Project Sponsor:Biagio Lucini, Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research Culture
Swansea University has updated its Research Publications Policy as part of a commitment to open and reproducible research. The University is dedicated to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. From July 2023 the policy supports authors to retain more intellectual property rights in their research outputs. The ability to retain rights is a key benefit for researchers, and the University is at the forefront of bringing this policy into action as the first Welsh institution to adopt a rights retention policy.
Our new Research Publications Policy grants Swansea researchers the right to make a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) immediately Open Access at publication via the repository (Cronfa), using a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). By making articles immediately available with no publisher embargo, researchers can ensure their work reaches a wide audience, increasing visibility and potential impact.
The policy applies to:
In-scope funded and unfunded peer reviewed research articles (published in either a journal, conference proceeding or publishing platform).
Book chapters.
Articles which are not eligible for paid Open Access at acceptance can be deposited in the repository (Cronfa), without embargo and with a CC BY license using the green self-archiving Open Access route. Articles made gold Open Access via an article payment charge or ‘Read and Publish’ agreement are unaffected. The University recognises that there may be situations where it is difficult to follow this policy completely and it is possible to opt out of the requirement for open access or the assignment of a CC-BY licence. This may make your output funder non-compliant.
JISC / UK Universities are currently engaged in negotiations with Springer Nature to agree a sustainable ‘Read & Publish’ deal.
Springer Compact, Nature research journals and Palgrave titles are included in the publisher portfolio.
Springer Nature have confirmed that there will be a grace period of read access to subscription content and a continuation of Springer Compact open access publishing until the end of March 2023.
An agreement is important for researchers to fulfil funder open access policy requirements. If an open access journal or APC (article processing charge) payment is not available, authors can meet their obligations by using a rights retention statement at the point of submission in hybrid journals. Releasing the accepted manuscript immediately at the point of publication in the repository with a CC-BY licence will be compliant for UKRI.
Individual payments by the University for all APCs in this portfolio may be withdrawn if negotiations conclude without agreement. Further information will be circulated if this scenario occurs.
If the sector walks away from the negotiation and suspend subscriptions, we will provide additional inter-library loan services to provide research reading. Access to historical subscription materials will continue to be available under agreed retention rights. We recommend that you install a browser extension plugin to your device for seamless access to articles. Try CORE Discovery, or Unpaywall for open access versions, or LibKey to obtain access to articles provided by Swansea University Library.
The transition to open access publishing is fulfilled through a range of transformative agreements in consultation with a wide selection of stakeholders. This supports the wide dissemination and free access to our research and helps to constrain costs, accelerate open access and increase transparency. Universities in the UK spend around £30 million a year with Springer Nature, the second largest publisher of all UK research.
The current deal with Springer ended on 31 December 2022 and JISC are acting on behalf of the sector in the current negotiation for an expanded read and publish agreement. If successful, an acceptable agreement will cover the whole Springer Nature journal portfolio – Springer Compact journals, Palgrave journals, Nature journals and their fully open access titles.
Why do we need an agreement?
To facilitate ‘read’ access to published journal content in their portfolio.
A new transitional Read & Publish agreement will provide open access publishing for UK authors in Springer Nature journals at no direct cost to the individual researcher.
Many funders require their open access funding to be used in journals that are part of a transitional agreement. They are driving change from an individual and institutional payment model (article payment charges and library journal subscriptions) to one where the library budget fairly supports the publishing services at institutional level. Springer Nature will be paid for providing access to their journal portfolio and for corresponding authors to publish reviews and primary research articles under one single agreement.
However, most funded researchers are not required to pay for open access in Springer-Nature portfolio journals. The self-archiving route for the author accepted manuscript (AAM) via a repository is still available for publishing in hybrid (open access and subscription) journals. To meet funder requirements UKRI authors should continue to use a rights retention statement at the point of submission. This will enable immediate open access by depositing the accepted manuscript with a CC-BY licence in Cronfa via the Research Information System (RIS).
Rights Retention Include this statement in your submission cover letter and the acknowledgement statement:
“For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript arising from this submission.”
We strongly encourage all authors to utilise this zero-cost publication route in order to support the ongoing negotiations. Nature open access costs are remarkably high compared to the average cost of APCs and price restraint is required.
What happens next?
Springer Nature have confirmed that there will be a grace period of ‘read’ access to subscription content and a continuation of Springer Compact publishing until the end of February 2023. Individual payments by the University for APCs in this publisher portfolio may be withdrawn if negotiations conclude without agreement. Further information will be circulated if this occurs.
