International Open Access Week 2022: Open for Climate Justice

This week is International Open Access week, an annual event about raising awareness and taking action on open access. This year’s theme is “Open for Climate Justice”, considering how open access and open research can help in tackling the climate crisis.

Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

– https://www.openaccessweek.org/theme

What is climate justice, and where does open access fit in?

As Earth Overshoot Day gets earlier each year, it’s clear that the climate crisis is a global emergency which needs global action to tackle it. Open access can help ensure that work on climate change isn’t locked away behind paywalls where it can only be accessed by people working at institutions that can afford expensive journal subscriptions.

Image credit: NASA Source: https://images.nasa.gov/details-GSFC_20171208_Archive_e001532

The term “climate justice” acknowledges that the effects of climate change are not being felt equally and that the impact is hitting marginalised populations harder – exactly the people who are also less likely to be able to access academic work and research on climate change. Opening up access to this work can be beneficial both directly and indirectly, because as well as making the work itself more accessible, it can enable people working on these issues to find others working in the same field, as well as raising the profile of their own research, helping to create opportunities for global collaboration.

What does open access look like in our corner of the world?

Here at SGUL we enable open access through our repository, SORA, where SGUL academic staff with a profile in our CRIS can have their full text manuscripts made available for articles that would otherwise only be available with a subscription to the published journal article (as well as those that are published open access).

We also maintain a Research Data Repository that can host a wide variety of outputs as well as data, making them freely available where possible whilst also allowing for access controls where appropriate (eg for sensitive medical data).

As well as these, we also have a number of Read and Publish deals with various publishers to allow SGUL corresponding authors to publish open access in some or all of their journals at either a reduced cost or at no direct cost. New deals for this year include those with Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, which join existing deals from publishers such as OUP and Wiley. Full details on our deals, including eligibility requirements and lists of included journals, are on our webpages.

What about the rest of the global community?

There are however questions round the equitability of these Read and Publish deals and whether they are shifting the inaccessibility burden from readers to researchers: instead of readers being unable to access published research due to the cost barrier, are marginalised researchers being shut out of the publishing process due to the cost of open access fees? Are these deals just concentrating all the money for open access on the same publishers that were already making the most money from subscriptions?

The open access landscape is shifting rapidly as questions around fairness and access lead to new publication models, which lead to new questions and new discussions on how to move towards a world where everyone is able to participate in the academic community without barriers due to cost.

What might help?

Image by 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼 from Pixabay

Initiatives such as PLOS Community Action Publishing aims to ‘make selective publishing more equitable’ and has capped margins so the more institutions who join, the lower costs become. Not for profit journal publishing as undertaken by the Microbiology Society, uses income generated to reinvest in their community. Both these publishers’ journals are covered by SGUL publishing agreements.

Many charitable funders and institutions are increasingly advocating that authors include a rights retention statement in their manuscripts on submission to subscription journals, to ensure the accepted manuscript can be made openly available even if the published version is not.

As well as traditional journal publishing, other OA publishing models such as preprinting may not require OA fees at all – for instance there are no open access fees for publishing on medRxiv or bioRxiv. ASAPBio, a not for profit scientist community, has produced FAQs on public preprint feedback, including How can preprint review contribute to equity?.

Diamond open access publishing (in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers) is being advanced as another initiative, as this recent conference demonstrates.

Find out more

Want to join the conversation but don’t know your AAM from your RRS? Curious about Creative Commons licences? Take a look at our new Open Access Glossary – and drop us a line if you run across something we don’t have a definition for yet!

Any questions? Get in touch with us:

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Carly Lightfoot, Library Research Services Manager

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

Open Access Week 2021: It Matters How We Open Knowledge

This week is Open Access Week! This year’s theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”, focusing on how to make sure all knowledge producers and consumers are able to participate equally. To find out more about this year’s theme and keep up with conversations and events, visit www.openaccessweek.org, and keep an eye on the official hashtag, #OAWeek.

We’ll be tweeting and retweeting from the library Twitter account, @sgullibrary, throughout the week, and if you’d like to see posts we’ve made in previous years, take a look at the Open Access Week tag.

