This report sets out UCL’s compliance with the RCUK Open Access Policy during the reporting period 1 April 2013 – 31 July 2014. UCL received an open access grant of £1,149,066 from RCUK in the first year of the policy (1 April 2013 – 31 March 2014), and £1,351,843 in year 2. UCL’s 45% target amounted to 693 papers, rising to 815 (53%) in the second year of the Policy. 1217 UCL RCUK-funded papers have been made open access during the reporting period, 1014 (83%) of them Gold; 203 (17%) Green

Sharp, CL

UCL Discovery

UCL RCUK Open Access Report 2013-14 Introduction This report sets out UCL’s compliance with the RCUK Open Access Policy during the reporting period 1 April 2013 – 31 July 2014. The data that accompanies this report is available at http://figshare.com/articles/UCL_RCUK_open_access_papers_2013_14/1170072. UCL received an open access grant of £1,149,066 from RCUK in the first year of the policy (1 April 2013 – 31 March 2014), and £1,351,843 in year 2. UCL’s 45% target amounted to 693 papers, rising to 815 (53%) in the second year of the Policy.  As soon as the RCUK Policy was introduced, UCL established an Open Access Funding Team to manage payments, negotiate with publishers and educate researchers about the requirements. At the same time, UCL set up its own open access fund. Reporting methods This report was compiled using UCL’s records of Gold open access payments, and papers in UCL’s institutional repository, UCL Discovery, as well as selected information extracted from Researchfish and ROS. Certain constraints affect all these sources.  i. Authors may report a paper’s funding inconsistently.  UCL maintains a database of open access payments made by invoice or prepayment from its RCUK, Wellcome and institutional funds. Before payment, authors confirm whether they are RCUK-funded. Articles are later checked to ensure that they are open access, and to verify the licence chosen. UCL’s Open Access Funding Team sometimes discovers that a paper that the authors have previously described as Wellcome-funded, or unfunded, in fact acknowledges RCUK funding, or is reported in Researchfish as RCUK-funded. The data in this report has been corrected where RCUK funding has been discovered after payment. These inconsistencies illustrate the need for an integrated reporting system that includes accurate funding information for all papers. ii. Reporting from institutional repositories is limited. Authors deposit in UCL Discovery through UCL’s Research Publications Service, run by Symplectic Elements. Funding is not routinely reported at deposit, so repository staff check deposits to identify those papers that acknowledge RCUK funding. This depends on the acknowledgements in the paper correctly reflecting funder contributions (see i, above). Where UCL identifies papers in a fully open access journal as RCUK-funded, but the fees were paid by another institution, the paper is reported as Green.  iii. Reporting in Researchfish and ROS is not comprehensive, and is subject to inaccuracies. Not all RCUK-funded papers are reported in Researchfish and ROS, so it is impossible to produce a comprehensive list of all UCL’s RCUK-funded papers.  There is a pressing need for an integrated RCUK author reporting structure that will enable institutions to identify RCUK-funded papers. There are inconsistencies in funding information and metadata between these and other datasets (see i, above). Comparison between this data and UCL’s Gold open access records is therefore a very manual process. Publication months are not reported in Researchfish, so 2  reports are by year only. Pending the transition from ROS to Researchfish, it appears that authors have not been reporting thoroughly in ROS. Integrating real-time reporting, at publication, to Researchfish with institutional open access administration would enable institutions to monitor RCUK compliance more efficiently, and to address non-compliance quickly. UCL is unable to report non-compliant papers using the tools available. UCL has cross-checked its Researchfish data against its central open access compliance records. However, it is very likely that additional papers reported in Researchfish have been made open access – either Gold, through payment by another institution or directly by the authors, or Green, by deposit in subject repositories or institutional repositories other than UCL Discovery. UCL’s open access compliance figures are therefore probably higher than reported here. iv. Papers cannot be reported until after publication, but payment occurs much earlier. Payments for Gold open access are processed immediately after acceptance. Given the inevitable delay between acceptance and publication, it may be several months before UCL can verify that the paper has been made open access, and that the authors have chosen the CC BY licence. This report contains articles whose APCs were paid during the reporting period, and which have been published, but does not include papers not yet published. Reporting structure UCL appreciates that both institutions and RCUK would benefit from a standard reporting format. However, institutional reporting capabilities differ, so exceptions and caveats would need to be permissible. In the absence of standard formats, the data comprising this report has been organised in separate worksheets, and is presented in the accompanying Excel file UCL RCUK 2014 papers, available at http://figshare.com/articles/UCL_RCUK_open_access_papers_2013_14/1170072. The separate sub-reports are as follows:   a. Gold CC BY_by article: papers identified as RCUK-funded for which UCL has paid centrally, which have been made open access with the CC BY licence b. Gold other CC_by article: papers identified as RCUK-funded for which UCL has paid centrally, which have been made open access with a Creative Commons licence other than CC BY c. Gold not CC_by article: papers