisa Meek, created an Open Research text-based computer game that not only promotes the benefits of open research, but also shows how researchers can best engage with open research practices at every stage of their research journey.  We also love that it brings back memories of some much-cherished games from (many) decades ago!

The game is fully open access, and is published under a CC-BY license which sits well with the Open Access Week imperative to ‘prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community’.

Here’s Lisa explaining how the game works, and her reasons for creating it. 

International Open Access week falls this year October 21^st – 27^th . 

International Open Access Week is an annual word-wide initiative, organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), with the aim of facilitating the open sharing of knowledge, and a chance to connect the efforts of individuals, institutions, and organizations tasked with furthering the global drive to make research freely available. 

The theme this year, “Community over Commercialization”, a sentiment many of us would like to see applied to many areas of life, both academic and beyond, continues that of last year.  In the context of Open Access, however, the event hopes to “[…] prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.”

Recent developments, such as the integration of AI into academic systems at an incredibly rapid rate, will certainly inform the responses of HEIs to ongoing critical questions going forward.  These, according to the Open Access Week website include:

• What are the consequences when a small number of corporations control knowledge production rather than researchers themselves?
• What are the hidden costs of business models that entrench extreme levels of profit while exacerbation inequity?
• When does the opaque collection and use of personal data by commercial platforms begin to undermine academic freedom?
• When and in what ways can commercialization align with the public interest?
• What community-governed infrastructures already exist that better serve the interests of the research community and the public (such as preprint servers, repositories, and open publishing platforms)?
• How can we shift the default toward using these community-minded options?

While some of these questions are levelled squarely at the academic publishing industry, others are more positive, and forward-thinking, and I’m certainly interested in how other institutions use the web in a more open and, let’s be honest, responsible way when it comes to sharing knowledge. 

There have been some really inspirational academic publishing initiatives, such as the White Rose University Press (non-profit, open access), which are both academically rigorous and community-minded, and it strikes me that this has to be the way forward given the enormous problems associated with the current methods of subscription-based or gold OA publication.

A huge series of free (and open!) events are planned, and can be found here [Events — International Open Access Week].

We’re hoping to attend some of these sessions, and we’ll write about our experiences later in the week.

Open Access is complex. In some ways, it is too complex for the mission it is trying to achieve: make research available to all who want to read it as long as they have an internet connection.

One of the main issues is the cost of Open Access. Most authors raise this as a concern and oftentimes will say that of course they would choose Open Access but it is too expensive and creates inequality. Institutions with deep pockets can pay for Open Access, less well endowed institutions will find their work behind a paywall. This issue was already clear in the realm of journal articles, it might become even worse as we head towards a requirement for long-form publications (monographs (books), edited collections and book chapters) to be Open Access.

The UKRI Open Access policy is already requiring long-form publications to be Open Access and has set aside some money to fund it.

REF2029 is heading towards a similar requirement but that comes with no money.

In the realm of articles, while Read and Publish (or transitional agreements) with publishers helped to make research open access, they are problematic in that not all institutions can take all the deals available, and at the current rate, it would take 70 years to to flip all journals to Open Access with this current model.

But the money problem is really only a problem if we focus on the so-called gold route to Open Access: when the version of record - that is the version published on the publishers website- is Open Access. Yes, this generally incurs a fee.

Yet, there is a way to make articles Open Access for free. This is the so-called green route. In this version of Open Access, the author accepted manuscript is made Open Access on a subject or institutional repository (SURE for the University of Sunderland). There are some barriers to green:

-some publishers require embargoes (they can only be released after a period of time - 0 to 24 months after the date of publication in most cases).

-authors are unsure what is the author accepted manuscript or it is difficult to locate if you are not the corresponding author.

- the word document might feel like an imperfect version of the article.

Yet, it's value in making articles Open Access is huge. It is a FREE route to Open Access. It allows research to be seen and read by more people. This version of the article has been peer-reviewed -  the voluntary work undertaken by academics for the dissemination of good and valuable research has already taken place: author, editors and peer-reviewers have done their part of the work.

It might be time to start thinking again about what the author accepted manuscript is in relation to the so-called version of record. In the word of Daniel Hook (Digital Science) during a plenary at the UKSG conference in April 2024, the version of record is actually a version of esteem and part of the prestige economy that is currently embedded int he academic world.

For the dissemination of research, the author accepted manuscript is more valuable if it is accessible to all in an institutional repository.

Copyright and Creative Commons Licence

One of the key aspects of the Open Access movement, was for academics to regain control over their published work to allow re-use of research without undue barriers. In the traditional model, publishers asked authors to sign a transfer of rights agreement. These agreements transferred your copyright to the publishers and meant that as an author, you could not do with your work as you wished. This enabled publishers to develop as commercial activity around academic publication in addition the subscription fees they charge for access.

