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.

 

Making a paper open access step-by-step

This post is a walk-through of the process for making a journal article open access on our institutional repository, as required by REF / SU’s open access policy.

If you can pay for “Gold” open access with the publisher (including a CC-BY licence), then your paper will be compliant. You may wish to consider using one of the Springer journals covered by the UK open access agreement with that publisher. This gives free open access publication to SU staff and students in one of the applicable titles. We have funding for open access for UKRI researchers.

Scenario: you have written an article and you want to submit it for publication.

Check that the journal allows you to comply with open access requirements: use Sherpa Romeo. If you have a research funder, check your funder’s policy as it is likely to have more restrictions.

Points to check on Sherpa Romeo are:

1. If there is an embargo period, is it longer than 12 months (STEM) or 24 months (social science/humanities)? If so, this will not comply with the REF open access policy. You can still submit to the journal but you will need to produce evidence for the REF that you considered other journals and only this one was suitable.
2. Do they allow you to upload the accepted version (post-print) onto an institutional repository at a minimum? Published version would be even better. If not, you can still submit to the journal but you will need to produce evidence for the REF that you considered other journals and only this one was suitable.

Acceptance: Your paper is peer reviewed, a few changes are requested and then you are contacted to say the paper has been accepted.

1. Create a record on RIS with the information you have: title, journal, date of acceptance.
2. Upload the accepted version: this is your final version which includes any changes made following peer review. Convert a Word document to PDF. If you are allowed to make your paper immediately available before publication, use the “Publish to Cronfa” link next to the file in RIS to make it appear the next day.

Your paper is finally published (either online, early, or in an issue of the journal).

• Once the article is published, use the “Publish to Cronfa” link next to the file in RIS to set your full text file to release to Cronfa either immediately (if there is no embargo) or on a date in the future.

Whenever your paper becomes open access, be sure to promote it with a link to the Cronfa page so that readers can find the full text. You can track views and downloads on Cronfa and there will also be information on altmetrics (social media activity) and citations if these accrue.

Locating open access papers

Making a paper open access serves no purpose if that paper is not findable by its potential readers. These may be other academics, students or interested public.

In recent years there’s been an increase in open access discovery tools to help readers quickly locate the full text of an article which is paywalled. Most of these tools have pros and cons; none of them fully index the full spread of legally available open access papers in institutional and subject repositories. Some of these will link with the library’s subscriptions to give access to the full text, as well as any freely available copies on the web. Check our library’s access using iFind’s “Articles & more” search tab (see below).

How can a researcher find full text for a paper they need to read? This quick overview assumes a search for a specific known paper (not a general search on a topic):

• Google Scholar: this is the academic search engine version of Google. It is excellent for turning up open versions of papers and usually displays a link straight to the paper on the right. However, institutional repositories are not always well indexed by Google Scholar so it can miss free content. You can link Google Scholar to the library’s subscriptions; it also has its own browser button.
• Unpaywall: an open access discovery service that is being integrated into many databases and sites. You can also use their browser extension to get a colour-coded padlock with (hopefully) direct access to a PDF. Our repository – Cronfa – is not yet indexed by Unpaywall so its coverage is good but not comprehensive. Unpaywall also has the facility to bulk-check a list of DOIs which may be useful.
• Open Access button: another open access discovery service which also has its own browser extension. Cronfa IS indexed by open access button but, again, its coverage will not be complete.
• Kopernio: another browser plugin to help find OA content.
• The university library iFind service does include some open access content but coverage of free material is not as good as some of the above. However, it does provide authoritative access to the university’s subscription content which will give the publisher version of a paper after logging in (IF we have a subscription to that journal).
• Google is not an academic search engine but many use it for discovery. Open access papers are often indexed by Google and including the search command “filetype:pdf” can help to locate full text. You can also include quotes around the title to make your search more precise.

If you do a lot of literature searching it is definitely worth installing one of the browser extensions to find an open version of a paper but it is also worth remembering that, if one is not available, a focused Google search may still turn up a copy in a repository that has not yet been indexed by these services.

Comments welcomed if you use any of these tools!

Plan S

 

A group of 11 European funders, including UKRI, have put open access back in the news. They propose a radical plan from 2020 where:

• Papers must be free to read on publication
• They must have a liberal licence which allows others to reuse, translate or download the work.
• Papers should not be published in hybrid journals which take subscriptions as well as article processing charges
• Green open access would be allowed but with no embargo period
• Funders will cap the amount they will pay for article processing charges.
• Authors should keep their copyright with no restrictions

Publishers have obviously hit out at the plans as unworkable. Time will tell…