Open access and open research are about making sure that knowledge is shared as freely and equitably as possible.

The theme of this year’s open access week intentionally aligns with the recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. The recommendations put forward a framework to support scientific collaboration, and foster open practices, raising the profile of being “open” at an international level.

Students, researchers, academics may all be consumers or producers of research. Open science can mean making publications and data available, but it’s also about enabling a more collaborative, transparent research environment – where results are reproducible and researchers can easily access and build upon each other’s work – and where research is opened up to others such as charities, patient groups, and citizen science.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Here at SGUL, we support open access via our institutional repository, SORA, which holds over 6000 full text articles by SGUL researchers past and present, with more articles being made available every day. And open research isn’t just about articles – we also support open research via our Research Data Repository, which can host not only research data, but also source code, poster presentations and more. Take a look at these recent posts from our Research Data Support Manager to learn more about managing your research data and using the Research Data Repository:

• Focus on Figshare: using ‘collections’ and ‘projects’
• DMPOnline for St George’s University researchers

We’ve also signed up for a number of read and publish deals, which allow SGUL staff and students to both read content in these publishers’ journals and publish open access in them with no additional costs (subject to eligibility criteria). See our webpages for a full list of our deals, along with further information on eligibility and how to access them.

Several well known research funders have launched open publishing platforms, where researchers they fund can publish their results quickly and without direct cost for publication. These include:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Gates Open Research
• European Commission (Horizon 2020): Open Research Europe
• National Institute for Health Research: NIHR Open Research
• Wellcome: Wellcome Open Research
• Association of Medical Research Charities: AMRC Open Research

These platforms also allow for open peer review – to bring greater transparency and diversity to the peer review process. Registering for the ORCID open identifier enables you to showcase peer reviewing work you have undertaken.

Want to get involved?

Here’s some things to think about to help make research more open:

• For SGUL researchers with access to CRIS, upload your accepted manuscripts via the CRIS so they can be made open access in SORA (and encourage your colleagues to do the same).
• Consider whether you could publish via an open research platform, and consider who is invited to peer review (for instance, Wellcome Open Research encourages discussion with the editorial team to help with diversity of reviewers).
• Think about other research outputs you could make available on the SGUL data repository: e.g. datasets, protocols, code, posters and presentations.
• If you’re on the editorial board for any journals, can you advocate for reduced embargo periods, lower APCS or APC waiver policies for researchers with no source of funding?
• Join the conversation via the twitter hashtag #OAWeek – or start a conversation with your colleagues in person!

Any questions? Get in touch with us:

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager

Open Access Week 2020: Open with Purpose

This week, October 19^th-25^th, is Open Access Week, an annual, international event dedicated to celebrating and promoting Open Research.

This year’s theme is Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion, acknowledging that current systems are often built on a past of historic injustices and that in building new systems, we need to be mindful of who we are and aren’t including, who we are prioritising and whether we are perpetuating a legacy of injustice.

To find out more, visit www.openaccessweek.org, or follow the official twitter hashtag, #OAWeek. We’ll also be tweeting and retweeting from the library account, @sgullibrary, and, if you’re in the library, look out for our poster on how to find open access material.

You can also find posts we’ve made in previous years under the Open Access Week tag on this blog.

Here at SGUL we support open research via our Research Publications Repository (SORA) and our Research Data Repository. We currently have over 4870 full text papers available via SORA, with an average 4180 downloads a month, and these numbers are rising every day. And, since its launch three years ago, we’ve had 17,163 downloads of public content in our Research Data Repository.

As well as supporting SGUL researchers to make their publications openly available via SORA, the Library is also signing up to Read and Publish deals, several of which are new in 2020. These deals work by giving SGUL patrons access to read journals, and giving SGUL corresponding authors the opportunity to publish original research articles on open access, as visualised below:

(from our blogpost on our Read and Publish deals)

Research outputs that aren’t traditional publications, such as research data, source code, poster presentations and so on, can be uploaded to our Research Data Repository, where they will be preserved and, where appropriate, made available for other researchers to explore and re-use. The Research Data Repository has been updated recently – have a look at our blog post from last week to find out more.

