[Open-access] HEFCE OA policy and the issue around date of acceptance

Wed Apr 9 15:15:28 UTC 2014

Dear All,

A potential issue with the HEFCE REF/OA policy's focus of "acceptance" as opposed to "publication" is that institutions have no way of knowing whether an academic is about to publish a paper unless they tell us. Had it been date of publication (+3 months) there would at least have been a chance that our CRIS could have picked up there is a new publication so that we could have checked whether it has been made open access in the way the policy outlines - or alternatively work with the author to make that happen.

Now, it will be in the interest of the author to meet the requirements of the policy and we can certainly put effort into communicating the policy, but even assuming everyone is aware of it an plays along there is still the issue that at the point of publication we only have incomplete metadata. So the academic has to somehow share the accepted version of the paper with us, including what metadata they have. Once we know the publication date we then have to update that record and set the correct embargo period (where there is one) from the date of publication. Now, the latter step can be automated, the first one can't.

...unless: Wouldn't it be great if the publishers would, on the date of acceptance, alert us to the fact that there is an article, send us the metadata and ideally also the peer-reviewed manuscript - preferably in a way that can then go directly into the repository. That would ensure that no article is forgotten; it would not burden the author with extra effort; it would ensure we comply with the policy;  and finally, the publisher and the university could be confident that the correct version ends up in the repository, so we can forget about takedown notices etc.

Especially with more widespread use of ORCID I cannot see a reason why in principle this would not work. What are your thoughts?

(While I am thinking naïve thoughts: Wouldn't it be great if articles would be submitted through a kind of shared system that did all of this work in the background, even the reporting and compliance? Automate the process for everyone? This may be unrealistic, but if I were still at Jisc this is what I would at least consider.)

Best wishes,
Torsten

Dr Torsten Reimer
Project Manager (Open Access)
Research Office
Level 5, Sherfield Building
Imperial College London, Exhibition Road
South Kensington, London, SW7 2AZ
Tel: 020 7594 3190  Fax: 020 7594 1265
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/researchsupport
https://twitter.com/torstenreimer

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