Softening of line on Open Access-only REF

IMMEDIATE FULL-TEXT DEPOSIT IS MANDATORY Paul, in writing t”hat authors will still be required to submit metadata about their papers, such as title and author, to a repository within three months of acceptance for publication" in order to make the article eligible for REF2020, you have missed the most fundamental feature of the new HEFCE policy! It is not just metadata that must be immediately deposited. It is the full-text of the article! The deposit need not be made open access immediately. It can be made closed access if the author wishes to comply with a publisher embargo on open access. But there are limits (set by HEFCE as well as RCUK and the EU Horizon 2020) on how long an OA embargo is allowed. There are two essential components to an effective Green OA mandate (i.e., one that generates as close to 100% compliance, as soon as possible): (1) It must uncouple the date of deposit from the date the deposit is made OA. It must require immediate deposit, with no exemptions or exceptions. How long an OA embargo it allows is a separate matter. On no account must date of deposit be allowed to be contingent on publisher OA embargoes. This is exactly what the HEFCE policy has done. (2) Eligibility for research assessment (and funding) must be made conditional on immediate-deposit (date-stamped by the journal acceptance letter). Again, this is in order to ensure that deposits are not made months or years after publication: no retrospective deposit The deposit requirement for eligibility for research assessment and funding is not itself an OA requirement, it is merely a procedural requirement: For eligibility, papers must be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Late deposits are not eligible for consideration. This engages the institution (always extremely anxious to comply fully with REF, HEFCE and RCUK eligibility rules) in ensuring that deposit is timely, with the help of the date-stamped acceptance letter throughout the entire 6-year REF cycle, 2014-2020. These two conditions are what have yielded the most effective of all the Green OA mandates to date in ROARMAP (well over 80% compliance rate and growing) at University of Liege and FRS-FNRS (the Belgian Francophone research funding council); other mandates are upgrading to this mandate model; Harvard FAS has already adopted immediate-deposit as one of its conditions. And now RCUK — thanks to HEFCE/REF — has the immediate-deposit condition as well. OA embargoes are another matter, and HEFCE/REF is wisely leaving that to others (RCUK, EU Horizon2020, and institutional mandates) to stipulate maximal allowable embargo length and any allowable exceptions. What HEFCE/REF is providing is the crucial two components for ensuring that the mandate will succeed: (1) immediate deposit as a (2) condition for REF-eligibility. But let me add something else that will become increasingly important, once the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit requirement begins to propagate worldwide (as I am now confident it will: UK is at last back in the lead on OA again, instead of odd-man-out, as it has been since Finch): The immediate-deposit clause and the contingency on eligibility for research assessment and funding also ensures that the primary locus of deposit will be the institutional repository rather than institution-external repositories. (Deposits can be exported automatically to external repositories, once deposited and once the embargo has elapsed; they can also be imported from extrenal repositories, in the case of the physicists and mathematicians who have already been faithfully depositing in Arxiv for two decades,) But besides all that, many of the eprints and dspace institutional repositories already have — and, with the HEFCE mandate model propagating almost all of them will soon have the email-eprint-request Button: This Button makes it possible for users who reach a closed access deposit to click once to request a copy for research purposes; the repository software emails an automatic eprint request to the author, who can click once to comply with the request; the repository software emails the requestor the eprint. (Researchers have been requesting and sending reprints by mail — and lately by email — for decades, but with immediate-deposit and the Button, this is greatly accelerated and facilitated. So even during any allowable embargo period, the Button will enhance access and usage dramatically. I also predict that immediate-deposit and the Button will greatly hasten the inevitable and well-deserved demise of publisher OA embargoes.) Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/ Let me close by noting another important feature of the new HEFCE/REF policy: The allowable exceptions do not apply to the immediate-deposit requirement! They only apply to the allowable open-access embargo. To be eligible for REF2020, a paper must have been deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (with a 3-month grace period).

AND THERE IS NO LONGER ANY CONSTRAINT ON AUTHOR CHOICE OF JOURNAL HEFCE/REF is placing no constraint whatsoever on author choice of journal! On the contrary, the HEFCE/REF policy is remedying the constraint imposed by the Finch/RCUK preference for publishing in Gold OA journals. In fact, the policy is about, not about OA journals: Papers should continue to be published in the journal the author judges most appropriate for the work. But they must be (1) deposited immediately upon acceptance and (2) made OA immediately or at latest after the elapse of the interval allowed for complying with journal OA embargoes.