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.