#hefce

Marie-Clare McLeod, IRSA, University of Strathclyde

Who are we and what do we do?

If you are research active and working in a Higher Education Institute and have deposited your research in your Institutional Repository, you will probably have received emails from us but you may not know who we are and what we do. The term may sound like a scary superbug but in fact it stands for Institutional Repository Support Assistant and providing support is our key mission - we are here to help, so don’t be afraid to ask us questions.  We ensure research content is described appropriately within our repository, complies with all current OA policies, is consistent with publisher copyright, and we manage the full-text files themselves to support discoverability and long-term digital preservation. In essence, that means we make sure the information is correct and appropriate before the public can access anything through Strathprints or indeed through the Knowledgebase.

Why should researchers care?

Have you received emails from us and think ‘what do they want now and why do they need it?’ Have you heard the dreaded words “HEFCE OA requirements”, “REF-able”, “non-compliance”, “mandates”?

Submission to REF: In March 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced that any article or published conference proceeding that a higher education institution (HEI) wants to submit to the next REF will need to be made openly available via a repository and a time limit was set .Whilst the policy allows for publisher embargoes to be observed, the manuscript must be deposited within 3 months of publication from April 1st 2016-March 31st 2018 and 3 months from acceptance from April 1st 2018. In most cases the manuscript required will be the author accepted manuscript (AAM). A large part of our work is making sure research is submissible for REF so if we are asking for more information, particularly dates of acceptance or AAMs, this is the reason; we are not just being pedantic. If there is a reason why as a researcher, you can’t meet the policy requirements, let us know as soon as possible so that we can assess if an exception may be applicable.

Environment component: We are often told that an output isn’t important as it is unlikely to be submitted to REF but the University is reporting compliance figures for all of its outputs and we may gain extra credit in the environment component if we can demonstrate that we have followed the policy for all in-scope outputs and also applied it to out-of-scope items if possible. So this makes every output important.

Funder mandates: Funders may set additional requirements over and above the HEFCE policy. We also work with our Open Access Advocacy Librarian to identify outputs which may be eligible for gold open access funding. In order to do this effectively, we need to be made aware of outputs at the point of acceptance.

Research impact and visibility: It’s not all about REF, depositing research outputs in a repository will make it available to a wider audience and lead to more citations.

What are the issues for an IRSA? 

Working as an IRSA, I have identified common themes emerging in the use of PURE by researchers. The biggest problems we encounter are:

Missing date of acceptance: We need this to demonstrate compliance due to the time limits imposed by the HEFCE policy.

Missing manuscript: This speaks for itself.We need a copy of the manuscript in order for the output to be compliant. Sometimes researchers are worried about publisher permissions, but this is a large part of our role. We check publisher permissions in a variety of ways such as using SHERPA/RoMEO, checking publisher websites and if in doubt or there is no policy information available, we contact the publisher directly. With this information we can apply embargoes if required and add a statement specified by the publisher.

Wrong version of manuscript: In most cases the version we require is the author accepted manuscript (AAM). This is a major source of confusion, not helped by other terms such as pre-print or post-print coming into the mix. We frequently receive the following manuscripts:

Submitted: This is sometimes called a pre-print and is the original version without any revisions based on the peer review process. This can be quite difficult to identify as it can look the same as the accepted manuscript. We often rely on researchers to tell us that it is the submitted version and this can be done using the labels in PURE but we often have to contact researchers to check. Some publishers allow this version to be deposited, however, as it has not been peer-reviewed it will not satisfy HEFCE requirements.

Accepted with peer review comments showing: Researchers may misinterpret the description of an accepted manuscript and think they need to supply the reviewers’ comments and their responses too. We don’t need this and will remove where possible or ask for a clean copy.

Proofs: Researchers may think the version we require is the one sent back to them after acceptance but before publication. This has normally been typeset but may not have the final page numbering added. Most publishers don’t allow any version that has typesetting to be made available so we can’t use this version. Sometimes publishers will ask for templates to be used so it can be difficult to determine if the publisher has applied typesetting or the author has used a pre-formatted template. We often have to check the author instructions on publisher websites to identify when a template may have been used.

Final published version: We normally identify these by the addition of information such as a copyright statement, page numbering, volume or issue numbers or a doi. In some cases the publisher allows or even specifies that we must use this version and we can use it in the case of gold open access articles but more often publishers do not provide permission for this version to be made available.