If you’d like to know more about SORA or about our Research Data Repository, please get in touch at sora@sgul.ac.uk (for SORA) or researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for the Research Data Repository, or for general help managing your data throughout the research lifecycle).

Want to get involved?

Here are some ways to consider making your research practices more open:

• Upload your author’s accepted manuscripts to a repository such as SORA: this means that, publisher copyright permitting, we will be able to make them available to people who might not otherwise have been able to access them. You can do this via your CRIS profile at http://cris.sgul.ac.uk/ – if you have any questions, you can contact us at sora@sgul.ac.uk
• Get in touch with researchdata@sgul.ac.uk about making your other research outputs openly accessible via our Research Data Repository, or for ideas on where to find open data and other outputs you can use in your own research.
• Think about uploading a preprint of your research to a preprint server. Posting papers to preprint platforms has increased greatly since the start of the pandemic – you can find out more about preprints, such as what they are and what to consider before posting, by reading our blogpost from last year on preprints in the medical, biological and health sciences.
• Follow the conversation via the twitter hashtag #OAWeek – and add your own thoughts and reflections!

Any questions? Get in touch with us:

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

Open Access Week 2019: Publicly funded research data are a public good

This week October 21 – 27, 2019 is Open Access week, an international event celebrating and promoting openness in research.

In keeping with this year’s theme, Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge, this blogpost reflects on the public benefits of open data, the current challenges and opportunities.

We’re using the Library’s twitter account (@sgullibrary) to retweet interesting articles and blogpost all this week.

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Open for whom?

This week the international research community is celebrating Open Access Week by reflecting on equity in open knowledge; enabling inclusive and diverse conversations on a single question: “open for whom”? Today’s blog post focuses specifically on open research data. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) state in their Common Principles on Data Policy that:

Publicly funded research data are a public good, produced in the public interest, which should be made openly available with as few restrictions as possible in a timely and responsible manner.

But who exactly does open research data benefit? We often speak about the benefits of open data to research and innovation:

• enabling transparency
• promoting reproducibility
• boosting opportunities for collaboration
• enhancing opportunities for innovation
• reducing inefficiencies in research

The public ultimately benefit from open research data but are often treated as beneficiaries and not active, engaged partners.

This year’s theme asked me to challenge an assumption that open research data are for (and used primarily by) scientific/technical specialists working “in the public interest”, rather than the public themselves. A noble endeavour, I thought. So off I set…

Designed by Freepik

Who is the public?

At the very start, I faced a conundrum – who exactly is the public? The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) helped ‘define the territory’. The short answer is everyone. Anyone can be a part of the range of groups that make up the public.

Source: The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement

Non-governmental organisations, social enterprises, health and well-being agencies, local authorities, strategic bodies and community, cultural and special interest groups all comprise members of the public with an interest in accessing data to inform decisions that will benefit their group.

Releasing raw data in ways that make the data easy to find, access, understand and reuse helps maximise the potential benefits of research data across the social spectrum. It should be easy to discover what research data are available and how that data can be accessed. When released, data should be in open formats so that anyone can be able to access it, not just a select or privileged few possessing expensive, proprietary software. Data should also be shared with sufficient information about how it was created, how it should be understood and how to reuse it meaningfully and responsibly. Finally, data should always be shared under licences which tell people what they can do with it. Called FAIR data, these principles of data management and sharing enable maximum reuse of research data.

Measured voices

It’s here that a measured voice within in me started whispering… and I listened carefully.

Is this really enough? This still has the potential to get messy. Very messy. Especially if we’re talking about health and medical data derived from human beings, which can be sensitive and which we have taken responsibility for protecting.

In the fallout of various data scandals, including scandals about the data used to train artificial intelligence, organisations everywhere are scrambling to restore public trust in the way we handle and use data. Part of restoring that trust is in the transparency offered by open data. Another aspect of restoring trust is in safeguarding the data that people provide us with and using that data responsibly, in ways individuals have consented to.