If anyone wanted to use your work whether for research, or commercial usage, they should ask the publisher’s permission. For instance, If someone wanted to use a few of your graphs, diagrams or illustrations (provided they were not under third party copyright), the publisher could charge fees for the privilege.

What the Open Access movement aimed to do, in addition to opening up scholarly work for everyone to read, was to counter this commercial use of copyright, and more importantly to break the barrier to reuse.  Indeed, not only is Open Access arguing for making scholarly publications accessible to all without charges it also aims to accelerate research by allowing reuse through advocating for Creative Commons licenses. By encouraging authors to apply a license themselves, the movement aims to give them back the control of their work and its reuse.

The advice is generally to add a Creative Commons license with attribution (CC BY) to your work. Applying this license means that the author must still be credited, but that third-party users can then reuse the work as they wish. While there are some more restrictive CC licenses, the CC BY license is the one that is often favoured by funders (See UKRI for instance). To help you choose which Creative Commons Licence to use for your work, you can use the licence chooser provided by the Creatice Commons organisation.

When signing contracts with your publishers, take the time to assess the agreement you are signing. It is often all in the small print that you will be able to figure out whether the agreement you are singing let's you be the owner of your work. As an academic author, it is worth asking, as prompted during OA week, whether the commercial usage of copyright serves your purposes and that of the community you are trying to serve.

For over 20 years, since the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a variety of stakeholders from HEIs, research funding bodies, and the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) have all implemented OA requirements.  These requirements to make published research outputs available to the public without cost built on a general dissatisfaction with traditional methods of dissemination (especially journals using a subscription model to meet publication costs), and meant that demand for OA alternatives increased.

Like most HEIs, the University of Sunderland has an Open Access Mandate, which requires academic staff to upload the final, author-created version of published research outputs to SURE within 12 weeks of the date the output is accepted for publication.  By having such a mandate, the university ensures research undertaken at Sunderland is visible to the public, and also stored in a robust system.  Since its implementation, the mandate has increased awareness of OA and staff engagement with SURE in now much greater.

In addition to this institution-led incentive toward OA, researchers are increasingly required by funders to make outputs that result from research in receipt of grants available in OA publications.  This had led to an understandable rise in OA articles, and from the perspective of the readership, this has been a Good Thing.  Far fewer research outputs are now hidden behind paywalls, beyond the means of anyone not affiliated with an institution able to pay the high costs of subscriptions.  

The downside of this situation, however, is that costs once levied at readers, are now often being met by authors through payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).  I’m sure we’ll write more about APCs in future posts, but it’s important to say that SURE gives authors a free alternative to having to pay to publish in journals that require these fee payments, which can be several thousand pounds per article.

Many traditional subscription-based journals allow authors to upload the final, author-created manuscript (AAM) of articles to repositories like SURE.  This means authors can choose where to publish, but still meet the OA requirements of funding bodies.  The important point here is that publishers will often impose an embargo on the upload of these manuscripts of anywhere from 6 months to several years.  It’s best to check the Sherpa/ Romeo service provided by JISC which contains information on the OA policies and deposit permissions of the major academic journals.  

The best way for authors to meet funder requirements for OA is to upload the AAM to SURE upon acceptance.  The SURE team can advise on embargo periods for different journals, and we can make sure embargoes are observed by only making the text visible to the public after the embargo period expires.  

The third stakeholder with specific OA requirements is the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  Although details of the next REF exercise, which is now due in 2029, are still to be finalized, the previous REF stated that for outputs to be eligible, they must have been made OA within 3 months of acceptance for publication.

You’ve probably noticed a pattern in how SURE can respond to the various stakeholder requirements mentioned here.  It’s useful that by uploading the accepted manuscript to SURE immediately upon acceptance, authors can meet most OA requirements easily and without additional cost.  It’s a simple message, but one that’s worth repeating: when you have a paper accepted for publication in a journal, upload the final author accepted manuscript to SURE the same day.  By getting into this habit you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort when it comes to placating your departments, the research office, your funders, your line managers, and, most importantly, the SURE team!

 

In the next post in this series, we'll look at how SURE can be used as a means of promoting and archiving Grey Literature - research outputs that don't fit a traditional model.

Plan S, launched in September 2018, is an initiative to “make full and immediate Open Access a reality”.

It is supported by a group of national research funders, European and international organisations and charitable foundations which have agreed to adopt the mission and principles of Plan S. Together, they are known as CoalitionS. UKRI was one of the early signatories to PlanS. Its Open Access requirements are intrinsically linked to the principles outlined by PlanS. The number of supporters grew over the past 5 years and key funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have aligned their open access policies with the aims of the coalition.
It is built on 10 key principles and has one objective to make all scholarly publications emerging from publicly funded research available Open Access, either via Open Access journals, Open Access platforms or Open Access repositories.

