Rights retention policy: an update after 9 months

2022 has been a big year for open access at the University of Edinburgh. We started the year off with a bang by introducing a revised Research Publications & Copyright policy in January. This mandatory open access policy applies to all University staff members with a responsibility for research. Going forwards all authors automatically grant the University a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

We are proud that the University of Edinburgh was the first institution in the UK to adopt this type of progressive rights retention open access policy, and we are hugely encouraged to see that many other universities are adopting similar policies. In many ways the policy is just the starting point and most of the hard work actually happens afterwards when supporting members of staff with new publishing processes.  This post is intended to give an update of progress so far and to give an account of how the University of Edinburgh policy is having a positive effect on the number of open access publications being immediately available.

Contacting authors

During 2022 the Library in conjunction with Professional Service staff embedded within Schools and Colleges have held an ongoing series of internal seminars for Schools/Institutes. To date the recorded attendance has been 1700 researchers (21.5% of 7,900 total). During these sessions academic staff were informed about the new institutional policy and the support options that are available to them. A second approach was to send All-Staff emails circulated by local College and Schools with information about the new policy and guidelines. This co-ordination between the Library and Professional Service staff was essential in spreading the message about the new institutional policy and getting widespread buy-in from academic staff.

Contacting publishers

In parallel to informing academic staff the University undertook an exercise to formally write to and inform the most popular publishers that University staff submit their work to. Solicitors from our Legal Services department sent a Notice of Grant of Licence by recorded delivery and email to 170 publishers we identified. These publishers we selected covered in the region of 95% of the University’s publication outputs.

Many publishers have introduced restrictive publishing agreements which require embargo periods, and some publishers even assert that their licensing terms will supersede any other prior agreements. We dispute this and if challenged the University will be able to bring a legal claim against the publisher as they have willingly procured a breach of contract against our pre-existing rights.

For a claim of procuring a breach of contract to succeed it must be shown that the defendant knew about the prior contract and intended to encourage another person to break it. Our solicitors have prepared a sworn Affidavit confirming service on all the recipients which will be sufficient to confirm that all the named publishers were indeed advised of our position ahead of article publication and that they have subsequently asked an author to breach the terms of their employment contract by accepting a publishing licence. Most of the time these publishing agreements are click-thru licences that are impossible to edit or change.

With a prior licence granted and publishers contacted the University can now deposit the accepted manuscript of articles in our digital repository, with the article metadata usually available immediately upon deposit and the scholarly article made accessible to the public on the date of first online publication under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

A snapshot of open access statuses

So with the policy in place, and the majority of authors informed, how effective has the policy been over the first 9 months?

Using data from our Current Research Information System (CRIS) we can track progress on articles published and their open access status.  However, we have to be aware of some of the limitations about the health of the metadata extracted from the CRIS. Sadly around 5% of research output records do not have complete metadata allowing us to determine their status. Another point to note is that individual research outputs records in the CRIS commonly have information about both the accepted manuscript version and a final published version. Due to the data model of the CRIS it is not easy to disambiguate between the green versus gold OA statuses when running reports.

Bearing this in mind the table below shows the current open access status of 2022 journal articles:

Open status Count of OA status Percentage
Closed 219 5%
Embargoed 576 12%
Indeterminate 226 5%
Open 3519 78%
Grand Total 4540 100%

For the 2022 calendar to the present date (mid-Oct) University staff members have written and published 4737 journal articles, of which 197 are not yet published so we’ll discount those.  This table includes journal articles that are published via all types of OA route – including fully Gold OA journals and Gold OA via Transformative Agreements (Read & Publish deals). If we remove the journal articles that have been published under a Transformative Agreement or in a fully open access journal we will be left with the number of Green OA articles. We have determined that 958 journal articles have made open access via the repository (Green OA) route in the first 9 months of 2022. It is interesting to note that a Rights Retention Statement (RRS) was only included in 103 articles.

Timing of Open Access

By comparing the dates we have recorded for the official publication date and the date of earliest online access via the repository we can tell something about the timing of open access. The table below shows the available data for articles published in 2022.

Timing of OA # of Green OA articles
Before publication 157
Within 1 month of publication date 644
Between 1-3 months of publication date 58
Between 3-6 months of publication date 16
Greater than 6 months of publication date 83

The majority of articles released before official publication in the journals are preprints that have been deposited in arXiv (or similar) and share a single research output record for the preprint version and journal article.

Around two-thirds (67%) of the Green OA articles were deposited and made OA within 1 month of the date of publication. This time period is the one recommended by UKRI to comply with their 2022 Open Access policy. Around 16% of Green OA articles were made open access after this 1 month deadline so technically would not comply with research funders policies, like the UKRI. Looking at the data more closely reveals that the majority of these seemingly uncompliant articles were submitted before 2022 so actually would not need to follow the immediate OA requirements.

