Blog Archives
HEFCE announce new policy for open access in post 2014 REF
Following on from their two stage consultation process last year, HEFCE have just announced their new policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework.
The policy applies to all journal articles and conference proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016, but not to monographs, other long-form publications, creative or non-text outputs, or data.
Academic research now available from your local public library
Under the recently launched ‘Access to Research‘ initiative, public libraries are now able to provide walk-in readers with access to a wide range of academic articles and research.
Following the recommendation of the Finch report that the major publishers should grant public libraries a licence to provide free access to their academic articles, the two year Access to Research scheme will enable a new audience of the general public, small businesses and independent researchers to access scholarly research.
NECTAR: What’s in it for me?
NECTAR, the university’s open access institutional repository, is now entering its eighth year, with deposits of both bibliographic data and full content going from strength to strength. But what does this mean to the individual researcher? In the rush to enter details for this report or that, it is easy to overlook the fact that having one’s research outputs in NECTAR delivers a range of benefits.
Elsevier takes down papers from Academia.edu
Over the weekend there has been a burst of activity in the social media as authors respond to a flurry of take-down notices sent by Elsevier to Academia.edu on Friday. Elsevier have asked for some 2800 final published versions of their papers to be removed from the social networking site.
Open Access Button – breaking down paywalls
Launched on Monday, the Open Access Button is a great new tool for finding open access copies of research articles and at the same time raise awareness and gather evidence of the impact of paywalls on scholarship worldwide.
How it works:
Finch report: progress review published
In June of last year the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (or ‘Finch Group) published the ‘Finch report‘, describing ways and means of increasing access to UK research outputs. Amongst its recommendations it controversially argued that the sector should adopt the ‘gold’ route to open access (OA), where necessary paying article processing charges to publishers to ensure immediate access to research publications.
Within a month the Department for Business, Information and Skills (BIS) had announced its support for the Finch Group’s recommendations and Research Councils UK (RCUK) had published a new open access policy. Both parties quickly followed through with financial support – BIS made available £10 million to pump prime the system whilst RCUK announced a block grant scheme to support 107 organisations over the following two years.
HEFCE consultation on open access and REF post 2014 – 2nd stage
Continuing the two stage consultation process announced earlier this year, HEFCE has just announced a further consultation on its proposals for open access to post-2014 REF outputs.
The University of Northampton’s response to the first (informal) stage of the consultation is here.
Finding an open access journal for your article
FAQ: How can I find a suitable open access journal in which to publish my work?
Perhaps your funder expects you to publish your work in an open access journal, or you’d like to enjoy the citation advantage of making your work open access, but you’re not sure where to start. Here are a few things to think about.
SAGE permits authors to deposit full text in NECTAR
As of today, if you have an article published by SAGE Publications you can upload the accepted version of your full text to NECTAR immediately. With no embargo.
SAGE has just announced a review of its author archiving policy and now permits immediate deposit of the post-peer-review, accepted copy of an article in the author’s own institutional repository.
(See details of SAGE’s publishing policies here.)
This represents a very positive response to recent developments in the sector (such as the Finch report and the revised RCUK policy on open access) and means that SAGE can now promote itself as a SHERPA RoMEO ‘Green‘ publisher, along with 349 other publishers including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Intellect, John Wiley and Sons, Kluwer, and Public Library of Science.
Launch of the UK Data Service
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has just announced the launch of a new national service that will consolidate and incorporate four established data services and websites:
- Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS)
- Census.ac.uk
- Secure Data Service (SDS)
- Survey Question Bank (SQB)
The UK Data Service offers a a single point of access to a wide range of secondary data including large-scale government surveys, international macrodata, business microdata, qualitative studies and census data from 1971 to 2011. Read the rest of this entry
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