RSP - OA

How does Open Access impact me?

There are a number of benefits that come from Open Access, including wider outreach, higher citation rates and impact in areas beyond academia. As well as the benefits, both for your own research profile and for the broader research environment, there are also an increasing number of Open Access requirements you need to meet.

Both the University and REF have Open Access policies in place, whereby your research must be Open Access via either the Green or Gold Route. A number of funders also have policies around Open Access, that vary in their specific requirements. As a result, you will need to ensure you make your research Open Access.

What do I need to do?

Throughout the publication process, you will reach different stages where you will need to take action. Two key stages are at Submission and Acceptance, which is why we advice that you need to "Sort at Submission" and "Act on Acceptance".

Sort at Submission:

• Check any OA requirement you have to meet - as a member of staff at Coventry University, you must meet the University Open Access Standard; you should also meet the REF Open Access requirements; you may also have requirements based on your funder.
• When you're choosing a publisher, you should keep open access in mind - we have Read and Publish Agreements that allow you to publish OA without paying an APC; the internal APC fund and the UKRI Block Grant only cover Gold or Transformative Hybrid journals; some publisher policies may conflict with your OA requirements.
• You may need to include a Rights Retention Statement and/or a Data Statement to your article before submission - Some funders do require these to be applied, and can sometimes be difficult to apply retrospectively.
• Our Read and Publish Agreements only apply if the corresponding author is from Coventry University, and some publishers check this by looking at the corresponding author's email address, therefore we encourage you to use your university email when you submit articles for publication.
• Whilst it will not meet the requirements for OA, in many fields it is good practice to post your Submitted Version to a pre-print server like ArXiv or PubMed.

Act on Acceptance:

• You must deposit the Accepted Manuscript into Pure within 3 months of acceptance - even if the manuscript has to be embargoed for longer than three months, it needs to be deposited into Pure in order to meet the REF requirements. The Research and Scholarly Publications team can then manage the record to ensure it meets both the REF requirements and the Publisher's Policies.
• You must inform us of the Accepted Date - in order to monitor REF compliance and address any accidentally non-compliant publications, we need the Acceptance Date.
• Usually APCs will be charged after acceptance, as such you will need to coordinate the funding you have planned to cover the APC at this point.

Publisher's Proof:

• At the proofing stage, publishers often apply their own typesetting and aspects for which they hold copyright, and as a result will not allow this version to be archived. If you have archived your Accepted Manuscript but need to apply changes that arise from the proofing stage, please contact oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk.

At Publication:

• Once the article is published, you can inform us and we will update the record in Pure. If the article is published OA, we can also replace the accepted manuscript with the final published version.