The eligibility of Nature, Nature research, Palgrave journals to use UKRI open access funding
“UK institutions are in negotiation with Springer Nature to secure a transitional open access agreement for the Nature, Nature research journals and Palgrave journals. In accordance with UKRI OA policy, whilst Springer Nature provides a compliant route to OA publishing in Nature, Nature research journals and Palgrave journals via immediate publishing of the Version of Record OA under a CC BY licence, authors (and their institutions) are not able to use UKRI OA funds to pay for APCs in these titles as they are hybrid journals and ‘not part of a transitional arrangement that meets the sector’s requirements’. Whilst negotiations for a transitional agreement are ongoing, we hope to secure an arrangement for these titles that provides a compliant route for UKRI funded authors, but which does not compel an author or an institution to pay publication charges.” Authors can check the status of Nature, Nature Research journals and Palgrave journals at: Sherpa and JCT. Derived from JISC Statement 08/04/2022
The hybrid journal titles do not meet ‘transformative journal’ status and remain ineligible for UKRI funds. This follows a recently published THE article that offered an inaccurate interpretation of the current position.
Several funders are revising Open Access (OA) requirements for peer reviewed research and Swansea University authors are encouraged to familiarise themselves with any OA policy that applies to their work.
For all disciplines, funded research articles need to be open access immediately upon publication via the green or gold OA route to improve the availability and impact of research .This ambitious change is part of a transitional shift towards sustainable and equitable open access. Wellcome and cOAlition S Funders endorsed this policy in 2021 and further funder alignment is imminent:
2022: UKRI, AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC. (From 1 April 2022 – journal articles/reviews/conference proceedings with ISSN, or publishing platform) NIHR, National Institute for Health Research (From 1 June 2022) CRUK, Cancer Research UK (From 1 January 2022)
2024: UKRI (From 1 January 2024 – monographs/ book chapters/ edited collections)
What is the Rights Retention strategy?
The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) devised by cOAlition S has been introduced to ensure that funded research is subject to an open licence that allows researchers to retain the right to use and share their work.
Rights Retention Strategy One Page by cOAlitionS
There are two routes to funder compliance:
Gold open access route 1: final published version of record(VOR) document on a journal website or publishing platform with a Creative Commons CC-BY attribution licence or equivalent*.
Green self-archiving route 2: researchers publish in a hybrid (subscription + open access) or subscription journal. When an author submits a paper using this route, the manuscript should include a statement indicating that the author will apply a Creative Commons attribution (CC-BY) licence or equivalent* to any author accepted manuscript (AAM) resulting from peer-review. The AAM will be released in the repository with no embargo and means that your article is freely available to read without a paywall upon publication. Green open access is the preferred route for making outputs available as it is cost free.
* Open government licence (OGL) to any AAM subject to Crown Copyright. By exception some funders permit Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND).
Publishers have been notified of the rights retention strategy for self-archiving in repositories by the large funders. However, there are some publishers like Springer Nature that will not permit the AAM to be shared or distributed under a creative commons licence when self-archiving papers published in subscription journals. They expect authors to agree to a publishing licence that includes an embargo period. If a publisher refuses to honour rights retention you may wish to seek an alternative publication venue or route to publication in order to meet funder open access requirements.
Journal Checker Tool: https://journalcheckertool.org/ Add journal title + Funder name + Swansea University to view Plan S compliance status. Sherpa Fact is also available: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/fact/ Add journal title + Funder name You will also find a list of funder open access policy conditions on our research handbook.
What does an author need to do to ensure funder open access compliance?
Route 1. Open AccessPublisher Agreements (gold)
Swansea University has purchased agreements with some publishers to enable corresponding authors to publish their work open access at no additional cost. A list of transitional agreements (TA) is available from the Effective Research Publishing Handbook. These include selected titles from CUP, OUP,IOPScience, BMJ, PLOS, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. We also have membership schemes for discounted fees with SAGE, MDPI and ACS. By April, the current Swansea University UKRI open access block grant webpage for financial support, will be updated for hybrid journal payment applications that are not part of a Swansea University transitional publisher agreement. We can also support publication in other fully open access journals and platforms. For journals that do not meet the sector requirements for transition to open access authors will need to use alternative funding for payment of open access fees.
We emphasise that authors can still choose to publish in hybrid journals that are not part of a transitional agreement, or where their research organisation is not a participant in an existing transitional agreement. Authors can be compliant with UKRI’s open access policy either via self-archiving in a repository (where a journal accepts submissions acknowledging UKRI) or by using other funding sources for article processing charges.
UKRI Open Access Policy – explanation of policy changes 08/2021
Route 2. Open Access via self-archiving in a repository(green)
Upon submission, the author informs the publisher that the accepted manuscript (AAM) arising from the submission is licensed CC-BY in accordance with the grant’s open access condition. You can use this form of words in the acknowledgment section.
