The myths surrounding open scholarly publishing

We were interested to spot this new preprint by Professor Tom Crick et al, discussing the ten myths around Open Scholarship publishing. The paper, which is open for comment, delves into the evolving framework and core issues surrounding Open Research, Open Science and Open Scholarship.

Whilst it is hard to pick out a ‘favourite’ myth, there are some particularly cogent points highlighted in Myth 6, Copyright Transfer, which deserve wider discussion and dissemination amongst academics. With Plan S hovering into view with the requirement that authors and universities retain copyright in their scientific research articles rather than transfer it to publishers, this topic needs much wider visibility.

If you want to explore the debate you can read the full text of the article here: https://peerj.com/preprints/27580/

PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27580v1| CC BY 4.0 Open Access|

 

The Library Research Support Team in 2018: a roundup

It’s nearly the end of a busy year for the Library Research Support Team. There is an overview of our activities on our web page (specifically our Team Remit) but the bulk of our work is in the area of open access: supporting researchers in meeting the requirements of the university and REF open access policies (and any additional funder policies), administering our grant from UKRI for Gold open access, administering the university’s e-theses collection and supporting the uptake of ORCiDs in our research community.

In 2018 we have:

• Checked over 1980 records on RIS and chased up any that needed files uploading in order to be compliant with the REF and university Open Access policies (Engineering does this work in-house but we cover the other 6 Colleges/Schools).
• Answered over 300 queries by email, phone and in person. Most of these are on open access, ORCiD or RIS. Contact us at iss-research@swansea.ac.uk
• Revamped our website and moved content to new LibGuides; published 20 blog posts and lots of tweets.
• Run 17 sessions on open research topics including two Open Research Cafe events supported by a grant from SURF and co-organised with Rebecca Kelleher.
• Processed 50 applications for the UKRI Gold open access fund, totaling around £65k
• Processed 66 new PhD theses for the new E-Theses portal and added a 1000 older theses as part of a retrospective digitization project

This is in addition to work supporting copyright, bibliometrics/Scival, the Postgraduate Skills programme and participation in the wider Welsh/UK Scholarly Communications community.

Open Access Success

Thanks to the diligence of our researchers, we are currently seeing excellent levels of compliance with the REF/university open access policy. In 2018, we saw 3290 new full text downloads appear on our repository Cronfa, with a further 939 waiting for the publisher-imposed embargo to end before they become open access. We are now encouraging authors to take advantage of book chapter self-archiving permissions and we have over 100 of our more recent chapters available for download now.

Changes in the team

The team is seeing some changes at the end of the year: Penny Lauder (Scholarly Communications Assistant) has already taken on an additional part-time role as Impact and Engagement Officer on the EPSRC-funded CHERISH digital economy centre, celebrating impact of their many interdisciplinary projects; Anna Zasheva has increased her hours in the team to cover. Sam Oakley (Research Librarian) will be leaving at the end of 2018 to take up a new post at the University of Glasgow; Susan Glen will continue 2 days a week in the role of Research Librarian until the post is filled on a full-time basis.

We wish all our researchers and readers a happy and successful 2019!

 

Getting hold of an accepted manuscript for green open access

Most journal copyright policies permit the self-archiving of the accepted manuscript (or post-print). This is the final author version of a paper and we get many queries about identifying and obtaining this version. A new resource from Open Access Button promises to be helpful: Direct2AAM.

The guides, available for most major journals, provide easy to follow instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their journal submission system, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process.

Access the resource here: https://openaccessbutton.org/direct2aam

At present the following publishers are covered:

International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS)

On Monday 12th November 2018, IJPDS is changing the publishing licence from the current Creative Commons
CC-BY-ND to CC-BY

 

 

The International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS) is an electronic, open-access, peer-reviewed journal focussing on the science pertaining to population data. It publishes articles on all aspects of research, development and evaluation connected with data about people and populations.

It is published by Swansea University.

Why is IJPDS changing to CC-BY?
At IJPDS, sharing research freely is at the heart of everything we do and, as an Open Access journal, it is important that we uphold the Open Access ethos of making research freely accessible to all without restriction.

We currently publish articles under the CC-BY-ND licence, but this restricts the freedom to make changes and to distribute derivatives, thereby blocking or restricting the creation of derivative works. Our decision to migrate to the CC-BY licence will allow others more freedom to engage with IJPDS author’s research whilst still protecting the author’s moral rights.

• the freedom to use published research and associated benefits of using it
• the freedom to study manuscripts and to apply knowledge acquired from them
• the freedom to make and redistribute copies of the information
• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

Funder Requirements
Increasing numbers of research funders stipulate the use of CC-BY when publishing via Open Access. Subsequently, IJPDS already offers the CC-BY licence to authors funded by RCUK / Wellcome Trust. We also use the CC0 “No rights reserved” licence for publishing source data that permits its re-use. IJPDS is now simply extending the right to freely access and use published research by rolling CC-BY out to cover all published works.

