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A little bit of (easily resolved but very important) ambiguity has crept into the HEFCE instructions and FAQ: Many items conflate DEPOSIT and OPEN-ACCESS DEPOSIT. It is ever so important, in order to prevent misunderstanding and to ensure timely compliance, to clearly distingush DEPOSIT rules from OPEN-ACCESS rules. DEPOSIT IMMEDIATELY UPON ACCEPTANCE (with 3-month grace period) has to be mandatory. Rules concerning when the deposit is made OA should be clearly separate from this. Here are the ambiguous passages: "The policy states that, to be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF, authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication. Deposited material should be discoverable, and free to read and download, for anyone with an internet connection. “ The article must be deposited immediately upon acceptance but deposits do not need to be made OA immediately upon acceptance. 11. From what start point is the embargo period active, and how can this be calculated? (NEW) Embargo periods are normally calculated from the date of first publication, including online publication, but publishers may set their own policy. If the paper is not published by the time it is deposited, the embargo end date must be entered into the repository record at a later point. Institutions may choose to ask for ‘closed’ deposits from authors, and when they know the output has been published (perhaps assisted by a publications index), they may set the embargo period based on information found in SHERPA/RoMEO. Over time, publications metadata will evolve to include embargo information, allowing for this step to be completely automated. Publishers are committed to implementing the NISO-approved <license_ref> tag to provide the publication date, the embargo end date and any licence metadata for green open-access via CrossRef. Repositories will be able to ingest these metadata from CrossRef automatically, meaning deposits can be made accessible at the end of the embargo period without any additional manual work. Deposit is upon acceptance. Papers are almost never published immediately upon acceptance. 19. Some publishers ask that institutions sign agreements before allowing deposit of outputs in the repository (specifying that embargo periods will be respected etc.) Must institutions sign these in order to create the conditions for compliance? (NEW) This is a question that concerns the relationship between institutions and publishers. If institutions wish to achieve open access via their institutional repository, and agreements are required by publishers in order for outputs to be deposited, then we do not see these as a barrier to compliance. If agreements are signed, we would welcome a brief report on these to be emailed to [log in to unmask] Publishers have absolutely no say over deposit itself, only over when the deposit is made OA. 21. What should Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust-funded authors do? (NEW) Authors who receive funding from the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and a number of other funders are required to deposit their papers in Europe PubMed Central. This repository is a permitted venue for complying with the REF open-access policy requirements. However, authors, when publishing in a fully OA journal (or a hybrid journal in which they have selected the author pays option) should not deposit their accepted manuscripts in Europe PubMed Central because the final, version of record, paper will be automatically deposited by the publisher into the Europe PMC repository. If this automatic deposit happens within three months of acceptance, the REF deposit requirements will be met and no further action is needed by the author. If automatic deposit does not happen within three months of acceptance, the author will need to deposit their manuscript elsewhere (typically in an institutional repository) in order to meet the REF deposit requirements. (1) Deposit is supposed to be immediately (within 3 months) of acceptance, not publication. It is OA that is calculated from date of publication. (2) How is it to be determined whether automatic publisher (OA) deposit has taken place within 3 months of publications? And what about publisher-embargoed OA? MRC/Wellcome authors should, like all other authors, have to comply with the immediate-deposit requirements of HEFCE. It is a big mistake to loosen the rules for them. In PMC deposits, the “automatic deposit” can be as late as subsequent to the OA embargo (6-12 months), which is far, far later than the immediate-upon-acceptance requirement for everyone else. 29. If a publisher actively disallows deposit, but has a ‘hybrid’ gold OA option, is the author expected to pay the APC in order to get permission to deposit? (NEW) No. We do not wish for authors and their institutions to pay publishers for permission to deposit their work. If the publication does not allow open-access deposit, and it is the most appropriate publication for that work, there is a relevant access exception in the policy. (This assumes the author is not already publishing via the gold route.) A publisher can only disallow OA, not deposit. There can be an exception for OA but not deposit. These loopholes can easily be patched be very clearly reiterating the distinction between the no-exception immediate-deposit-upon-acceptance rule and all rules on OA timing, version choice, or repository choice. Stevan Harnad On Oct 31, 2014, at 6:30 AM, Ben Johnson (HEFCE) <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Dear colleagues > > *For information, and with apologies for cross-posting* > > We have today published information and audit requirements for the policy for open access in the post-2014 REF. These can be found on our website at the following link, under ‘Technical resources’: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/oa/policy/ > > We have also updated our FAQs to include a number of new questions (all marked with ‘NEW’): http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/oa/faq/ > > I’d be grateful if you could pass this to the relevant contact within your institution. > > If you have any questions about these requirements or next steps, relevant contact information is given in the documentation. Alternatively, please email [log in to unmask] > > Best wishes > > Ben Johnson > Policy Adviser (Research) > HEFCE, Northavon House, > Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QD > 0117 931 7038 > [log in to unmask] > www.hefce.ac.uk >