This tension between openness and our professional responsibilities is recognised in the UKRI’s data policy as well:

UKRI recognises that there are legal, ethical and commercial constraints on release of research data. To ensure that the research process is not damaged by inappropriate release of data, research organisation policies and practices should ensure that these are considered at all stages in the research process.

This is a tension we are constantly negotiating given the kinds of data that we handle at St George’s.

Data ethics

A new field of applied ethics, called data ethics, gives us a useful framework for exploring and responding to legal and moral issues related to data collection, processing, sharing and reusing. The Open Data Institute has developed the Data Ethics Canvas to help organisations identify and manage ethical issues related to data. The UK Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport also provides a Data Ethics Framework to guide the use of data in the public sector. 

Being responsible in our data sharing means that a large amount of data produced from human participants are only available on request from other researchers. This takes me right back to where I started, though with the caveat that it might be particularly relevant for health and medical research: an assumption that open research data are for (and used primarily by) scientific/technical specialists working “in the public interest”, rather than the public themselves.

But maybe there’s a middle ground for health and medical data derived from human participants? Maybe there are possibilities for us to create meaningful and lasting partnerships with ‘the public’ to realise the public benefits of data? The UK Biobank engages very closely with their participants, but they are still participants. I wonder if there are examples out there of projects where participants are also decision-makers about their data. Or examples of projects that have formed collaborations with civil society and/or public sector groups to realise the greater benefits of data. It would be nice to see examples of initiatives like these to use as a springboard for wider conversation. 

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager (researchdata@sgul.ac.uk)

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access Week 2019: The When, Where and How of Open Access

This week October 21 – 27, 2019 is Open Access week, an international event celebrating and promoting openness in research.

In keeping with this year’s theme is Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge (1), in this blogpost we look at where and when you can be open with your research, to ensure maximum reuse of, and access to, research – for now and the future.

We’re using the Library’s twitter account (@sgullibrary) to retweet interesting articles and blogpost all this week.

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When and where should you be open?  We have some pointers to help you decide.

What can you share, and how can you easily find open access research? See our top tips below.

When to be open

As the endorsement of Plan S  (“making full and immediate Open Access a reality”) by many significant charitable and public funders shows², the drive to make research open and accessible is an ever-growing expectation. 

Of course, before you choose to blog, tweet, promote at conferences or upload to websites such as ResearchGate any research you are working on, you’ll need to consider:

Could there be any real-world applications or commercial opportunity?

Does your funder ask you to keep the research confidential?

SGUL’s JRES Enterprise and Innovation team can give advice to help you understand intellectual property-related matters and commercial research endeavours.

Examples of Open/public domain publication & communication:

• Conference poster
• Conference presentation
• Publication
• Blogging
• Tweeting
• Sharing and posting online

Follow the principle ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’.

Where to be open?

Open Access publishing

If you have been approached to publish open access, what are the credentials of the publisher, and what commitments do they make to perform peer review? Will your work be indexed in the scholarly databases?

Use Think, Check Submit and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

Posting your work online

Can you make your work available in a repository? Hang on though – what is a repository?  

Features of repositories as outlined in this paper³ are that they are platforms which:

1.            Allow deposit of digital research outputs
2.            Manage those digital research outputs
3.            Disseminate digital research outputs over the internet
4.            No login or subscription required to access outputs
5.            Are fully interoperable with other research systems
6.            Have some role with respect to preservation

Institutional repositories, such as SGUL’s SORA (St George’s Online Research Archive) and subject repositories (such as Europe PubMed Central) typically organise the records so that the information can be discovered by other systems – to help foster further sharing. SGUL Library staff check the publisher T&Cs before making any full text freely available online.

The CORE database aggregates millions of research papers from repositories and allows for text and data mining.⁴ to fully exploit the mass of research.

ResearchGate on the other hand is a networking site where many researchers post their papers.