Benefits of CC-BY
By removing the restriction on derivative works, CC-BY opens up more options for using the research e.g. new ways of representing scholarly articles through text-mining and visualization techniques or allowing articles to be translated into other languages, and encouraging engagement with manuscripts through wider use has clear benefits to the authors.

Protecting Authors
Publishing under a free license does not mean that authors lose all their rights and any use of manuscripts published in IJPDS still require full attribution (i.e. giving credit and recognition to the author of a manuscript). Creative Commons licences require that no modifications to manuscripts should ‘be prejudicial to the Original Author’s honor or reputation’ (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions).

Please note that manuscripts already published IJPDS prior to Monday 12th November 2019 will remain as CC-BY-ND, unless we receive a request from the authors to change to CC-BY.

Guest post by Sharon Hindley, IJPDS Marketing Manager.
Tweet to @IJPDS

Wellcome Trust new open access policy

Wellcome Trust have just updated their open access policy which will last until Jan 2020. Although Swansea does not have a large number of Wellcome funded academics this is an interesting development as it follows a big review and is an attempt to work within the Plan S policy put forward by the European Commission.

• It stipulates that articles must be freely available through PubMed Central as soon as they are published.
• They have to be published under a CC-BY licence.
• They will only fund articles in journals which appear in DOAJ and will not cover publishing in subscription journals.
• All research articles will have to include a statement explaining how other researchers can access the data, software and materials underpinning the research.
• They encourage publication of preprints under a CC-BY licence.
• When they assess research outputs for funding they will judge on intrinsic merit, not the title of the journal or publisher.

As the cost of publishing in “hybrid” journals has kept rising and they are harder to discover than articles in fully open access journals this could be the start of a trend. One to watch….

 

 

 

#ThesisThursday – Open Access Week 2018

Today is #ThesisThursday on Twitter, part of the activities celebrating International Open Access Week.

We asked our guest blogger Julia Terry to tell us about her recently completed Swansea University PhD.

What was the most important or overarching finding of your research?

My thesis focused on exploring talk about mental health nursing. I interviewed mental health service users, nurses and nursing students. In today’s healthcare climate we expect to see more practice that involves patients/service users in nursing processes. In Wales this is legislated for in mental health settings. However, my main finding was that there was limited talk about service user involvement in nursing processes and that involvement does not appear feature as a main part of mental health  nurses’ professional identity. Generally, service user involvement was spoken about very little, with service users voicing dissatisfaction with the limited time nurses spent with them, and nurses describing their roles as mostly task focussed.

What was the most surprising thing that you discovered; was there anything odd or unexpected?

It was surprising that nursing students said they had little understanding about service user involvement in nursing processes and had seen few good examples in practice. However, whilst these results were surprising, other studies in the UK have also found limited service user involvement in mental health care planning and that their expectations from nurses have not always been met.

What was the biggest challenge that you encountered during your PhD, and did it change the direction of your research?

The biggest challenge was the part-time nature of my PhD. I was very well supported and encouraged all the way through my journey. It was essential that I kept up my organisation and time management skills in order that I remained on track.

Have you any words of wisdom for any researchers who might be embarking on a similar programme of research?

Keeping a research log from the beginning is a good idea. I kept short notes on my progress all the way through and even took these in to my Viva exam. It means you have everything in one place, and can track your progress easily.

Read Julia’s thesis in our repository, Cronfa.

Title: Talking about mental health nursing: a qualitative analysis of nurses’ and service users’ accounts

Supervisors: Professor Michael Coffey & Dr Jeanette Hewitt

Link:  https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa43230

posted by Caroline Rauter

REF Open Access policy: determining the date of acceptance

A key feature of the REF Open Access policy is that papers must be deposited in RIS within three months of acceptance for publication. We therefore need to record the date of acceptance in RIS for every journal articles (or serial conference proceedings paper) so that we can prove this was done. For many papers, the date of acceptance is displayed on the publisher site or PDF. For some journals however it is not easy to determine what qualifies as the “date of acceptance”, particularly if an article has been requested or the route to publication is not straightforward.

The REF Draft Guidance available now has this to say about dates of acceptance:

‘Date of acceptance’ means the date given in the acceptance letter or email from
the publisher to the author as the ‘firm’ accepted date.

They go on to clarify:

Outputs that are published by a journal or conference proceedings which does not require peer review are within the scope of this policy. In this instance, the author’s final accepted version must be deposited. The date of acceptance in this instance should be taken as the date that the publisher confirms that the article has been received from the author and will subsequently be published.

If you are still unsure what counts as the date of acceptance, please get in touch with the Library Research Support Team and we can advise.