The cost of complying with OA

The Cost of Complying with OA: Survey

The study, commissioned by SPARC Europe and London Higher, aims to explore both the financial and administrative implications to researchers and administrative staff of complying with funder OA policies.

Expected outputs include indicative costs to institutions of making articles OA through gold and green routes; and the estimated cost to UK HE institutions of complying with RCUK and HEFCE policies.

The research is being undertaken by Research Consulting. 

You can read more information about the research on the Research Consulting blog.  The Survey can be found here.

Scholarly Communication and Open Access

Imperial College London has been disseminating its research as widely as possible and encouraging all academic and research staff and students to make their output available through open access (OA)

Authors are choosing to make their research available on open access because:

• it means anyone anywhere in the world can read, use and cite your research, encouraging wider impact, collaboration and visibility of work
• authors retain more control over and rights to distribute and re-use their intellectual property
• funders require outputs for their funded research to made available on open access

On 31 March 2014 HEFCE published its policy on Open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework. The policy states that from 1 April 2016, in order to be eligible for the post-2014 REF, journal articles and conference proceedings must be deposited in a repository within three months of acceptance for publication. They must also be discoverable (e.g. via a search engine) and accessible no less than a month after this deposit.

The HEFCE policy includes a range of exceptions to ensure that you can still publish in the most appropriate journals, even if these do not currently have open access policies.