The Office of Scholarly Communication based in Cambridge University Library can help you make your research open.
What do researchers need to do
The Self-Archiving Policy enables researchers to meet various funder and research assessment requirements for journal articles and conferences proceedings. By following the steps outlined below you should meet funder requirements for your published outputs.
If you are publishing a monograph and are funded by either UKRI or Wellcome Trust, please contact the Open Access Team.
Support for departments
Briefings and training sessions are available on open access, research data management and open research. To request a session for your department, please email Lynne Meehan at info@osc.cam.ac.uk or discuss with your local librarian.
Self-Archiving Policy
The University's Self-Archiving Policy cam into effect on 01 April 2023. The policy applies to all peer-reviewed research articles submitted after 01 April 2023, including reviews and conference papers, that are accepted for final publication in either a journal, conference proceeding or published platform. The policy allows authors to make their accepted research articles available in Apollo immediately upon publication. It is based on the researcher retaining their rights to apply a Creative Commons license to the accepted version of the manuscript ('rights retention').
REF, Open Research and Research Assessment
Research England confirm that the REF Open Access Policy introduced for REF 2021 should be followed until further notice. The REF 2021 Open Access Policy requires journal articles and conference proceedings published with an ISSN to be made open access. Authors are required to deposit a copy of the author's accepted manuscript in an institutional repository - such as Apollo - within three months of acceptance for publication. We expect Research England to update this policy in Spring 2024 and will share information when it is available.
UKRI Open Access Policy
This policy comes into effect from 1 April 2022 and impacts anyone with funding from UKRI (including for example AHRC and ESRC) and we expect that similar requirements will be in place for any outputs we submit to the next REF.
The key points are:
- All research articles must be immediately open access by the publication date, either through route 1 (the 'gold' route, where the final published article is open on the journal website) or route 2 (the 'green' route, where the accepted version of the paper is put on the institutional repository - in our case this means uploading through Symplectic Elements to Apollo)
- All articles must include a statement about where other researchers can find the data underlying the research - or a statement saying that there is no such data, or a statement explaining why underlying data cannot be shared
- From 2024 there a requirement for open access to monographs and book chapters, but we don't have the detail on how this will work yet. Any monograph, book chapter or edited collection under contract from 01 January 2024 will need to be made available with creative commons license within one year of publication via self-archiving the accepted manuscript, or by publishing open access. UKRI supports open access publishing through the traditional Book Processing Charge (BPC) model, as well as other approaches, such as Diamond Open Access initiatives.
Open Access Forum for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
12pm-1pm, Thursday 8 December 2022 via Zoom (recorded)
This session provided an update for AHSS researchers on recent developments in open access publishing. Covering topics including policies, monographs and alternative forms of publishing, the discussion focused on how to navigate the increasingly complex terrain of open access. Please see the recording below. Further updates will be provided once available.
Speakers:
Dr. Debbie Hansen (Senior Open Access Adviser from the Open Access Team).
Dr. Samuel Moore (University Library’s Scholarly Communication Specialist and a researcher of issues relating to open access publishing in the humanities).
with Dr. Andrea Salter (REF Manager for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and also part of the Schools’ Research Facilitation Team).