 
 
The 10 principles of PlanS aim to challenge the traditional publication model for scholarly communications, and over the past 5 five years has influenced and forced publishers to offer solutions for open access.

PlanS  invites a wider reflection about the way in which scholarly communication has been done so far. In particular, it outlines the need for researchers to stay in control of their research by ensuring they retain copyright instead of handing it over to publishers. It insists on the need for research to be easily reusable which entails not locking it behind reserved rights. Instead, it advocates for the use of Creative Commons licence with attribution (CC-BY). This allows other researchers and stakeholders to use the research while still giving credit to authors. It highlights the need for a research culture that assesses research on its own merit rather than on the merit of the venue of publication eschewing metrics such as high impact factor in line with DORA principles.  These metrics largely reliant on number of citations do little as a measure of research quality and are skewed towards STEM disciplines and publications in English. PlanS supports varied models of publication and in particular the model of diamond open access to counter the controversial and costly APCs.  These risk making publishing the preserve of the few wealthy researchers and their institutions. They also call for pricing transparency when APCs are charged.

PlanS has been an important mover in Europe and in a recent announcement pushes for further reforms of scholarly publishing to give researchers more control and power over where and when to publish their work. In addition, it encourages opening up the process of publication including peer-review. This model of publication would be non-profit and free to authors. They encourage through their Towards Responsible Publishing proposal a model of ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ whereby scholarly literature would be opened. Authors would place their work on pre-prints platforms, these would be submitted for peer-review, and all the material from the process would be openly available. In doing this they support models such as those describe in two previous blogs: Pre-prints and Open Review and Octopus.
PlanS has been an important mover towards Open Access, but recognises that their activities might have encouraged the charging of APCs which is counter to their ambitions. With their new announcement, they aim to support new models of publishing that truly support researchers and research.

With their new proposal, PlanS is keen to survey the community of researchers. Take the time to read the proposal and take the survey to help shape the next stage of Open Access campaigning.

We spend a lot of our time advocating for Open Access, and more specifically, helping staff make their research Open Access by uploading it to SURE.  I thought it might be useful to think about what we expect from SURE, what it’s for, and what Institutional Repositories in general can offer to the academic community.
SURE, like all institutional repositories, is an online archive that collects, preserves, and provides the means for the dissemination of research outputs produced by researchers at the University of Sunderland.  From a purely practical point of view, SURE provides an accurate record of the intellectual output of the University.  Anything you add to SURE will also appear on your staff profile page, so it’s an easy way to keep your list of publications up-to-date as well.
Beyond this though, the contents of SURE can be made available to anyone with access to the web, allowing you to meet the Open Access requirements of funders, the university, and the next Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF) without any additional cost.  This method of achieving Open Access is referred to as the Green Route (as opposed to the Gold Route that refers to Open Access publishing), and there’ll be more on this later.

Although many researchers archive their work on personal web pages or blogs, repositories can better facilitate open access to this material by providing persistent URLs, they generally have more robust technical support, and, as Peter Suber has noted, ‘[…] don’t disappear when the author changes jobs or dies’. (p 64).  The contents of repositories are also more discoverable due to the interoperability of initiatives like the OAI which allows metadata to be harvested more effectively;  and services like CORE offer a global aggregation of repository contents, meaning that research in SURE is a lot more visible to prospective readers and future collaborators.
For many researchers, Open Access means paying to publish.  Journals charge authors, or rather their funders, or even their home institutions, an Article Processing Charge (APC) upon acceptance, and then the resulting paper is made available to readers for free.  This so-called ‘Gold’ route to OA was a (very successful, from the point of view of the larger academic publishers) response by publishers to the calls for increased accessibility to published research findings from governments, funding bodies, and the general public, who, under the traditional subscription method, were unable to access a great deal of publicly-funded research simply because they weren’t affiliated with an academic institution.   Although the model allows free access to articles, the costs can be considerable and wildly inconsistent, ranging from zero to $12,290 per article for the journal Nature.
SURE represents a different, ‘Green’, model of Open Access to research, one with no additional costs beyond the maintenance of the platform.  Authors can publish with any journal and then upload the final author-created accepted manuscript (AAM) to the repository.  This version of the article is essentially the same as the one that appears in publication, but doesn’t contain any of the typesetting or branding added by the publisher.  SURE always provides a hyperlink to the published version, and also cites that version in the metadata.  Most journals now allow the AAM of a published article to be uploaded to SURE, but many of them impose an embargo, which can lead to problems when funders require that AAMs be deposited immediately upon publication.

In the next part of this series, I’ll look at the specifics of how SURE can meet the OA requirements, and what tools are available to help you decide where to publish and still be OA-compliant.