New UoE Open Access Policy

New open access policy was passed by University Senate in February 2009. It requires all researchers at the UoE to deposit their papers in the Publications Repository and when it's appropriate in the open access ERA (Edinburgh Research Archive).
UoE is aiming to have all the open-access papers available in ERA and all that don't require open access listed in the Publications Repository.
 

The direct reasons for implementation of the new policy were the difficulties in collating the data for the latest RAE that the library staff encountered. The aim of the new policy is to collate the data well before the next Research Excellence Framework assessment.

All the researchers at the UoE are required to use UoE name in all publications as well as other names (institutes, schools, centres, research groups) (RAE requirement).

New policy goes live in January 2010 for REF-compliant material: journal articles, conference papers, book chapters. Research Publication’s Service will require author’s copy of the paper in electronic file. The aim is to concentrate on next REF and collate data starting 2008 first, before collating the retrospective data.

New university policy is in line with Wellcome Trust policy which requires that an electronic copy of all original (primary) research papers funded, in whole or in part, by the Wellcome Trust was made freely available from the PubMed Central (PMC) and UKPMC repositories as soon as possible, an in any event within six months of the publication. 
The Wellcome Trust has provided the University of Edinburgh with funds to cover publishers' Open Access charges.

CIIE admin team will ensure integration of our internal publications system with the ERA. The clear advantage for the researchers working in the Centre is that they will only have to deposit their papers once.
 

Advantages of depositing papers in ERA and Public Repository
 
All authors who deposit their papers in ERA and Public Repository will be able to generate an automatically updated citations’ list that can be used on their websites/departmental websites. They will also have access to the download statistics. Example average download from ERA is 10 downloads per citation (Physics).

Digital Library Staff is working on incorporating data from PubMed to ERA – at the moment the papers published in PubMed are publisher’s final version, whereas in ERA author’s final copy is used.

 
Any embargo requirements that need to be placed on publications can be built into the system.

 
Copyright issues
 
Copyright Transfer Agreement - Terms and Conditions of the licence are usually signed by author as proposed by the publisher. There’s no reason why authors couldn’t amend the terms of the agreement e.g. in regards to Open Access.
 
Once paper is published author still has copyright to the text, publisher - to the layout. That causes constrains to putting papers on the web in the final version (rather than author’s proofread copy).

Library staff are looking at preparing a form that could be added to the contract between authors and publishers, which is already a school’s policy in Informatics.

Principle author should ensure broad agreement regarding depositing the paper in ERA or Public Repository from co-authors from external institutions.
 
More information:
https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/PubRep
http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk
http://www.publications.lib.ed.ac.uk/ (restricted access)

Access to CIIE Publications System:
CIIE Publications (ease login required)