However, action has been taken by the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, a publishers’ coalition, because their copyrighted material has been shared without the copyright holders permission – a recent report⁵ stated that “ResearchGate continues to illicitly provide access to millions of copyrighted research articles” 

Consider if you have the right to post your research there – are you the copyright holder? Are you working on the research with other researchers and have you checked with them?

What can you share?

Look out for Creative Commons licences, which give you a clear indication of how you can reuse – see our blog post explaining the varieties of licence you may come across, and what they mean.

How can you easily find legally posted open access research?

Install the CORE browser extension https://core.ac.uk/services/discovery/

Install the Unpaywall extension   https://unpaywall.org/products/extension

References

1] Shockey, N. Theme of 2019 International Open Access Week To Be “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge” [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 23]. Available from: http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/theme-of-2019-international-open-access-week-to-be-open-for-whom-.

2] Wellcome Trust Open Research [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 23].

Available from https://wellcome.ac.uk/what-we-do/our-work/open-research

3]  Jacobs, Neil. In the context of Open Access policies, what is a “repository”? Some definitions and principles [Internet]. 2016 [cited 2019 Oct 23]. Available from: https://scholarlycommunications.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2016/05/31/what-is-a-repository/

4] CORE: Learn more about our powerful services [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 23]. Available from https://core.ac.uk/services/

5] Coalition for Responsible Sharing: Status Report on ResearchGate: June 13, 2019: [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 23]. Available from http://www.responsiblesharing.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/CfRS-status-report-2019-06-13.pdf

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access Week 2019: Open for Whom?

This week October 21 – 27, 2019 is Open Access week, an international event celebrating and promoting openness in research.

This year’s theme is Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge (1). This goes beyond calling for open access to research, and asks whether we’re supporting equitable participation in research. It’s an opportunity to reflect on whose interests are being served by current modes and systems of open access, and which voices are being left out of the conversation.
We’ll be using the library’s twitter account (@sgullibrary) to retweet interesting articles and blogpost all this week, as well as adding to the conversation ourselves – look out for more posts here on the library’s blog.

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Who needs open access?

The basic principle of open access and open research is about ensuring that no-one is prevented from accessing research findings because they, or their institution, can’t afford to pay to access researchers work. This is especially important in health sciences, as clinicians, patients, policy makers, charities and so on all have an interest in accessing up to date health research, but may not be able to afford to subscribe to all the articles and journals they need. Earlier this year, the BMJ posted two pieces calling on researchers to remember doctors in developing countries (2), and to remember patients (3).

How to find open access research

To find open access articles you can use these tools:

• CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers.
  • Download the CORE browser extension “One-click access to free copies of research papers whenever you hit the paywall” (requires Google Chrome or Chromium).
• Unpaywall also indexes open access content.
  • You can get the unpaywall browser extension  (requires Chrome or Firefox).

How does SGUL facilitate access to our research?

We have our institutional repository, SORA. Our researchers can upload their accepted manuscripts via our CRIS system and then, publisher policies permitting, we can make these full texts available via SORA, meaning that anyone with an internet connection can access them, even if they’re behind a paywall on the publisher’s website.

We also help researchers to access funds to pay to make the final published version of their work openly available immediately on publication: see the Open Access Publishing FAQs for more, or get in touch via openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

Our Research Data Repository is available to help SGUL researchers make available research outputs that aren’t traditional publications: not just research data, but poster presentations, source code, and more. Anything deposited will be given a digital object identifier (DOI), a long-lasting reference to the output, helping it to be easily found and cited. We can also help researchers with their data management plans, and with managing their data across the research cycle. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch via researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

What can you do?

This Open Access week, here are some things you can do to help promote greater access to health research:

• Upload your accepted manuscripts to the CRIS so we can make them available via SORA.
• Think about whether you have research data or other outputs you can make available: see our page on Research Data Management for things to consider.
• Start a conversation with your colleagues about open research: is there anything you can do to help other researchers build on or access your research? Have any other researchers made their data or other outputs available that could help you in the research you’re doing?

