As a Chief Investigator
there are two ways in which you can comply with the grant condition to ensure
that your CSO supported research is made freely accessible via PMC and UKPMC.
Journal allows Open Access
You can submit your
manuscript to a journal that offers an open access option. Journals who provide
this facility will take responsibility for depositing the final, published
version of your paper in PMC/UKPMC and making it freely available on the day of
publication. Publishers that provide this option include all the open access
publishers (such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science) as well as
an increasing number of traditional publishers who have introduced a model in
which individual articles can be made open access. Under this model the author
pays a fee to the publisher to make their article accessible for free online,
immediately it is published in the journal. A copy of the article can be
deposited in PMC/UKPMC, again with immediate free access.
Author deposition
If you submit your manuscript to a publisher that does not offer an open access option you can still comply with the policy by depositing a copy of the final, peer reviewed manuscript in PMC/UKPMC. In cases where the author manuscript is deposited, these papers must be made freely available not later than six months after the journal publisher's official date of final publication.
From the 1st October 2006
the SHERPA database, developed by the
University of Nottingham, will provide information - at the journal title level
- as to whether or not a journal has a publication policy that is compliant with
open access.If the journal to which you wish to submit your manuscript is not
listed in the database you should speak directly to the journal's editorial
staff to determine their policy.
What should I do if the journal does not have an open-access option, nor does it allow me to self-archive my manuscript with PMC/UKPMC?
Authors must ensure, in
advance of making any agreement with or commitment to a publisher at any stage,
that the agreement or commitment does not conflict with the author's obligations
under CSO's Grant Conditions. Specifically, authors should inform the journal
that they have an obligation to deposit in PMC, and investigate whether the
publisher's policy is in conflict with this obligation.
Authors are unlikely to be able to comply with the Grant Conditions if,
without reaching a specific agreement with the journal about deposition of a
copy of the final paper in PMC, they transfer their copyright (or undertake to
do so in the future) to a journal. If such a conflict exists, authors have a
variety of options:
(a) Grant a licence of their copyright to a journal instead of assigning the
copyright. Such a licence would have to deal with the rights granted to
the journal in such a way as to allow the journal to publish but still allow the
author to deposit in PMC. In this way, authors should be able to retain
ownership of their copyright and still allow publication in a journal. This
could be achieved, for example, through using the
JISC SURF Licence to Publish.
(b) Agree to a journal's normal arrangements only on the condition
that it be specifically agreed that deposition in PMC can take place.
Copyright agreements can take many forms, but the following is an example of the
sort of wording that could be included in an agreement with a journal that would
still allow an author to comply our Grant Conditions:
Notwithstanding any of the other provisions of this agreement, the journal
acknowledges that the researcher will be entitled to deposit an electronic copy
of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript into UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) and for
this manuscript to be mirrored to all PMC international sites. Manuscripts
deposited with UKPMC may be made freely available to the public, via the
internet, within six months of the official date of final publication in the
journal.
(c) Reconsider where to publish. This is anticipated to be an
exceptional circumstance. It is also worth noting that the UK Research Councils,
a number of large charities and a number of national and non-government funding
agencies around the world have adopted very similar positions, which make it
likely that that the arrangements suggested here will become part of normal
research practice within a few years.