Tag Archives: compliance

An open letter to Blood

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The Office of Scholarly Communication routinely advises Cambridge authors about their publishing options, and in the vast majority of cases we can help authors comply with funder mandates. However, there are a few notable journals that offer no compliant open access options for Research Council UK (RCUK) and Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) authors. One of those journals is Blood. We’ve previously called them out on their misleading advice:

Today we are urging Blood to offer their authors either self-archiving rights without cost and a maximum 6 month embargo or immediate open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. If Blood does not offer these options we will advise our researchers that they should publish elsewhere so as to remain compliant with their funders’ open access policies.

You can click through and read the open letter in full below:

If you would like to add your name to the list of signatories, please email info@osc.cam.ac.uk

 

Cambridge University spend on Open Access 2009-2016

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Today is the deadline for those universities in receipt of an RCUK grant to submit their reports on the spend. We have just submitted the Cambridge University 2015-2016 report to the RCUK and have also made it available as a dataset in our repository.

Compliance

Cambridge had an estimated overall compliance rate of 76% with 46% of all RCUK funded papers  available through the gold route and 30% of all RCUK funded papers available through the green route.

The RCUK Open Access Policy indicates that at the end of the fifth transition year of the policy (March 2018) they expect 75% of Open Access papers from the research they fund will be delivered through immediate, unrestricted, on‐line access with maximum opportunities for re‐use (‘gold’). Because Cambridge takes the position that if there is a green option that is compliant we do not pay for gold, our gold compliance number is below this, although our overall compliance level is higher, at 76%.

Compliance caveats

The total number of publications arising from research council funding was estimated by searching Web of Science for papers published by the University of Cambridge in 2015, and then filtered by funding acknowledgements made to the research councils. The number of papers (articles, reviews and proceedings papers) returned in 2015 was 2080. This is almost certainly an underestimate of the total number of publications produced by the University of Cambridge with research council funding. The analysis was performed on 15/09/2016.

Expenditure

The APC spend we have reported is only counting papers submitted to the University of Cambridge Open Access Team between 1 August 2015 and 31 July 2016. The ‘OA grant spent’ numbers provided are the actual spend out of the finance system. The delay between submission of an article, the commitment of the funds and the subsequent publication and payment of the invoice means that we have paid for invoices during the reporting period that were submitted outside the reporting period. This meant reconciliation of the amounts was impossible. This funding discrepancy was given in ‘Non-staff costs’, and represents unallocated APC payments not described in the report (i.e. they were received before or after the reporting period but incurred on the current 2015-16 OA grant).

The breakdown of costs indicates we have spent 4.6% of the year’s allocation on staff costs and 5.1% on systems support. We noted in the report that the staff time paid for out of this allocation also supports the processing of Wellcome Trust APCs for which no support is provided by Wellcome Trust.

Headline numbers

  • In total Cambridge spent £1,288,090 of RCUK funds on APCs
  • 1786 articles identified as being RCUK funded were submitted to the Open Access Service, of which 890 required payment for RCUK*
  • 785 articles have been invoiced and paid
  • The average article cost was ~£2008

Caveats

The average article cost can be established by adding the RCUK fund expenditure to the COAF fund expenditure on co-funded articles (£288,162.28)  which gives a complete expenditure for these 785 articles of £1,576,252.42. The actual average cost is £2007.96.

* The Open Access Service also received many COAF only funded and unfunded papers during this period. The number of articles paid for does not include those made gold OA due to the Springer Compact as this would throw out the average APC value.

Observations

In our report on expenditure for 2014 the average article APC was £1891. This means there has been a 6% increase in Cambridge University’s average spend on an APC since then. It should be noted that of the journals for which we most frequently process APCs, Nature Communication is the second most popular. This journal has an APC of £3,780 including VAT.

Datasets on Cambridge APC spend 2009-2016

Cambridge released the information about its 2014 APC spend for RCUK and COAF in March last year and intended to do a similar report for the spend in 2015, however a recent FOI request has prompted us to simply upload all of our data on APC spend into our repository for complete transparency. The list of datasets now available is below.

1. Report presented to Research Councils UK for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014-2015

2. Report presented to the Charity Open Access Fund for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2015-2016

3. Report presented to the Charity Open Access Fund for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014-2015

4. Report presented to Jisc for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014

5. Open access publication data for the management of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Research Councils UK, Charities Open Access Fund and Wellcome Trust open access policies at the University of Cambridge, 2014-2016

Note: In October 2014 we started using a new system for recording submissions. This has allowed us to obtain more detailed information and allow multiple users to interact with the system. Until December 2015 our financial information was recorded in the spreadsheet below. There is overlap between reports 5. and 6. for the period 24 October and 31 December 2015.  As of January 2016, all data is being collected in the one place.

