RSP - OA

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens after I create a record on Pure?

Provided a record is set to status ‘for validation’ (this shows at the bottom of the record) this will enter the work queue of the Research and Scholarly Publications team. The record will be checked to ensure that deposit in Pure is in line with your publishers policy; the full text version and the information regarding the output is correct, before it is made available from the Pure portal.

Depending on your publishers' policy, the full text version that you upload to Pure may be subject to an embargo period.  This means the full text cannot be made available until after the embargo period has ended.  The ORSP Team will check if an embargo period applies to your output and will set the date within the system so that the full text will be made available automatically once the embargo period has ended.  If you have any queries regarding this, please contact oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk.
 

How can I know what a journal’s policy is toward open access?

A useful source of reference is the website Sherpa / Romeo which documents the policies of many academic journals. If the publication does not appear on Sherpa / Romeo it would be worth checking with the journal editor and examining the detail of any copyright transfer agreement (CTA) which you may have been asked to sign.

Articles published in some non-open access journals may be eligible to be published 'Gold Open Access' at no additional cost via one of the publisher Open Access agreements which we have in place, where a Coventry University author is acting as the corresponding author. For more information on such agreements please see this section of our LibGuide. 

Sherpa/Romeo also operates the sister sites, Sherpa/Juliet which details funder open access policies, and Sherpa/Fact which checks the compatibility of particular journal titles with funder policies.

If you are publishing in a journal which either requires an embargo which exceeds the maximum permitted for REF (over 12 months for REF Panels A and B, over 24 months for REF Panels C and D), or in a journal which doesn’t permit dissemination of the accepted manuscript, you will still need to upload the accepted manuscript to Pure within 90 days of its acceptance. There is provision in the REF policy for an exception applying if the publication can be shown to be the most appropriate publication venue for the research.
 

When are embargo dates calculated from?

The REF Open Access policy advises that they be set from date of first publication. This is often classified as the ‘e-pub ahead of print’ date where electronic release of the article comes before the print publication.

How will embargo dates be set if the article is not yet published?

The ORSP team in the library will implement a provisional embargo on the day they check and validate the record, and have a system for periodically checking back on records to see when publication occurs..

However, if authors can remember to update Pure records following publication to add such details as publication date and DOI / weblinks to the final publication this is helpful as it will lead to the record getting checked sooner and the final embargo date being correctly set.
 

In what circumstances should I change the visibility settings of a Pure record?

We suggest the default visibility setting of a Pure record should be set to ‘public’. There may be grounds however to restrict the visibility of the record where one of the following scenarios apply:

• A press embargo has been requested by the publication
• A publication is at the stage of being submitted for publication or is being prepared for publication
• The record details a confidential report or similar whose details are not to be publicly disclosed
• The output meets the REF's definition of posing a security risk to the author(s) - please note in such circumstances it would be expected that the author(s) would not disclose their organisational affiliation(s) on the publication

Please note that the visibility of the record operates separately to the visibility of any documents attached to the record. It is possible for the overall Pure record to be set to ‘public’ even where the attached document is under an embargo.

In cases where the restricted visibility of a newly created record may impact upon its compliance with the REF Open Access policy, a member of our team will get in touch to query this.
 

At what point will a record display against my profile in the Pure Portal?

Records will display on the Pure Portal once they have been validated, provided the visibility of the record is set to ‘public’ (which is the default setting). Records are validated by the Open Research and Scholarly Publications team in the library, generally a few working days after a record has initially been created.

Please note that when changes are made to a record which has been validated this will trigger the record going into ‘re-validation’ for a member of the Open Research and Scholarly Publications team to check the information which has been added is accurate. During this period the record will for a brief time not display on the Portal.
 

Can I link video or multimedia material to a record in Pure?

Currently the Pure Portal can only display videos from YouTube or Vimeo on output records where the video does not have any privacy settings. To add a video use the ‘add other link’ option on the research output and paste in the shareable link to the video and choose portal multimedia from the link type dropdown.
 

Can I freely share my work through Research Gate and similar platforms?

Before uploading any version of a publication to an academic social network site such as Research Gate, we would advise authors to check any Copyright Transfer Agreement which may have been signed with the publisher. While the posting of publications on academic social networking sites remains fairly widespread, authors do risk infringing publisher copyright if they do so in violation of the terms of a Copyright Transfer Agreement and there have been cases of publishers issuing copyright takedown notices to authors as a consequence. A notable instance of takedown notices being sent to ResearchGate occurred in October 2021, when over 200,000 files were requested to be removed.

Various publishers have set up a website called How Can I Share It? which details journal policies toward academic social networking sites, in addition to other types of platform.

Please note as well that academic social networking sites such as Research Gate are not repositories which meet the Open Access requirements for research funders or for any Research Assessment Exercise, such as the REF. In order to comply with this policy, please archive the accepted manuscript of any journal and conference proceeding publications to the Pure system within three months of their acceptance for publication. 
 

Can I share the accepted manuscript / the published version of my paper with colleagues?

To ensure you are not violating any agreement which you might have signed with the publisher, we would advocate checking the terms of any Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) which you have signed up to

Most publishers permit private sharing with colleagues and peers, but the form that this takes can vary. Some publishers for instance provide a 'toll-free' link to an off-print of the published version which can be shared by the author a finite number of times to researchers who may not have access to the final publication through the journal platform.
 

How do I cite data from digital repositories (online open archives), data centres, and public sources?

There is no consensus on format and components for citations of electronic data and rmerging conventions vary by discipline, but there are some common elements within these conventions. The How to Cite Data page by The Michigan State University Libraries provides helpful guidelines for multiple citation styles, including a tab that leads to guidance for citing data from statistical tables. The guidelines for social science data​ provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may give you a good general sense of what you will need to include in most data citations.

Many online repositories or data centres provide guidelines on how to cite the data that they maintain and provide. These vary dramatically in detail and visibility. For example, census.ac.uk, which provides specific types of data sets, often repeating over time, provides thorough guidelines on citing each electronic release of census data and related studies. The UK Data Archive, which houses a wider variety of data sets, includes general data citation advice in an FAQ (How do I acknowledge and cite data?), and includes the specific citation information for each data set when you download it. If you can't find it, you should always feel free to email or call the staff who run the site for advice on citing their data (or any other sort of material in the repository).
 

If you have a question which is not covered here, please contact us at: oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk.