Publish with Elsevier? Send us your full text

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According to SherpaRomeo  Elsevier publishes 1889 journals including the Lancet so the likelihood of you publishing in one of their journals is very high. Elsevier is a subscription publisher so in order to read the research they publish you will need to either be at an institution that has a subscription or purchase daily access to the article (roughly $30 per day). To ensure that your research reaches more readers we ask you to send through to researchonline@lshtm.ac.uk your author accepted manuscript.

So what is this? Sometimes it is known as the ‘post-print’ or ‘author accepted manuscript’. This is the version of your article that has been accepted by the journal after it has been peer reviewed. It cannot have any publisher pagination or branding on it. Usually it will be in a word format. If you send this through to us we will convert to pdf and once it has been deposited into LSHTM Research Online anyone can read and access that article. In fact once you have had your article accepted please just send through this version and once the article is published we will make it available. We will of course have a direct link to the publisher’s final pdf so that if someone does have a subscription to the journal then they can still read that version.

ResearchGate: 'Add full-texts to them to create exposure for your research'

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johntrainor

In the last few months I’ve had a few queries from academics about uploading their full text articles to ResearchGate often prompted by them receiving an email saying 'Add full-texts to them to create exposure for your research'. The purpose behind this is of course increasing access to the research itself but there are a few issues with this in ResearchGate

However first I must say that ResearchGate is a great site and service, it brings together researchers from all areas of science, ignoring institutional affiliations in the way that researchers and science does. It links up researchers in other areas, provides with a good ‘home page’ , suggests other research they may be interested in, shows who else they are working with and has ‘forums’ for discussion. It identifies your papers for you and asks you just to confirm that and then for you to upload your papers. At present it has 521 LSHTM staff registered on it (although how many are active is another thing) and each day I get notificaton of new members and more papers being added.

What can you upload to ResearchGate? Well remember that in the majority of cases the copyright will have been transferred from the authors to the publisher and as such only with specific permission can you redistribute that research online. But there are many different versions of research papers and different licenses, which allow different things.

Publisher pdf version of record: If you have published with Elsevier, Wiley, Cambridge, Oxford, Springer, Lippincott or most other traditional publishers you cannot upload this.

Author accepted manuscript (post-print): Many publishers (though not Wiley) do allow this to be redistributed/hosted after an embargo but only on your own institutional site and not for commercial use. ResearchGate is a commercial site.

Paid Open Access articles with PLoS and BioMed Central: all these articles can be uploaded to ResearchGate and this is due to the fact that they also will have a CC-BY license which allows commercial reuse.

Paid Open Access articles with other publishers: This will depend on what license has been applied, if you chose CC-BY then yes you can upload this.

WellcomeTrust funded articles: All Wellcome Trust funded articles are now required to have a CC-BY license so these can be uploaded.

RCUKfunded articles: RCUK indicate that where a article processing charge is paid it needs to be released under a CC-BY license which would allow you to upload

How do you check this? Well we use the wonderful site SherpaRomeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ for information on publisher permissions and SherpaFact http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/fact/ on whether individual journals are compliant with funder requirements

So you can see it can be quite complicated to work out and in fact restrictive and maybe this is why ResearchGate prefers just to say ‘upload your full text’. Yet publishers have been pretty diligent in telling institutional repositories such as ours what we can and cannot host or distribute and we at LSHTM Research Online are very careful in ensuring we don’t breach copyright. But sites such as ResearchGate and Mendeley have taken a much more hands off approach to copyright and publishers have not really questioned them. 

Why is this? Well maybe publishers view such sites as future/potential businesses. Recently Elsevier bought Mendeley and Bill Gates also invested $35min ResearchGate itself. The value in both of these sites are the researchers themselves, they voluntarily provide huge amounts of data about themselves, their research and associations. ResearchGate has been described as the ‘Facebook’ for scientists and Facebook’s value is all in the data that they have gathered. So maybe publishers allows such sites to gather research papers without questioning their ‘loose’ monitoring of copyright breaches since there is another value and if the site gets enough academics and scientists registering then buying them out is worth much more than stopping copyright breaches. Whereas institutional repositories offer publishers nothing at all, all we try and do in our own small way is to manage and control the research that our academics and institutions produce and that is more of a threat than a social media company that can eventually be bought.

CC-BY license for all Wellcome Trust funded open access articles

Since the 1st April Wellcome Trust have updated their requirements for articles published as a result of their funding. Previously Wellcome Trust allowed researchers and publishers to assign any creative commons license to an article this has now changed and the licence that must be selected is CC-BY . This license allow anyone to reuse, host, distribute, adapt the research for commercial or non-commercial use. Publishers such as PLoS, BioMed Central already apply this license. Elsevier, Wiley and Nature Publishing Group will also automatically apply this license where it is indicated that Wellcome Trust have funded the paper and an article processing charge (open access fee) is paid.

With other publishers you will need to specify to them that if an article processing charge is paid then the CC-BY license must be applied. If a publisher does not want to apply this license then no article processing fee can be paid, in such cases the publisher should instead allow the posting/deposit of the author accepted manuscript into Europe PubMed Central with an embargo date of no longer than 6 months. If the publisher cannot agree to this then the researcher should not publish with them since the article will be discounted from their list of publications to submit to Wellcome Trust and could have an impact on future funding.

Why CC-BY?

This license allows the greatest reuse of the research. Under different licenses the use of the paper or figures in a blog is not allowed since often they contain advertising, translations of papers are not allowed without further payments to publishers. CC-BY will allow the reuse and hosting of papers on blogs, enable translations and text mining. CC-BY does not affect

•  User’s fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations
•  The author's moral rights
•   Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights

Work that is licensed CC-BY must be attributed to the author and cannot be used to endore views or opinions that the author does not support.

To check different journal positions you can look at Wellcome's list of frequently used journals

There is also now Sherpa Fact which is tool for researchers to find out whether or not a particular journal is compliant with Wellcome Trust of any other RCUK funder.

This position does not affect any articles published prior to April 1st 2013.

If you have any questions please contact Andrew Gray andrew.gray@lshtm.ac.uk

Wiley Open - New Series of Open Access Journals

Wiley Publishing have now joined the Open Access journal route with their Wiley Open series of journals. At present they list 3 journals Brain and Behaviour, Ecology and Evolution and Microbiology Open with hopefully a lot more soon. So now we have

Springer Open

BMJ Open

Sage Open

Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing

So all the big publishers apart from Elsevier have responded to the challenge that PLoS One threw down. Like PLoS One all move the charge from the reader to the author with fees upwards of £1,500. Of course such Open Access fees should be included in any funding applications from the beginning. If you intend to publish in such a journal please contact Andrew Gray andrew.gray@lshtm.ac.uk for advice on keeping your copyright. Hopefully one day we will also see a reduction in subscription fees as a result of publishers being paid upfront