So what version do we need? The one that the corresponding author sent to the publisher, after they had made changes based on peer review but before typesetting and the publisher then accepted. It is possible to upload more than one version to PURE and this can sometimes be helpful. For example the American Institute of Physics allows the AAM to be made available without embargo and the final published version to be made available 12 months after publication. The advice we would give researchers is, if in doubt, you can upload more than one version and we will make the most appropriate available and mark the rest as closed so that they won’t show on the Strathprints or Knowledgebase records.

Other files: In Pure there are two options for uploading files. There is the “add electronic version button” and the “add other files” button. If we are faced with a large list of records to check and validate, we need to prioritise those with a manuscript attached as we don’t want to exceed the time limit set by HEFCE. One of the restrictions in PURE is that we can filter those items with an “electric version” attached but this can miss “other files.” So although we will deal with manuscripts uploaded as “other files” it is better if researchers use the “add electronic version” button when uploading.

Items in Progress: Sometimes researchers add the manuscript and the date of acceptance but forget to set the status of the item to “For validation”. This means it isn’t in our workload list and may exceed the time-limit for deposit.

Acknowledgements: Funder’s should be acknowledged in the manuscript with the project code. They may also be linked in PURE using the projects section. This information is needed to comply with funders but can also be used by our Open Access team to determine if an output is eligible for funding for gold APC payments.

Conferences: The minimum requirement under HEFCE is that any paper published in proceedings with an ISSN is within scope. For some conferences it can be quite easy to determine if they are within scope but others can be a bit more difficult. Then the environment component rears its head again, so we really want conference papers to show compliance even if they don’t have an ISSN attached. When we see a conference contribution we have to do our best to determine the following:

Are proceedings going to be published?

Where will they be published?

When will they be published?

Who will publish them?

What are the publisher’s permissions?

Is it an abstract/poster/oral presentation with slides or does it have an extended abstract/short paper/full paper?

Is it within scope or might it provide us the opportunity for extra credit?

Some of this information we may be able to find online but sometimes it can be hard to come by.

Final message

With less than 2 days left, as my final blog for Open Access (OA) at the University of Strathclyde I thought I would indulge in some reflection of my journey through open access. Almost 4 years ago, I attended an interview for a post as an open access research advisor at the University of Edinburgh.  Prior to that, I had never heard of open access!  The interview required a 10 minute presentation on what open access was, and was to include anything that would be specific to the Humanities.  So my research began, and I got a rough idea of what open access was and what it hoped to achieve.  Though I couldn’t quite pin point what particular difficulties this would have for the humanities!  The idea of open access made sense to me, and I thought it was definitely a good idea and couldn’t figure out why anyone other than publishers would object to it!

On my first day I had a meeting with the CIO, @fmuir and the College Research Officer, who explained the goal of the post, and had a few ideas of how I would achieve these.  To me, they were talking in a foreign language, and whilst I nodded and diligently took notes, I really had no idea what they were talking about!  On returning to my desk I promptly googled “REF”, “RCUK” and “PURE” – all of which I had no idea what they were, what they had to do with open access, or how integral they would become to my working life. 

I was fortunate that my first presentations to academics about open access were joint presentations with @DominicTate, the Head of Scholarly Communications.  Whist I knew the content of my presentation inside out, the idea of being asked questions about a subject matter I was only myself learning, and that I probably wouldn’t know the answers to was more than a bit daunting.   For the first few presentations, I handed all questions over to the capable hands of Dominic!  It wasn’t long till I realised that the questions and objections were fairly similar, and I soon had answers for them!

Dominic’s catch phrase for each presentation was “I’ve been doing open access for over 10 years now”… I would stand there thinking to myself… “I’ve been doing this for a few weeks… and most of you in this room probably know more about open access than I do!”… Perhaps best not to mention that at the start of my presentation! As I became more familiar with open access, and when preparing a presentation for Edinburgh College of Art, I recalled how I had actually far earlier, made a foray into open access, without even realising it.  As a youth worker, after holding a workshop for young indigenous people on their own art and storytelling, we scanned in the artwork and stories produced on the day, and proudly displayed them on our new youth website. Copyright didn’t even cross my mind, my main concern was how long it took the internet to download the pictures… Think 46K modems, and Netscape!

However, it did for the first time allow other people to read the stories of the local community and to see the artwork.  The main benefits that we saw from this were that it drew the community closer together, and there was an exchange of stories from other indigenous communities. It opened up to the world stories and artwork that previously were only known by a small portion of a community. So really my journey into open access began many years ago!  The benefits of open access continue to be seen today, as more research made freely available.

