The UK’s Research Excellence Framework Policy for Open Access requires that authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must be deposited in an institutional or subject repository within three months of acceptance for publication. The policy applies to research outputs (such as journal articles and conference proceedings) accepted for publication after 1 April 2016.
As an open-access publisher, which makes articles immediately available online, eLife complies with this requirement by delivering all content at the point of final publication to PubMed Central (PMC) and, via PMC, Europe PMC. However, to ease compliance with the REF policy for individual UK institutions, eLife is going a step further and linking up with the Jisc Publications Router.
Developed by EDINA, Jisc’s designated centre for digital expertise and online service delivery, the Jisc Publications Router is a middleware tool that automates the direct delivery of research articles between multiple data suppliers, such as publishers and subject repositories, and multiple institutional repositories (IRs). Currently Huddersfield, Reading, and Salford universities are receiving data from the Router, and more institutions are in the process of coming aboard.
For eLife, the Jisc Publications Router helps us to:
- Push our content to further end points
- Help content reach institutional repositories as soon as it’s published in final format, faster than it’s available elsewhere, aside from the eLife site
- Make available all formats of the content, including final typeset PDF, all figures, videos and supplementary files, and JATS XML
- Support institutional compliance with the REF policy through just one relationship
The process to set up and supply our archive of content through the Jisc Publications Router was simple and involved minimal time and effort. As the first content provider to complete the process, we’d be happy to support other publishers and institutions as they seek to become part of this important initiative.
We’re pleased to support the Jisc Publications Router as an important step in facilitating compliance with the UK open-access policy, in particular, and in extending the infrastructure for open access in general.
For more information:
- About the Jisc Publications Router: Visit http://broker.edina.ac.uk or email edina@ed.ac.uk
- About the Research Excellence Framework Policy for Open Access
- About eLife’s experience with the Router, email eLife’s Head of production, Melissa Harrison, via m.harrison@elifesciences.org
