Handbook

Actions for Departments to Achieve Open Access

For departments or schools located within a research institution which is actively pursuing an Open Access agenda, the major task is to convince its members of the benefits of self archiving (maximum access, maximum impact) and to encourage them to change their working practices so that the archives are filled with research papers!

If your department or school is not located within a research institution which is actively pursuing an Open Access agenda, then it is necessary to develop your own policy and may be necessary to install and manage your own EPrints Archive. (Neither of these is a particularly onerous task, and may well be undertaken as a matter of preference by departments in an institution with a devolved management model.) Even in this case, the major task is to encourage staff to deposit their papers.

A successful open access eprint archive is unlikely to come about by simply issuing a decree, especially in an institution where researchers and academics have a high degree of autonomy. It will be necessary to take on the task of advocacy, explaining to researchers the benefits of archiving in terms of increased research impact (in concrete terms, more citations for their work) and comprehensive, managed bibliographic lists for CVs, grant proposals and administrative returns. The damage of not archiving (lost research citations) is dramatically demonstrated in the paper Online or Invisible (Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001)

It is also worthwhile being up front with your department's researchers about the cost associated with the benefit of archiving. The cost is the effort required to archive the papers (transfer them to the eprints archive and enter their titles, authors and associated metadata) instead of leaving them on the researchers' hard disks. No data entry task is so trivial as to not create extra work for anyone; entering data to be shared with the global research community requires particular attention to detail (e.g. spelling of names) and the EPrints software itself is not without occasional bugs, pecularities and irritations.

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Sample Research Self-Archiving Policy

"Articles freely available online are more highly cited." Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001.

1. It is our policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.
   1. It is also our policy to minimise the effort that each of us has to expend in order to provide open online access to our research output.
   2. With all our research output accessible online we will be able to respond to the research assessment and other administrative initiatives with minimal input and effort from individual staff.
2. We have accordingly adopted the policy that all research output is to be self-archived in the departmental EPrint Archive (http://eprints.institution.edu/) before and after peer-reviewed publication. This archive forms the official record of the Department's research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source.
3. Our policy is compatible with publishers' copyright agreements in the following way:
   1. The copyright for the unrefereed preprint resides entirely with the author before it is submitted for peer-reviewed publication, hence it can be self-archived irrespective of the copyright policy of the journal to which it is eventually submitted.
   2. The copyright for the peer-reviewed postprint will depend on the wording of the copyright agreement which the author signs with the publisher.
   3. Many publishers will allow the peer-reviewed postprint to be self-archived. The copyright transfer agreement will either specify this right explicitly or the author can inquire about it directly. If you are uncertain about the terms of your agreement, a table of copyright policies is available to guide you. Wherever possible, you are advised to modify your copyright agreement so that it does not disallow self-archiving.
   4. In the rare case where you have signed a very restrictive copyright transfer form in which you have agreed explicitly not to self-archive the peer-reviewed postprint, you are encouraged to self-archive, alongside your already-archived preprint, a "corrigenda" file, listing the substantive changes the user would need to make in order to turn the unrefereed preprint into the refereed postprint.
   5. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department's infrastructure for your personal homepage.
4. We do not require you to archive the full text of books or research monographs. It is sufficient to archive the references along with the usual metadata.
5. Some journals still maintain submission policies which state that a preprint will not be considered for publication if it has been previously 'publicised' by making it accessible online‡. Unlike copyright transfer agreements, such policies are not a matter of law. If you have concerns about submitting an archived paper to a journal which still maintains such a restrictive submission policy, please discuss it with the Department's IPR and Copyright Advisor.

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† This is known as the Ingelfinger Rule, after a previous editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. As the Ingelfinger Rule is now vanishing, and as it was never either a legal or an enforceable matter, it need not be a concern of authors. See the new policy of Nature , which formerly practised the Ingelfinger Rule.