Open Access Information

HEFCE’s open-access policy requires that journal articles or conference proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 must be deposited in an institutional or subject repository within three months of acceptance. The requirement does not apply to books, monographs or data. More stringent requirements have been in place since 1 April 2013 for research wholly- or partially-funded by RCUK (including AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC). Some charities (e.g. Wellcome Trust) also have open-access policies, and the European Research Council is expected to announce a policy soon. See the library website for further details.

The RCUK policy states that all peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers resulting directly from research wholly or partially funded by RCUK must be made open access. The policy applies to all RCUK-funded PhD students and researchers. There are two routes to comply with this policy:

-  Gold route, in which the published version of the article is made immediately and permanently accessible (under a CC-BY licence), free of charge at the point of use. The author is (almost always) required to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). QMUL has a number of Open Access Agreements to support open-access publishing under the Gold route. If the publication has arisen from RCUK-funded research then funding is usually available to cover the APC – an application form can be downloaded from the QMplus under the Research area.

-  Green route, in which the author must deposit the accepted, peer-reviewed version of the article in an institutional or discipline-specific repository within a specified embargo period (6 months for NERC and EPSRC; 12 months for AHRC and ESRC). The article must be accompanied by a licence allowing reuse for (at least) non-commercial purposes, text and data mining.

To comply with the HEFCE policy, the following is recommended.

At the point when your article has been accepted by a journal (i.e. after peer-review and revisions have been accepted), you should immediately upload the accepted manuscript (not the published version) to QMUL’s institutional repository, Queen Mary Research Online, using Elements. There is a three-month window after acceptance within which this deposit must be made. Uploading the article makes it ‘discoverable’ on the Internet. You will only need to add basic information about the article at this stage – the Repository and Research team in the Library will take care of the rest. The RM will be able to guide you through this process or record the information on your behalf; just email her with the acceptance date, the pdf of the accepted manuscript and the name of the journal.

All academics in the School are asked to sign an agreement confirming that it is their responsibility to comply with the policy, and return a signed copy to the RM or DoR. A copy of the agreement can be found with all other forms on QMplus under the Research area.

Even for papers that have been deposited in ArXiv, the academics must in addition create a bibliographic record in Elements.