“This research was funded, in whole or in part, by [Organisation name, Grant #]. A CC-BY or equivalent licence is applied to [the AAM / the VoR] arising from this submission, in accordance with the grant’s open access conditions’’
Upon acceptance following peer review, deposit the AAM in the Research Information System (RIS). RIS will be updated to capture rights retention activity and the AAM or VOR where the publisher permits will be released in Cronfa with no embargo upon first publication.
UKRI require a data access statement even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible.
Your funder may require a Europe PubMed Central (EuropePMC) deposit. Most publishers complete this step automatically for biomedical research articles that acknowledge MRC or BBSRC funding.
Key Takeaway Route 1 – Check if there is an institutional TA publisher deal available to remove open access costs. Route 2 – Use the rights retention statement at the point of submission. The elimination of embargoes and the use of open licensing will enable self-archived accepted manuscripts to be freely available in the repository upon publication.
Book Publishing
There is an expectation that UKRI researchers will make monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024 open access within 12 months of publication. Some exceptions apply (Point 17. UKRI)
A CC-BY attribution license is required unless an exemption has been obtained in writing from UKRI to use an alternative creative commons license.
A ring-fenced block grant will be provided to the sector to support UKRI monograph publishing.
Policy exceptions apply to scholarly editions, textbooks and trade books.
Register for a shortinformation session. The focus will be on changes to the UKRI policy.
Contact Caroline Rauter or Ellie Downes via LibraryResearchSupport@swansea.ac.uk if you would like to discuss Right’s Retention or your funder’s Open Access policy.
Celebrating International Open Access Week 25th October
In celebrating International Open Access Week, the following highlights from the activities of researchers across the university demonstrate how we continue to embrace and advance the spirit of Open Science and Scholarship.
Open Science, Scholarship and Access are very much within Swansea University’s DNA and there are several ways that staff and students can get involved in developing and informing our activities via the following groups.
Public Engagement Forum
The Public Engagement Forum is chaired by Dr Rhian Melita Morris and meets to discuss initiatives relating to the promotion, support and embedding of public engagement at Swansea university
UK Reproducibility Network (Swansea University Branch)
Dr Laura Wilkinson leads the Swansea University branch of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) which is a national peer-led consortium that aims to ensure the UK retains its place as a centre for world-leading research. They do this by investigating the factors that contribute to robust research, promoting training activities, and disseminating best practice. They also work collaboratively with various external stakeholders to ensure coordination of efforts across the sector.
Swansea University’s Open Scholarship Forum is coordinated by Alexander Roberts and the Library Research Support Team and includes researchers and administrative staff from within faculties and professional services. The forum is a place to discuss and inform the development of university policy, research support and infrastructure in relation to Open Science and Scholarship.
To participate in the forum and the discussion on Microsoft Teams please contact: a.l.roberts@swansea.ac.uk.
Please remember that the Library Research Support team should be your first call when seeking Open Access guidance and advice. The Effective Research Publishing Handbook highlights publisher open access deals and discounts for Swansea University researchers, 12 Steps to Open Research, OA FAQs and more.
Swansea University Open Research Data Community
Swansea University Open Research Data Community
If you are looking for a safe place to store the data underpinning your research then please upload it to the Swansea University Open Research Data Community on the Zenodo Platform. Find out more about Research Data management at Swansea by visiting https://libguides.swansea.ac.uk/research-data-support-services/rdm-home
English & History – Open Monographs, Open Access Resources, Articles and Journal
Dylan Thomas Online Collection
Dylan Thomas – all rights reserved
The new Digital Dylan Thomas Collection was made possible by an international collaboration between the Harry Ransom Centre at The University of Texas at Austin, the Dylan Thomas Trust and Swansea University.
The digital collection of the Welsh poet and dramatist Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) contains approximately 6,000 images of manuscripts of his poetry, stories, radio broadcasts, plays, and film scripts, as well as correspondence, drawings, photographs, and some career and personal papers is now available online to researchers and the general public for the first time.
By collaborating on the creation of digital preservation facsimiles of the objects held within the Dylan Thomas collection Swansea University has enabled wider access to these important research materials, not least for residents of Swansea, Thomas’s hometown, but for the rest of the world. Researchers, students, and members of the public now no longer need to spend considerable sums on travel costs, and accommodation to study this material and can instead focus on the material rather than the journey there. The burden of the travel costs associated with visiting collections such as this has historically been a barrier to wider engagement, and likewise meant that only those able to attract significant funding have been able to complete the journey. The digitisation of this collection has now brought about a democratisation of access.