I didn’t realise when I started working in open access, how hostile some academics were to the idea of their work being made freely available, or appreciate the full scale of the changes that we were asking academics to make in relation to academic publishing.  This was before we had the “compliance” stick of HEFCE, and although we had a publications policy, I soon learned that this carried little or no weight!  Some departments were more accepting than others. For some it was just another wearisome administrative task, and if hounded enough, then they would provide my team with the accepted manuscripts that we had requested.

Others had genuine concerns about smaller scholarly communities, third party copyright, would the publisher really allow this? Couldn’t we just get a copy from the library?  The accepted manuscript was really a “dirty” manuscript and should not be made public, it wasn’t the final polished work, if people wanted to read their work, it was only a small fee to read it, and all their colleagues and students had access to their work, so why was there a need to make it available to others? There was a general lack of awareness of what open access was, and how academics could achieve this.  Academics were also concerned that open access would be in violation of the copyright transfers that they had signed, and could therefore damage their future prospects of publishing.

Idealistically, or perhaps naively, we tried to make everything open access, from journal articles and chapters, to encyclopaedia entries and sculptures, if it was listed as a research output, then we wanted to somehow make it available freely for all! Especially if it had been submitted to the previous REF.

Four years on, and we are still finding difficulties with the lack of reporting functionality of PURE (our CRIS) for open access, so you can imagine, prior to HEFCE’s OA policy announcement, the large number of spreadsheets that were needed in order to monitor our progress.  Reporting has definitely improved since then, but still has a long way to go!

The routes to open access remain the same, with little changing other than the continued increase in prices of Article Processing Charges (APCs), with IEEE recently announcing a 25% increase (effective from January).  The top publishers in receipt of APC’s £s remains the same, and publishers have certainly not seen their profits diminish.  Embargo periods remain entrenched in the system, with some publishers ensuring that they exceed that which is required for RCUK requirements, hence requiring payment of an APC!  Other publishers have open access rules that appear to make no sense, with open access being allowed, but only for five years!  

 The HEFCE OA policy has certainly forced the biggest change upon UK HEI’s in terms of open access, with the requirement for all journal articles and conference proceedings to meet their open access requirements in order to be eligible for submission in the next REF.  Action had to be taken by all UK HEI’s to ensure that their next submission to the REF can include all the articles that the HEI would like to include.  Extra credit lurking around for those institutes that go above and beyond is continuously used as a push for academics to submit accepted manuscripts of their chapters and books, and other research outputs.

Sadly too, our messages have moved from being about the benefits of open access, to compliance with HEFCE.  Stock responses are sent out to academics who fail to upload accepted manuscripts, or enter in a date of acceptance.  Compliance reports are painstakingly created.  Ineligible outputs are frowned upon, and more staffing and resources are being invested into open access than ever before.  The greatest benefit of HEFCE’s open access policy has been the increase in items being deposited into our repositories, and therefore, the amount of research that is now being made freely available far surpasses that which was available a few years ago, sadly though, much of it will remain embargoed for a minimum of 12 months.

When I moved to Strathclyde University I brushed up on my knowledge of the RCUK and COAF/Welcome Trust and set about ensuring that we maximised use of the block grants allocated to the University.  An increase in the use of these block grants, did however mean an increase in monitoring of compliance, dealing with publishers, and leading academics through the process of selecting the correct licence, having a doi minted for a dataset, and ensuring funders were actually acknowledged in the papers, not to mention checking after the item was published to see if the publisher had obliged in publishing the article under the licence we had paid for!

In the 2013/14 year, at Strathclyde, 48 articles, (including 12 retrospectively) were processed, in the 2015/2016 period, 147 articles were processed.  A steep increase!  On top of this was the need for workflows, procedures and advocacy in relation to HEFCE’s OA policy – which I still think should be renamed HEFCE’s deposit policy – as so many institutions say – “if you do the depositing… we will take care of the open access!” I also worked to ensure that our academics with Horizon 2020 grants were given the support and information that they required in relation to open access requirements for their publications.  Different funder… Different requirements!

As the 1st of April drew closer, I sensed imminent pressure to ensure that as an Institution we had done everything we possibly could to ensure maximum compliance with HEFCE’s open access policy, with minimum additional workload to academics. A copyright addendum was created for the University, instructions, summary sheets, flyers were all produced, and each Department held at least one compulsory meeting for all their research active staff to be given the run down on HEFCE’s policy and what it meant for them. Given that we do not have the staffing to have a system of mediated deposit, it has been essential to ensure that our academics knew and understood what they needed to do, and what the library would do in terms of compliance.