identified as RCUK-funded for which UCL has paid centrally, which have been made open access but do not have a Creative Commons licence d. Problems_paid not OA_by article: papers identified as RCUK-funded for which UCL has paid centrally, but which have not been made open access. UCL is following up with publishers to ensure that these papers are converted to open access. e. Green_by article: papers identified as RCUK-funded, and made open access (within the maximum embargo period) by deposit in UCL’s institutional repository, UCL Discovery. This includes some papers published in fully open access journals whose APCs were paid by another institution. f. Gold_by publisher: numbers of UCL Gold RCUK-funded papers, and total central APC payments, by publisher. g. Gold_Green by journal: numbers of UCL Gold and Green RCUK-funded open access papers, 3  by journal. h. Publication charges_by paper:  Publication charges paid centrally from UCL’s RCUK funds. Expenditure During the reporting period, UCL has spent a total of £1,219,987 on Article Processing Charges from RCUK funds, and £77,887 on 83 invoices for publication charges.  UCL has spent £106,571 of its RCUK open access budget on staff salaries during the period April 2013 to July 2014. UCL’s Open Access Funding Team comprises four posts. UCL’s Open Access Funding Manager, and one Open Access Funding Assistant, are funded by UCL’s open access budget.  A second Open Access Funding Assistant, and UCL’s Open Access Compliance Officer, spend the majority of their time processing RCUK payments and monitoring compliance with the RCUK Open Access Policy. Their salaries are charged to UCL’s RCUK funds. UCL has achieved substantial discounts of up to 30% on Article Processing Charges by negotiating prepayment schemes with publishers. At present, UCL has prepayment schemes with BMC, BMJ, Elsevier, Frontiers, IEEE, PeerJ, PLOS, RSC, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Ubiquity and Wiley. For the purposes of internal compliance reporting, UCL has adopted the RCUK target of 693 papers in year 1 and 815 in year 2. This has been a helpful means of engaging UCL’s research community. Where Gold is concerned, monthly internal compliance reports include all articles for which payment has been processed, in order that funding commitments are correctly reported. However, annual reporting to RCUK needs to include accurate licence data. Because of this, only articles that were paid for during the reporting period, and which have been published, are included here. UCL is unable to pay publication charges for articles not funded by RCUK. This can lead to confusion amongst authors. If the Research Councils wish to monitor all publication charges by centralising payment, it would be helpful if authors were encouraged, in their grant literature, to approach institutions to arrange these payments. This would ensure that more payments are made and recorded centrally. Expenditure from UCL’s RCUK open access funds is summarised below:  Income April 13-Jul 15 Expenditure April 13-Jul 14 RCUK budget allocation £2,500,909 - Article processing charges - £1,219,987 Publication charges - £77,887 Staff salaries - £106,571    Total expenditure  - £1,404,445  Open access compliance 1217 UCL RCUK-funded papers were made open access during the reporting period. At UCL, the choice of Gold or Green open access is an academic decision for authors. 1014 (83%) of UCL’s 1217 RCUK-funded open access papers took the Gold route. This number represents all APCs for RCUK-funded papers paid during the reporting period, where the paper has been published. 203 (17%) were made Green open access, through UCL Discovery, UCL’s institutional repository. On the 4  available information, UCL estimates that at least 52% of its RCUK-funded papers comply with the RCUK Policy for the reporting period.  73% of UCL’s RCUK-funded Gold papers have been published with the CC BY licence. UCL reminds RCUK-funded authors of the need for CC BY when the author requests Gold, monitors the open access status of papers for which it has paid, and routinely checks licence, acknowledgements and data statements, but usually it is not possible to make corrections if authors or publishers do not follow the requirements. Where publishers give RCUK-funded authors a choice of licences, authors do not always remember to choose CC BY. Some publishers remind corresponding authors of the need for CC BY where an article is RCUK-funded, but this is not possible where authors do not provide accurate funding details at submission or acceptance. UCL’s compliance figures are as follows: Report Number of papers Percentage of total Gold papers Percentage of total UCL RCUK open access papers Total Gold papers and payments 1014  83% Gold papers with the CC BY licence 738 73%  Gold papers with another CC licence 122 12%  Gold papers made open access but without a CC licence 131 13%  Gold papers paid for but not open access* 23 2%  Green papers 203†  17% Total number of Gold and Green papers 1217   Publication charges by paper 83    * UCL is pursuing the publishers of these papers to make sure that they are made open access as soon as possible. † This is the number of Green papers that UCL is able to identify. More almost certainly exist, either paid for by other institutions or directly by the authors, or deposited in repositories other than UCL’s. Evidence for 2014 RCUK review UCL has submitted a separate response to the call for evidence for the 2014 review of the RCUK Open Access Policy, including a set of key recommendations that would lead to increased compliance levels.  Catherine Sharp Open Access Funding Manager, UCL September 2014 

UCL RCUK Open Access Report 2013-14

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1447872/1/UCL_RCUK_report_2014.pdf

UCL RCUK Open Access Report 2013-14

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