UKRI has published updated information to support funded research organisations and researchers to meet its new open access policy.
Peer reviewed research articles that acknowledge UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funding have been required to comply with UKRI’s open access policy since 1 April 2022.
From 1 January 2024, monographs, book chapters and edited collections that acknowledge UKRI funding will also need to be published open access.
“Reward and recognition are central to the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) strategy commitment of fostering a world-class research and innovation system and UKRI has already made significant progress in this area.
The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment represents another step forward, with UKRI committing to a common vision for the assessment of research, researchers and research organisations.
Assessment must recognise the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research and be based primarily on qualitative judgement.
Peer review is central this, supported by the responsible use of quantitative indicators….”
“On 12 October, UKRI convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham. The UKRI open research team and the UK Reproducibility Network brought together some of those Fellows in two special interest session s to discuss open and transparent research . H ere we summarise the perspectives a nd ideas that we heard from the Fellows, who work in a range of disciplines and have engaged with open research in a variety of ways . Where we are aware of related work, we note this [in square brackets]….”
“On 12 October, UK Research and Innovation convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham for their annual conference.
These research fellowships aim to develop the next wave of world-class research and innovation leaders in academia and business, so the UK Reproducibility Network were delighted to host events for Fellows to discuss open and transparent research.
In two special interest sessions, co-hosted by UKRN and the UKRI open research team, future research leaders discussed the benefits and challenges of topics such as sharing open and FAIR data, research software code and open access publishing.
Participants noted that transparency in research data is important, but not easy. They agreed that data should be open where possible, with documentation and related code. Community norms will accelerate this, as will journal and funder policies moving beyond ‘the data behind the publication’.
A full report of the discussions can be found here : Future Leadership Fellows discuss open reasearch …”
“Mr Sweeney’s powerful influence in steering the UK sector towards open-access research is a key part of his legacy, helping to set up the Finch report in 2011, which later laid down the “unanswerable” principle that “results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain”. As UK Research and Innovation’s lead on open access, Sweeney was also influential in ensuring the funder was an early supporter of Plan S, the Europe-wide open access drive, while UKRI’s own policies, which took effect in April, pushed requirements further. “The Finch report was significant and moved the dial on open access but without this global collaboration we won’t be able to move the system further,” he reflected….”
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But expert says fleshing out details including finance is “key” for social sciences and humanities
National R&D funder UK Research and Innovation has set out the next steps for implementing its open-access requirements for monographs.
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“As part of FRAP, an expert panel has been invited to lead a review of the role of metrics in research management and assessment.
The Future Research Assessment Programme (FRAP) is led by the four UK higher education funding bodies.
Tightly-defined objectives
This review, The Metric Tide Revisited, will take a short, sharp, evidence-informed look at current and potential uses of metrics against a set of tightly-defined objectives to:
revisit the conclusions and recommendations of the last detailed review of these questions, The Metric Tide (2015), and assess progress against these
consider whether developments over recent years in the infrastructures, methodologies and uses of research metrics negate or change any of those 2015 conclusions or suggest additional priorities
look afresh at the role of metrics in any future research excellence framework and consider whether design changes now under consideration as part of the FRAP suggest similar or different conclusions to those reached in 2015
offer updated advice to UK Research and Innovation and the UK’s higher education funding bodies on the most effective ways of supporting and incentivising responsible research assessment and responsible uses of metrics….”
“In a little more than 18 months, the new UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access (OA) policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections will take effect. Jisc is considering the implications for this policy and how to support the sector through this in an affordable way….
Part of this shift is the need to support an effective infrastructure, which will underpin OA for books….”
“Springer Nature has been asked to revise and resubmit an application for its Nature Research Journals and Palgrave Journals to become Jisc-approved transformative journals.
In its application, made on 14 April 2022, Springer Nature offered deposit of an author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) under CC-BY terms to authors funded by UKRI for a temporary period.
