Research Support

The Gold Open Access publishing model involves the authors paying for article publication (article processing fee or APC) in a journal but articles are then freely available to readers with no additional subscription charges. Providing the appropriate licence has been agreed, the article may then be shared and re-used. Many journals now offer complete or partial OA or hybrid publishing options. BioMed Central is a major OA publisher in medicine and healthcare. See the Directory of Open Access Journals to identify journals using this model.

RCSI Library has negotiated gold open access agreements with a number of publishers, details of these can be found here.

Also known as self-archiving, the Green Open Access route satisfies open access mandates by funding agencies such as SFI, HRB and HEA. This model allows you to deposit a version of your article in an institutional repository such as the RCSI Repository, the RCSI's publications repository. Benefits also include:

• preserves your work publicly and indexes on Google Scholar
• categorises RCSI research output

Permitted versions can be the final published pdf (if it has been published via the gold route), the original submitted manuscript or the accepted manuscript which incorporates changes from the peer review process. The Library team are happy to advise you on publisher permissions – contact us at repository@rcsi.com

Plan S is an initiative by a group of research funders to make publicly funded research outputs fully and immediately open access.  The international consortium (cOAlition S) is coordinated by Science Europe and includes Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), UK Research and Innovation, Research Council of Norway and others and is supported by the European Research Council and the European Commission. cOAlition S aims for a new model of publishing, characterised not only by immediate, free online access to, but also by largely unrestricted use and re-use of scholarly publications.

The key principle of Plan S is:

After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.

Ten further principles apply, including:  

• Authors retain copyright and should publish under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC-BY .
• Open access publication fees (APCs) should be standard across Europe and capped.  Fees should be paid for by funders or institutions and not authors.
• Outputs should be made immediately available in compliant open access journals or platforms.  Hybrid journals (which mix open access articles with subscriptions) are not acceptable. Embargoes are not acceptable.  Examples of open access platforms are HRB Open Research and Wellcome Open Research.
• Depositing in institutional repositories in addition to OA journals or platforms is encouraged, immediately on publication (Version of Record, or Author’s Accepted Manuscript) without embargo.
• Publishing open access with a CC BY licence in a journal which is covered by a transformative agreement is acceptable.  Transformative agreements have clear and time-specified commitments to a full open access transition.

Full details of the principles here.  

Implementation guidance has been provided by cOAlition S to flesh out the details of the principles and to include technical requirements.  Feedback was sought from interested parties and based on this feedback, a new edition of the guidance is expected in Spring 2019.

CONUL (Consortium of National and University Libraries) Response to Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S

The Office for Scholarly Communication in the University of Cambridge have published a blog post called Plan S – links, commentary and news items, which attempts to compile a list of discussions and documents around Plan S.

cOAlition S recognises that the new model calls for research funders, institutions, researchers, learned societies, librarians and publishers to work together towards a system of scholarly publishing that is more accessible, efficient, fair and transparent.

Plan S Update

Following a wide consultation exercise revisions have been made to Plan S, the Science Europe-led funder initiative launched last year to push for more open access publishing.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall Is a project of Impactstory, a not for profit company that aims to  make scholarly research more open, accessible and reusable. This is a free service that locates open-access articles and presents papers that have been legally archived and are freely available as open access. Unpaywall harvests content from over 50,000 journals and open-access repositories from all over the world.

How to install Unpaywall

1. Open Chrome
2. Click on three dots in top right hand corner
3. In the drop down menu, click on more tools
4. Then click on extensions

Search for Unpaywall and turn it on by sliding the swipe to the right.  When you browse to a paywalled paper and an open access version is avaliable Unpaywall’s grey ‘lock’ icon turns green and ‘unlocks’, clicking on the icon will then bring you to the open access version of the paper.