Seven months on, and the vast majority of academics have open access worked out, and have it integrated into the cycle of their research.  It is an added step, but many are starting to see the benefits of open access as their articles are visible to a wider audience that before.  

Today, whilst I stress the benefits of open access, the vast majority of my time on any presentation is taken up with how to comply with HEFCE’s open access policy.  Creating reports to monitor HEFCE compliance continues to be less than ideal, and further work is required to ensure that the systems we use require far less manual work than at present.

Open Data is now being talked about far more, and whilst yet to have the same “compliance stick” as was provided for open access, it is becoming more acceptable, with many funders and even some journals now requiring a statement with regards to the underlying data.  As open data becomes more prominent, how much it overlaps with compliance for RCUK demonstrates the need for those working in open access and research data management to work together, to complement one another.

It is important that research outputs other than journal articles and conference proceedings are not forgotten about.  Many publishers do allow for chapters to be made freely available, however, many will only allow one chapter of a book to be made available, this can be problematic for books that are co-authored.  

The Wellcome Trust has placed a number of conditions on publishers in order to ensure easier compliance from April 2017.  Such as including the doi of the research article on the invoice.  Steps like these will make monitoring compliance and the paying of invoices easier, and should make the process more efficient.  It also requires them to meet their open access requirements in terms of licencing and depositing in Pub Med.

The RCUK block grants for 2016/2017 that were recently announced showed a marked decrease in the amount of £s made available to Universities, and also came with the condition that all unspent monies after the 31st of March 2018 must be returned to RCUK.  There has been no mention of what direction the RCUK plans to take after this date, or if any further funding will be made available.  Without further information from RCUK it is difficult to give clear guidance for future spending forecasting.

A number of HEI’s have used part of their funding from the RCUK block grant to fund staff who whilst a proportion of their work is block grant administration, the vast proportion is HEFCE compliance, and open access.  I doubt that this was what RCUK had in mind when they created the block grants and more detailed restrictions may be applied in the future to this source of funding.  Therefore, posts like my own which are fully funded by RCUK may disappear in the future, and we have already seen reticence of renewing contracts for any period of time past the end of RCUK funding.  Some institutions are reluctant to absorb the additional costs of administrating open access, that is largely a result of HEFCE’s open access policy, but no funds have been made available from HEFCE to cover such increases in costs.

Although academics are complying with open access policies, for some it is more a “have to” rather than a want to, this is concerning in terms of the larger picture for open access, and a concentrated effort will need to be made to ensure that we don’t fall into doing open access just to comply!  At times I have felt more like a “compliance officer” than an advisor or advocate.

As it is now almost three months since HEFCE’s Open Access policy for the next REF came into effect, it was time to chase up our academics for accepted manuscripts to be uploaded and missing dates of acceptances to be entered into our CRIS.

Despite my best efforts to ensure that the message is that open access is a good thing, and that all HEFCE have effectively done is ensure that “best practice” for research becomes the norm, and what is required by all academics within the UK’s HEIs.    It is a little frustrating to receive comments back for reasons why the accepted manuscript has not been uploaded as:

“I am absolutely certain this paper will not go into the forthcoming REF”

“I'm 7th author on this, so it's unlikely to feature in my REF return anyway!”

“I did that last week, the file is already online, however “repository staff member” doesn't like the version.”

“It is a journal editorial not original research. Do you really want it?”

Showing how clearly HEFCE and the REF are now seen as the only reason that academics should make their papers freely available... we seem to have lost all of the good reasons as to why research should be made freely available.

So… back to the basics… some good reasons for open access (that have nothing to do with the REF or HEFCE!

·       Maximises the dissemination and visibility of research worldwide

·       Makes research accessible to other researchers

·       Makes research available to everyone, not just subscribers and those who pay for content

·       Further funding and or collaboration opportunities

·       Increased citations

·       Greater impact

·       Meet funders requirements (RCUK/Wellcome Trust)

“There is growing evidence to show that countries also benefit because Open Access increases the impact of the research in which they invest public money (see Houghton and Sheehan's study on the economic impact of enhanced access to research findings) and therefore there is a better return on investment. Society as a whole benefits because research is more efficient and more effective, delivering better and faster outcomes for us all.”

