Research and Scholarly Communications - Blog - Library Guides at University of Sunderland

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.

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Why participate in Open Research - #OA week

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. ...

Opening education research #OAWeek

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....

Open Access Week: Using and understanding Creative Commons Licenses

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. ...

An Open Research Game for Open Access Week

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What are Repositories For? Part 1

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