Progress: snapshot of licensing formats

Looking at the licence details on the open access research output records in the CRIS (which includes Gold OA and Transformative Agreements) show that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence is the most popular. It is worth noting that many scholars have opted to choose the more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. The licence field is not mandatory in the CRIS which means that often is it not completed. This is reflected by the high ‘unspecified’ response recorded for 1311 records.

Row Labels Count of Licenses to electronic version documents
All Rights Reserved 56
Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY) 2433
Creative Commons: Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 10
Creative Commons: Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 244
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 551
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) 20
Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike  (CC-BY-SA) 1
GNU GPL 1
Other 55
Unspecified 1311
Grand Total 3519

Summary

During the first 9 months of this year professional service staff in conjunction with the Library have been rolling out a massive advocacy push to let authors know about the new research publications policy. This has led to widespread engagement with academic authors who have made 90% of their research outputs open access, mostly within one month of publication. So far we have been informed that only three academics have opted-out from the institutional policy. This relatively low drop-out rate when considered alongside the fact that only 10% of accepted manuscripts have included the rights retention language (RRS) may mean that more outreach activities are required.

We note that the majority of these outputs have been made open via a combination of Transformational Agreements and Gold Open Access journals. However, where this has not been possible, the open access policy has enabled the remaining 27% to be published via the repository Green OA route mostly without embargo. We believe the rights retention policy is an important mechanism to allow authors to publish their research immediately, regardless of whether they have research funders mandates or not.

The power of preprints: an omicron case study

Much has been recently been written about the value of preprints which facilitate rapid and open dissemination of research findings to a global audience (if you’d like to read more about the rise of preprints in the life sciences I would recommend this editorial published in Nature Cancer). However, much of the discourse surrounding the benefits of preprints has been anecdotal. Of course sharing research findings early is a good thing, but what actual impact can a preprint have?

We present here a mini case study which highlights the initial effects of sharing a topical preprint during a pandemic. I plan to track the preprint over the next few months to see how this will translate into future publications.

Case Study: the EAVE II project

There were various headlines in the media on 22 and 23 December which reported the the discovery that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 appears to be much milder than Delta. This news was prompted by research from the EAVE II study carried out at the Usher Institute. The EAVE II team only finished their analysis on 22 December and were very keen to get their results out in a transparent manner as part of a media briefing they had agreed to do later that day.

Our Scholarly Communications Team helped the EAVE II project to post the results in the University of Edinburgh’s repository as a preprint. Subsequently, the University’s Press Office contacted us to say that this was initially beneficial when the world’s media contacted them to request the underlying data. The preprint is available here:

https://www.ed.ac.uk/usher/eave-ii/key-outputs/our-publications/severity-of-omicron-variant-of-concern-and-vaccine

The reaction was quick as the preprint was picked up and reported by the mainstream media like the BBC (this article in the BBC Science Focus Magazine is a good read), and also specialised services like the Science Media Centre:

expert reaction to preprint on the severity of the omicron variant and vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection in Scotland, from the EAVE II study

Various national advisory groups (e.g Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation) were then quickly able to read the research and fold it into their evolving guidance on boosters.

https://www.health.gov.au/news/atagi-statement-on-the-omicron-variant-and-the-timing-of-covid-19-booster-vaccination

To date the preprint has 22,535 downloads, of which the majority were within the final week of December 2021. 21, 005 downloads in 10 days – that sure is RAPID communication!

If the EAVE II project team had sat on their results and waited for publication in a traditional journal article then all of this activity would have been not possible. I’m extremely interested to see what happens next to the publication.

Questions….

At the moment I mainly have many questions that I don’t have the answer for. Will this piece of research be submitted for publication in a journal? Publication in a journal and the peer review process will add validation of the results and subsequent kudos from basking in the reflected glow of an esteemed journal title and possibly good citation metrics. But how can the value of preprints be more widely recognised and rewarded? For me, this is a missing part of the process. Or, perhaps the benefit of rapid communication is good enough?

 

 

 

Introducing Edinburgh Diamond: Library-supported Open Access Books and Journals

Library and University Collections currently offer a journal hosting service, free of charge to staff and students, which you may already be familiar with.

Open Access Week is the perfect time to share that that we have rebranded as Edinburgh Diamond and added a book hosting service to our offering!

The book hosting service will offer much of what the journal hosting service offers: ISBN and DOI allocation, a hosting platform for textbooks, monographs and edited collections, metadata deposits, indexing arrangements, annual reporting, ongoing technical support, guidance on publishing best practice… and more!

Bringing our journal and book services under one umbrella allows us to promote our services as a whole. Edinburgh Diamond does what it says on the tin: promotes diamond open access, transparency, and high-quality research. If you know someone who may benefit from using our service, please put them in touch with Rebecca Wojturska: rebecca.wojturska@ed.ac.uk.