6. Open access publication data for the management of Research Councils UK, Charities Open Access Fund and Wellcome Trust article processing charges at the Office of Scholarly Communication, 2013-2015

Note: In 2013 the Open Access Service began and took responsibility for the new RCUK fund, and was transferred responsibility for the new Charities Open Access Fund (COAF). At this time the team were recording when an article was fully Wellcome Trust funded, even though the Wellcome Trust funding is a component of COAF.

7. Open access publication data for the management of Wellcome Trust article processing charges from the School of Biological Sciences, 2009-2014

Note: Management of the funds to support open access publishing has changed over the past seven years. Before the RCUK open access policy came into force in 2013, the Wellcome Trust funds were managed by the School of Biological Sciences.

Published 14 September 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley & Dr Arthur Smith
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Promoting Open Access in a department – what works

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At Cambridge University, the Open Access team offers a centralised service to help our researchers make their work open access and comply with their funder requirements. But getting researchers to visit www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk and engage with the service is proving to be a challenge. We estimate that only around a third of the University’s journal articles are currently being uploaded within the three-month window allowed by HEFCE.

We’re working hard to publicise the message at our end, but centralised services can’t reach all academics in the same way as their departments and colleges can. If we’re to ensure that as much of the University’s output as possible is available Open Access and eligible for the next REF, some of that work has to happen in departments.

Success story

One of the most successful departments in the University is the MRC Epidemiology Unit, which currently submits more than 80% of its manuscripts on time. We went to talk to Signe Wulund, the administrator there who looks after open access, about what she does and the systems she uses.

Workflows

Click on the thumbnail below to open a high resolution version of the ‘MRC Epidemiology & CEDAR Open Access Process’.

MRC Epidemiology poster 1a

At the heart of her workflow is a detailed knowledge of what the department’s 120-130 researchers are publishing. Authors are encouraged to inform her of any articles accepted for publication and to send her their manuscripts. Frequent reminders in the form of posters, newsletter items and emails make sure they don’t forget.

Papers can be uploaded to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk by either the academics themselves or by an administrator on their behalf. Since 2013 MRC Epidemiology has had a great deal of success with either Signe or her colleague Karen handling manuscript uploads rather than the authors themselves. The expertise they have developed in the policies and workflows makes the process run extremely smoothly. They also check that the version of the article they’ve been sent is the correct one and that funders have been correctly acknowledged. This all means that by the time we received the manuscript, it’s exactly what we need and we can get back to them with advice and information on any payments as quickly as possible.

Click on the thumbnail below to see a high resolution version of ‘Open Access Process Flowchart – who does what?’

MRC Epidemiology poster 2a

Added benefits

The most valuable aspect to this approach, however, is that it allows Signe to keep centralised records of the department’s publishing output. She maintains a spreadsheet that tracks all the Unit’s known papers, including where they are in the publication process and their open access status. This includes both papers authors have directly notified her about and those which she has found later through other sources like Symplectic.

This has uses well beyond Open Access, but also enables Signe to maintain an organised overview of the department’s output and to chase up any issues that might arise; it also allows the department to follow up with journals and post manuscripts eligible for green Open Access to Europe PubMed Central.

Open Access is strongly backed by the department’s leadership and made part of regular research group leader meetings, with papers included and discussed about open access performance. This maintains high awareness among researchers and allows group leaders to remind or inform colleagues who are not taking the appropriate action.

This is the key advantage that departmental administrators have over a centralised service – the fact that they are a regular part of department life and can reach researchers more directly and more often than the Office of Scholarly Communication can, however many events or presentations we hold.

There are, of course, resource implications. We know that many administrative staff within the University are overstretched. However, the time demands of the work Signe does on open access are not extravagant, and well worth the modest investment.

Take home messages

So the key things that the MRC Epidemiology Unit do that other departments could try to improve their open access rates are:

  • Consistent administrators with responsibility for open access, working on it regularly and so able to develop expertise.
  • Engage with researchers to keep track of departmental publications.
  • Administrators upload articles to Open Access website to increase efficiency.
  • Strong support from departmental leadership.
  • Frequent reminders and publicity about open access, using a variety of means.
  • Open access made a regular part of PI meetings, which can be used to increase engagement with open access.

The impact such measures can have speaks for itself. The MRC Epidemiology Unit’s submission and compliance rates are more than double the University average. But the key thing to note is that such work also needn’t be especially burdensome from a time or resource standpoint. Of course, different departments have different organisational structures, publishing patterns and needs, but many of these approaches are common sense and applicable anywhere.

If you’d like more detailed advice or suggestions for how to promote open access in your own department, please get in touch with us at info@openaccess.cam.ac.uk.

Published 7 March 2016
Written by Dr Philip Boyes

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