The enterprise of the Swansea-founded OA peer reviewed journal Neo-Victorian Studies, General Editor: Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke is temporally double, staging an encounter between the Victorian and neo-Victorian, between the two periods’ aesthetic productions and material works, their discourses, ideologies, and socio-political contexts. It explores themes of modernity, alterity, and evolution through time and place in an ever more globalised and interconnected world. Two ages of literature and the arts reflect and converse with each other, the nineteenth century dreaming into the future, our own present moment reading and re-imagining the past, conjoined in an ever-changing interplay of light and shadows, visibility and obscurity, self and doubled other.
Professor Kirsti Bohata has written an introduction to the special open access issue of the journal ‘Shakespeare’ on the subject of Shakespeare, Race and Nation
The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh, CorCenCC, has recently been launched with major input from Swansea University researchers. This is a language resource for Welsh speakers, Welsh learners, Welsh language researchers, and indeed anyone who is interested in the Welsh language. CorCenCC is a freely accessible collection of multiple language samples, gathered from real-life communication. Click on the Explore or Download tabs to access the corpus and start to investigate Welsh language as it is actually used. The corpus is accompanied by an online teaching and learning toolkit – Y Tiwtiadur – which draws directly on the data from the corpus to provide resources for Welsh language learning at all ages and levels.
Oriel Science is a Swansea University public engagement project that takes research done by Swansea researchers, crafts these into interactive and visceral exhibits, and places them at the heart of the community. It welcomes members of the public and students on organised school visits. It has also run and given presentations at festivals. It is run by a small team including Swansea University researchers and is aimed at all members of the public to develop their familiarity with science, a.k.a. ‘Science Capital’ but with an emphasis on reaching underrepresented groups in the community. Published research shows that developing Science Capital is the best way to encourage Future Generations into university education.
Dr Ed Bennett from the Swansea Academy of Advanced Computing (SA2C) has successfully secured the first Fellowship offered by the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in Research Software Engineering. Fellowship—the only one awarded this year—competing with bids from the particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astronomy research communities across the UK. Worth £600k, it will help drive the development of cutting-edge research software and promote the vital role of software in enabling high-quality research.
Dr Ed Bennett
The Fellowship will support Dr Bennett in his aim to help the wider research community by improving software they use, to support and train other researchers and to conduct his own research.
Geography – Open Code, Open Data, Open Monographs and Citizen Science
Global Environmental Modelling and Earth Observation (GEMEO) group
Global Environmental Modelling and Earth Observation (GEMEO) group
One of Geography’s recent REF2021 impact case studies focusses on the work of Professors Peter North and Sietse Los as part of the Global Environmental Modelling and Earth Observation (GEMEO) group’s work to develop an open dataset of the earth’s reflectance. This work deals with code and datasets for improved weather forecasting and climate modelling. Open project partners included the UK Met Office, European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, European Space Agency, and suchlike.
Professor Carlos Garcia De Leaniz and the AMBER project seeks to apply adaptive management to the operation of dams and other barriers to free flow in European rivers to achieve a more efficient use of water resources, one that maximises benefits and reduces impacts. With over 1 million river barriers, Europe has probably the most fragmented rivers in the world. Dams provide energy, water, fishing, and leisure opportunities to society, but also fragment rivers and can have a huge impact on biodiversity. Some barriers are obsolete and out of use and pose a flood and safety hazard and should be removed. AMBER is a consortium of 20 active partners, ranging from large hydropower businesses, river authorities, and universities. Importantly, AMBER has also a citizen science programme which encourages people to locate barriers while fishing, kayaking or walking along the riverbank using the Barrier Tracker app. Data from the app has helped to build the AMBER Barrier Atlas, which is the first comprehensive open access database of rivers barriers in Europe (Nature 588, 436-441). These results are helping local and national authorities to prioritize barriers in need of improvement or removal.
The UKRI Open Access (OA) Policy sets out the requirements for publications that acknowledge funding from UKRI or any of its councils. The new OA policy requires immediate open access to be the default for research articles. This positive change will ensure that publicly funded research is openly available at the point of publication.
The new policy comes into effect for research articles submitted for publication on or after 1April 2022 and is similar to the cOAlition S and Wellcome open access initiatives. In-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024 are included for the first time.
UKRI will provide a £46.7 million Open Access block grant to support implementation of this policy however, the ring-fenced budget for OA monograph publishing is not significant at £3.5 million for the sector. UKRI will release further information on the block grant and conditions of funding in December 2021 and in 2022 for monographs. Swansea University Library is responsible for supporting Faculties to achieve compliance with the URKRI Open Access policy and receives the block grant to support researchers.