Find out more about Edinburgh Diamond: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/edinburgh-diamond

Take a look at our new book hosting site:
https://books.ed.ac.uk/

Unveiling the new Open Access policy at UoE

For Open Access Week 2021 we are pleased to announce a brand new Research Publications & Copyright Policy that will make it even easier for researchers from the University of Edinburgh to make their publications open access.

Earlier this month the University Executive approved the Research Publications & Copyright Policy (2021) which details our approach to the new open access requirements of major research funders from 1 January 2022.

The Research Publications & Copyright Policy (2021) can be read in full on the Information Services web pages, but the key details are outlined below:

  • The University of Edinburgh confirms staff members retain the copyright to scholarly works they produce (which is the opposite of UK employment law which states that employers own the copyright to works produced in work time).
  • To help comply with funders and other open access requirements, members of staff grant the right for the University of Edinburgh to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence upon publication.
  • This policy will begin on 1st January 2022, and will apply to journal articles and conference proceedings.

This new policy is in line with major organisations including UKRI and the Wellcome Trust and will allow all researchers to make their work open access immediately regardless of their funding situation. Support for implementation of the new policy is available through library research support staff. Any questions or comments regarding the policy can be directed to the Scholarly Communications Team at openaccess@ed.ac.uk.

 

Edinburgh Research Archive: March 2021

Edinburgh Research Archive: March 2021 • https://era.ed.ac.uk

March saw a record number of downloads for ERA, with a 10% increase on the previous best of May 2020 and a 27% increase on the then-record of March last year. It also saw a record number of unique items downloaded, albeit just 200 up on the previous best from January.

The total downloads so far this year has seen a 40,000 increase over last year, the number of unique items downloaded this year is 1.0% higher than 2020, and the percentage of the total stock that has been downloaded has passed the 50% mark within 3 months for the first time.

 

We follow-up to the November 2020 report looking at the three institutional repositories, as monitored by IRUS, with the most thesis downloads in 2020. Previously, we saw that the University of Edinburgh had the third most downloads but that it is likely to be overtaken by Oxford in the not too distant future. This time we’re breaking those downloads down imto percentiles, and seeing that the other two are significantly outperforming Edinburgh all the way through the 10% divides. White Rose sees significantly bigger multiples of its downloaded titles and Manchester fares better when the figures are adjusted for the size of the active collection. ERA works its tail a lot harder: it has both a bigger digital collection and gets a much higher proportion of unique titles downloaded at least once. Overall though, ERA seems to sell the facility to its users but not the contents.

Continue reading

Edinburgh Research Explorer: March 2021

Edinburgh Research Explorer: March 2021 • www.research.ed.ac.uk

The dip in download numbers which seemed to inflict Research Explorer from the last quarter of 2019 onwards, due to some heavy-handed filtration implemented in an upgrade at that time, appeared to have eased following another upgrade in August 2020. ERA, which was a year ahead in its upgrade schedule, recovered from its dip and has been booming with record numbers across the board, Research Explorer though, has been somewhat subdued. The period from Sept.-March did see an overall improvement of around 4.5% over the previous year, but Jan.-March has been further behind 2019, than it is ahead of 2020.

There was also some expectation of another boost to the numbers resulting from the launch of the new interface at the beginning of March, but that is not yet apparent. March’s figures continued the general trend since October of the quieter months over-performing compared to last year and the busier months to under-perform, with none of them comparing to 2019. This parallels what we saw with the filtration, the bigger numbers being suppressed and the long tail being largely unaffected.

Continue reading

Edinburgh Research Downloads: December 2020

Edinburgh Research Downloads: December 2020 • www.research.ed.ac.uk • www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk

• Looking at how Edinburgh Research Explorer and ERA have performed over the last year.
• Research Explorer hasn’t had the best of years, the numbers being shackled by the same filtration that had repressed ERA a year earlier, although they picked-up enough at the end to scrape past the million downloads for the second-year running; ERA on the other hand, has been somewhat unleashed.
• The usual snapshot of last month’s performances.
• A snapshot of the year that’s gone. Continue reading

Edinburgh Research Downloads: November 2020

Edinburgh Research Downloads: November 2020 • www.research.ed.ac.uk • www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk

• Looking at how Edinburgh Research Explorer and ERA have performed over the last year relative to other institutions across the UK. Overall they’ve done OK but probably could/should have done better: they’ve just about hung on to the coat-tails of the big guns, but they’ve been outperformed by a few smaller establishments.
• Looking at theses specifically, things look better: UCL have had a good year but ERA’s managed to stay ahead of them, allowing both to make the minutest of inroads into Manchester’s lead; White Rose though, are bigger and growing faster than everyone else.
• The usual snapshot of last month’s performances.
• A snapshot of the year-so-far. Continue reading