Any questions? Get in touch with us

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

References

1. Shockey, N. Theme of 2019 International Open Access Week To Be “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge” [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 21]. Available from: http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/theme-of-2019-international-open-access-week-to-be-open-for-whom-.
2. Murthi, M. Open access: remember doctors in developing countries. BMJ [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 21]. 365: l2255. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l2255.
3. deBronkart, D. Open access: remember the patients. BMJ [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Oct 21]. 365: l1545. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1545.

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access Week 2018: Medical charities collaborate further to ensure results are shared.

As the theme of 2018 International Open Access Week  “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge” acknowledges, “setting the default to open is an essential step toward making our system for producing and distributing knowledge more inclusive”.

Following on the heels of Wellcome Trust setting up Wellcome Open Research in 2016 – which publishes scholarly articles reporting any basic scientific, translational and clinical research that has been funded (or co-funded) by Wellcome – a group of funders have come together to launch AMRC Open Research:

This is a platform “for rapid author-led publication and open peer review of research funded by AMRC member charities” – which include Parkinson’s UK, Stroke Association, Alzheimer’s Research UK and many more.

“All articles benefit from immediate publication, transparent refereeing and the inclusion of all source data”

If you are an SGUL researcher in receipt of a grant from these funders, take a moment to look at How it Works.

The AMRC platform levies relatively minimal charges  for publication by researchers funded by the participating charities – much lower than the cost of publishing in traditional journals (see Wellcome is going to review its open access policy blog post, March 2018).

Any questions about making your publications open access, please visit our Open Access FAQs or contact us on openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

For any questions about sharing or preserving data, please visit our Research Data Management pages or contact us on researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

Jennifer Smith

Research Publications Librarian

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access: Green and Gold

St George’s researchers: read on to find out how to make research open access, and how to win a £30 Amazon voucher…

There are two different ways to make your research articles open access: the green route and the gold route.

Green Open Access: What is it?

Green open access means making your research articles freely available via a subject or institutional repository (such as SORA, SGUL’s institutional repository), after any embargo period required by the publisher has passed.

What do I need to do?

When your article is accepted for publication, create a basic record in the CRIS (Current Research Information System for St George’s Researchers) and upload your author’s accepted manuscript to it. . (This is the version after any changes resulting from peer review, but before the publisher’s formatting and copy editing.) We will then check the record and apply any embargo period before making it live in SORA.

For more guidance, please log in to your CRIS profile and click on the Help tab at the top right hand side.

If you have any questions, see our website or contact sora@sgul.ac.uk

 

Gold Open Access: What is it?

Gold open access means making your research articles freely available on the publisher’s website when they’re published, usually under a license which allows for reuse.

What do I need to do?

Find out if the journal you’re publishing in has an open access option, and then see if you have any funding available to pay for it.

Some publishers offer discounts or waivers for SGUL researchers: check our page on open access fees to see if any of them apply to you.

If your research is funded:

RCUK and COAF (a partnership of six health research charities) have provided us with funds to make articles arising from that research open access. To find out if you’re eligible, see our website or email openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

If your research is funded by another grant, check with your grants officer to see if there are any funds in it for open access publications.

If your research is unfunded:

Consider applying to our new Institutional Fund for open access publication fees – see the link on our open access webpage.

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Open Access Week Competition

Win a £30 Amazon voucher: follow our Twitter account @sgullibrary to enter our competition on this year’s OA week theme “Open in order to…”  – tell us why you think ‘Open’ is good. (See our blog post and Terms and Conditions for how to enter).

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access Open Research

SGUL’s open access institutional repository SORA now has over two thousand full text publications written by SGUL researchers freely available online, a great milestone for SGUL to celebrate in International Open Access Week 2017.

On average there are over 1800 downloads of papers per month from SORA, the papers are indexed in SGUL’s Hunter, and in Google for maximum discoverability:

Win a £30 Amazon voucher: follow the library’s Twitter account @sgullibrary to enter our competition on this year’s OA week theme “Open in order to…” – tell us why you think ‘Open’ is good. (See our blog post and Terms and Conditions for how to enter).

Open access publication is a requirement of many of the big funders in biomedical and life sciences research due to its role in making research more accessible, more discoverable and more impactful¹.

