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.
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.