Requirements of the new policy
For peer-reviewed research articles, reviews and conference papers with an ISSN, key requirements include:
immediate open access for research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022.
articles can be open through an open access journal or platform using the ‘gold’ route, or via ‘green’ self-archiving of the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in an institutional or subject repository without an embargo period.
authors can only access UKRI funds to publish in a gold open access journal or in a subscription “hybrid” journal covered by a JISC transitional agreement.
a Creative Commons CC-BY licence or CC-BY-ND (by exception) is required, including a requirement to notify the publisher of this licensing at the point of submission. UKRI provide rights retention strategy (RRS) boilerplate text for ‘green’ self-archiving purposes. Using a rights retention strategy is a cultural shift for authors and will be a funder requirement.
‘For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence (where permitted by UKRI, ‘Open Government Licence’ or ‘CC BY-ND public copyright licence’ may be stated instead) to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising’
articles must include a Data Access Statement, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible.
Key requirements of the new policy for monographs published on or after 1 January 2024 include:
the final version of a publication or accepted manuscript are made open access via a publisher’s website, platform or repository, within a maximum of 12 months of publication or the accepted manuscript must be deposited in a repository.
a Creative Commons CC-BY licence is preferred, but NC and ND licences are permitted for monographs.
UKRI’s licensing requirements do not apply to any materials included within a long-form output that are provided by third-party copyright holders – see the policy exceptions.
Preprints are not included within the new policy but the use of pre-print services across disciplines is encouraged. A statement on pre-prints is expected at some point.
The Library Research Support team will be adding policy updates to the Effective Research Publishing Handbookas they become available. Details of JISC transitional publishing agreements applicable to Swansea University researchers are also available from this resource. Faculty administrators and directors are encouraged to make contact for further guidance to ensure that researchers are able to comply with the new funder requirements.
Swansea UniversityLibrary (ISS) has signed up to several transformative deals* (TAs) with publishers that cover the cost of Open Access publication. Eligible corresponding authors submitting articles for publication in journals in these agreements will not be charged fees known as APCs (article processing charges).
We currently have deals in place for Swansea University affiliated corresponding authors with: Cambridge University Press (starts end of May 2021) IOP Science Oxford University Press PLOS (selected titles) Springer (selected Open Choice Springer Compact titles) Wiley
We have discounts in place for: MDPI (10% discount) SAGE (substantial discount)
Contact the Library Research Support team if you have questions on an individual deal or would like to arrange a training session to publicise the deals with Swansea Researchers.
Academic publishing can be a confusing place full of conflicting policies from your institution, your funders, and the journal publishers, unclear processes from submission to publication, and it can be difficult to know where to start.
So, we have arranged a series of sessions on Academic publishing every Wednesday at 11am via Zoom on a range of topics from how the landscape has developed, book publishing, to predatory journals and how research is measured. The Registration links below will take you to the event pages which have more details about the topics each session covers.
11th March – Academic Publishing Series: How the landscape is changing Register Here
17th March – Journal Articles from Submission to PublicationRegister here
24th March – Publishing Academic Books with Prof. Amy Brown Register here
31st March – Predatory Journals: What are they and how can you tell Register here
7th April – Measuring Research: an introduction to Metrics Register here
BHF Open Access Policy – October 1 2020 – 31 March 2021
Swansea University is in receipt of a small block grant to support the BHF Open Access policy. The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) support has now ended and the BHF has allocated £2,507 to support researchers to comply with their Open Access policy.
This small fund is available on a first come, first served basis for payment of article processing charges until the end of March for any Swansea University corresponding author.
From January 1 2021 until December 31 2023 publication fees for open access will be automatically covered by the flat fee publisher agreement with Swansea University Library for the following titles:
To be eligible for full payment of publications fees, the corresponding author must be affiliated with Swansea University. Please ensure that you use your Swansea University email address and identify your affiliation in the publisher submission system.
All article types in the five eligible journals are covered under the flat fee deal.
Articles will be automatically published with a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution license. PLOS articles are archived in LOCKSS and syndicated to PubMed Central/EuropePMC. PLOS requires data sharing where not subject to legal or ethical restrictions and has adopted the CRediT taxonomy.
PLOS reserves the right to accept or reject applications for financial support. If PLOS or the institution choose to reject the payment for Article Processing Charges (APCs), PLOS will invoice the authors individually, who retain full payment responsibility.
Further details on all open access publisher agreements and discounts for Swansea University researchers are listed on our Open Access Financial Support for APCs webpage.
RESEARCH NEWS from Swansea University Library 