Following a?review by the content expert group against the sector’s requirements it was agreed that the application did not currently meet the sector’s criteria. This is because the information presented to authors does not?equally signpost the option to deposit the AAM alongside the option to publish the Version of Record and pay an article processing charge (APC)….”
“This half-day webinar galvanises a much-needed sector-wide conversation on OA monographs in the context of the UK’s policy landscape. Expert panels of speakers from the library, publishing and policy worlds will outline the current state-of-play and discuss how we can move to meet the imminent OA mandates from cOAlition S/Plan S in Europe and UKRI in the UK, and potential implications of the REF.
Featuring expert speakers from UKRI (Rachel Bruce) and Jisc (Caren Milloy), the event will open with a discussion of monograph policies and mandates before moving to an academic viewpoint from Professor Martin Eve (Birkbeck, University of London) who will talk about various international OA funding models and the need to move quickly from pilot phases to business as usual.
The second half of the session will highlight the challenges of getting OA metadata into supply chains and systems often designed for closed books, and will discuss the concomitant challenges posed by metrics and reporting on OA books (speakers TBC). The afternoon will close with a view from the library perspective and expert speakers from the libraries at the Universities of York (Sarah Thompson), Aberdeen (Simon Bains) and Imperial College (Chris Banks). There will be time for Q&A after each set of speakers….”
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“One of our key priorities over the last two years has been to strike agreements that accelerate the UK’s transition to open access (OA), reduce and constrain costs, and capitalise on the potential of OA to break down some of the barriers to collaboration and excellence in research practices.
Alongside this, we have been working with the sector through our strategic groups to define and design the conditions that will support open scholarship during and after the OA transition.
As part of our work to support our funders’ policies, most notably UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), we have rapidly scaled-up our negotiations to put in place agreements that provide UKRI-funded researchers with routes to OA publishing and that allow these funds to be used to support these arrangements.
We are now at a point where around 80 per cent of UK output can be published openly via a Jisc agreement. Key to our negotiations are equity and affordability as set out in the sector’s requirements of our members. This means working with publishers to forge sustainable routes to OA that are available to all researchers regardless of institution, discipline, or publication venue.
As the most used publication venue for UK researchers and the largest agreement by spend, reaching an agreement with Elsevier that delivers full and immediate OA at an affordable and reduced fee was a priority for the sector….”
“UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) new open access policy is based on one simple principle, that findings from publicly-funded research should be accessible to all. The policy was published in August 2021 and comes into effect on 1 April….
After wide-reaching and measured consultation we are setting that key requirement for journal articles, while addressing other issues including:
constraining costs (and increasing our funding to pay our way)
supporting multiple routes for both publishers and authors
aligning with other key funders such as Wellcome and the European Commission to simplify publishing for our authors.
Without preempting future decisions on research assessment, our funding body colleagues have committed to being no stricter on open access than the UKRI policy, again simplifying choices for authors.
This is a reset, but one that follows on naturally and very simply from Finch as we abolish embargoes and target the use of UKRI funds to avoid increased costs. In essence, it is as simple as no embargoes, no hybrid payments….”
Open Access (OA) book publishing, and the way it is funded, is changing. 2020 and 2021 saw the emergence of several new OA monograph initiatives based on collective library funding. Cambridge UP started Flip It Open, MIT Press launched Direct 2 Open and Liverpool UP and the Central European University Press launched Opening the Future. This session will give a better understanding of the associated challenges facing libraries, publishers and scholars and will position these in the context of recent policy developments (UKRI OA monograph policy, the next REF, Plan S) and the rapidly developing OA landscape.
“Championing open research. Open research improves research efficiency, quality and integrity through collaborative, transparent and reproducible research practices. UKRI’s priorities include open access to research publications and making research data as open as possible but as secure as necessary. UKRI is building on the UK’s longstanding global leadership in open research with our new open access policy, which was developed through extensive consultation with the sector. The policy delivers on the ambition in the government’s R&D Roadmap, for publicly funded research to be accessible to all, and will boost the global impact of UK research by increasing opportunities for findings to be shared and used across all disciplines and sectors….”