Administrator (2006) Benefits of open access for research dissemination. Available at: http://openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=146&Itemid=308 (Accessed: 6 June 2016).

With HEFCE’s open access policy (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/oa/Policy/) now having been in effect for just over a month, and having spoken with almost all departments within the University regarding HEFCE’s policy (still chasing a few departments) it is disappointing that there appears to be in some academics mind a link between their work likely being submitted to REF, and therefore requiring gold open access (which is not the case, nor the intention of HEFCE’s policy).

I have received a number of requests from academics requesting that the University pays for their article processing charge as it is likely that it will be submitted to the next REF.  When responding to these emails I highlight that HEFCE’s policy is in fact a “green” policy, and that there is no requirement from HEFCE for any article to have an article processing charge paid.  In all of the emails I have received regarding this, the journals the academics are publishing in have been compliant with HEFCE’s open access policy and would not need an exception to be recorded.

I often state that HEFCE’s open access policy should really be called HEFCE’s Deposit and Open Access Policy!  As the deposit of the full text does not in most cases lead to the article being open access for at least six months!  The steps that I have created for our Institution’s compliance clearly indicate this, and hopefully all our academics are now aware of this.

From the feedback I have received from academics when spoken with further, it appears that part of the reason for emails associating HEFCE’s open access policy with gold open access may be a result of my own advocacy efforts in promoting the benefits of open access, (especially linkage to an increase in citations) and academics now being aware that their articles won’t be open access until after a lengthy embargo period in most instances.  Whilst it is encouraging that academics are realising the potential and benefits of open access, and want their work to be available for all as soon as it is published, it does at this stage lead to difficulties, as we do not have funding available to pay for article processing charges that are not funded by RCUK/COAF (Research Councils UK/Charity Open Access Fund), nor would this be sustainable, or a favourable model.

As awareness increases, will this lead to Institutions providing an institutional funding pot for articles that it considers would be submitted to the REF in the quest for increased impact and visibility of such research?  This is definitely not something that I would recommend, but it is worrying that it may be considered, creating a rather horrific scenario of “first class” research being paid for, and “other” research staying behind a paywall until embargo periods have expired.  I do hope that this does not come to pass.

A much more preferable outcome would be for publishers to do away with embargo periods for the accepted manuscript of all research outputs.  Even now we are dealing with journals that have embargo periods of 3 years (e.g., Business Horizons, Journal of Multinational Financial Management; Elsevier).  Springer’s Compact Agreement does go above these requirements with the incorporation of the anticipated article processing spend into the journal subscription fee, whether this will prove to be sustainable, or economical is yet to be determined.

Having completed an internal REF audit within our Institution, it fell to me to analyse the data in terms of compliance with HEFCE’s Open Access Policy, if the date had been after 1st of April 2016.  This allowed a good insight into where our academics are publishing in terms of submission to the next REF, narrowing the field from “all” journals published in by “all” staff in the University, significantly lowering the number of outputs to look at, and perhaps giving us a more realistic picture as to where we were as an Institution in terms of compliance.

The ability to have 94% of outputs compliant with HEFCE’s OA policy has been used in many a presentation, lecture, workshop. “A remarkable 94% of journals allow archiving of peer-reviewed articles after any embargo period has expired and any additional restrictions have been complied with” (Jiscinvolveorg, 2016).  I was therefore relatively pleased to see that our journal rate of compliance was 93%.

We hope that going forward we are able to increase our journal compliance through the use of an amendment to copyright agreement (based on the SPARC copyright addendum).  Ensuring that academics are aware of journals that would be non-compliant if an amendment to the copyright was not accepted.  This creates a far shorter list than providing lists of publisher policies for all journals published in, and limits the need of academics to interpret the sometimes contradictory information in Sherpa/Romeo.

Based on research outputs that would be submitted to the next REF, we identified 33 journals as being non-compliant.  Due to either longer than required embargo periods for the panel being submitted to, open access not being allowed, or inability to locate policy.

It was disappointing that the highest percentage of our non-compliant journals came from Wiley (39% - 13 Journals) and Elsevier (30% - 10 Journals), with Taylor and Francis coming third (9% - 3 Journals). The remaining publishers all had only one journal that was published in as non-compliant.  An amendment to copyright with each of the main publisher’s will likely be declined.  

A list of the journals we found to be non-compliant can be found at:

http://www.strath.ac.uk/openaccess/resources/noncompliantjournals/