On the 4^th October the Wellcome Trust released a new science strategy, Improving health through the best research. In it, they reaffirm their commitment to open research:

“Scientific knowledge achieves its greatest value when it is readily available to be used by others. And if knowledge generated with Wellcome support can be used for the improvement of health, it should be.”

Open research is an umbrella term bringing together a variety of efforts to make scientific research transparent and reproducible, and to increase its impact on policy, practice and technological advances. Open access publication is an important part of open research, helping to make research outputs accessible and useable by anyone. Another key tenet of open research is open data, and St George’s has recently launched a data repository to enable researchers to share, store and preserve their research content.

Queen’s University, Belfast, has put together some examples of how open access has benefitted their researchers.

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For further information, please visit our open access webpage or contact openaccess@sgul.ac.uk.

1 The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Accessed 19 October 2017

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Open in order to…

The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, which runs from 23^rd-29^th October, is “Open in order to…”. This year the focus is on thinking about possibilities are opened up by making research outputs open access.

Win a £30 Amazon voucher: follow the library’s Twitter account @sgullibrary to enter our competition on this year’s OA week theme “Open in order to…” – tell us why you think ‘Open’ is good. (For terms and conditions, and how to enter, see the end of this post.)

Here are some reasons why research is made “open in order to…”

…improve public health

Breakthroughs in medical science are frequently in the news, but the research publications underpinning the headlines are often locked away behind a publisher’s paywall. For example, the research article referred to in this recent article from the BBC  is currently only available to subscribers to the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and many publications cited in the recent award of the Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Physics are not publicly accessible. By contrast, a recent study by SGUL researchers on meningitis in children was published in an open access journal, meaning that the full article can be read by anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time.

Open access research allows anyone who is interested to read and evaluate the research for themselves. This might include:

• Medical professionals wanting to improve patient care;
• Members of the public wanting to learn more about a condition they have;
• Journalists wanting to report more accurately on the story;
• Policy makers;
• Researchers whose institutions don’t subscribe to the journal the research is published in, or who are operating outside an institution.

Opening up research helps improve public health by increasing access to academic research.

 

…raise the visibility of my research

Studies¹ have consistently shown a citation advantage for open access publications over closed access ones. Depositing your work in a repository increases the avenues by which your research can be discovered, as well as helping readers to follow your research from paper to paper more easily by collecting them all together.

 

…enable global participation in research

Making research open enables all researchers to access it and removes the financial barrier for those working in less well funded institutions, as well as independent researchers working outside institutions. Making your data and publications accessible for free and licensing it under terms which allow for reuse means that other researchers can pick up on and build on your research, benefitting the global research community as a whole.

 

…find new collaborators

Making your work open helps researchers on related topics find it and identify possibilities for collaboration. Open access can also promote cross-disciplinary working by making it easier for researchers to access work outside their own discipline.

1 The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Accessed 19 October 2017

 

How to enter:

Follow @sgullibrary on Twitter and complete the phrase “Open in order to…” using the hashtag #openinorderto and @sgullibrary’s Twitter handle.

Terms and Conditions:

1. The competition will run from Monday 23 October 2017 until Sunday 29 October 2017.
2. The prize draw is open to anyone with a valid SGUL ID.
3. Winners will be chosen from all valid entries once the competition has closed on Sunday 29 October 2017.
4. Winners will be contacted via Twitter. Be sure to check your account.
5. The prize can only be collected in person from St George’s Library on production of a valid ID card.
6. Prizes must be collected within two weeks of notification.
7. The Judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered in to.
8. Photos of the prize winners will be taken to be used in publicity on Library media channels.
9. One prize winner will be selected, unless the prize is not collected by the deadline, in which case the uncollected prize will be reselected (once only).
10. Your tweets may be reused by St George’s Library for future promotional or informational purposes.
11. Entries must contain the hashtag #openinorderto and must tag the library’s Twitter account @sgullibrary.

 

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To find out more about open access, contact openaccess@sgul.ac.uk or visit the Library open access webpages.

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.