What do researchers need to do?
In practice, very little will change for authors, and no additional action is required under the policy. The key message to authors is to keep depositing your Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) to GRO on acceptance for publication.
Although no additional action is required under the policy beyond depositing your AAM into Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) upon acceptance, there are some considerations that authors need to be aware of when submitting their articles for publication.
On submission authors should:
- Inform any co-authors of the requirement to make your AAM openly available at the point of online publication with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. You may wish to use our email template to contact your co-authors.
- When submitting to a journal, we encourage authors to include the following statement in the 'acknowledgement' section of the manuscript and the cover letter: “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission”.
On acceptance authors should:
- Deposit a copy of your Authors Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO). To ensure that there are no issues with submitting your publication to REF2029, we recommend creating a record as soon as you can after receiving notification of acceptance. The record will be made available on GRO shortly after deposit, but the AAM will not be accessible to the public until the date of first online publication.
- Where practicable, ensure that you do not sign a publishing agreement that transfers copyright to the publisher.
On publication authors should:
- Contact the Open Research team to inform them that their article has been published by emailing gro@gold.ac.uk. The Open Research team will regularly check the publication status of all outputs in-scope of the policy, but authors are encouraged to also send a notification email to the team.
- The GRO team will make the file openly available as soon as its first online publication under a CC BY licence.
How to use a rights retention statement in journal submissions?
As we have contacted publishers directly about our new policy, authors are not legally required to do anything to make use of the policy.
However, to inform publishers of their intentions, authors are encouraged to include the following rights retention statement in the acknowledgements section of their manuscript and the publisher cover letter even if the article will eventually be made open access via the publisher:
"For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission."
We have a cover letter template that you can use to inform publishers of your intentions.
The list of publishers we have contacted is available here. If a publisher you are considering submitting to is not on the list, please email gro@gold.ac.uk and we will contact the publisher to give them notice of the policy requirements.
What is the author accepted manuscript (AAM)?
Sometimes referred to as the “final-author version”, “final manuscript” or “post-print”, the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) is the final author produced version of your manuscript that has:
- Been peer reviewed.
- Been formally accepted for publication.
- Not yet had the publisher’s final layout, design and typesetting applied.
Publishers will usually send the corresponding author a copy of the AAM (often as a Word document) before a copyright transfer or licence to publish is completed.
Publishers in some disciplines (such as computing) require authors to submit their papers into a template which looks similar to the final published version. For these types of papers, we advise uploading to GRO the final author produced version of the paper before the publisher applies the DOI, copyright year and pagination.
The diagram below illustrates where in the publishing process the AAM emerges.
Image reused under CC BY 4.0 Rhev Lutchman, City University London.
Why apply a Creative Commons licence?
Open access publications are not just free to read - they also make it clear how someone reading that publication can make use of it. One way of doing that is using Creative Commons licences. These licences are internationally recognised, easy to apply and to understand and used for lots of types of published material, not just research publications. They are also machine readable, which helps people find open access material.
A Creative Commons licence specifies the conditions that apply to re-use of that publication and typically require that the authors are credited. The licences allow other people to know how to use a work in an appropriate way without infringing copyright, ensuring creators get the appropriate credit. Creative Commons licences do not replace copyright; they let users of digital works to know what they can and cannot do with that content. It protects the rights of creators, while helping them achieve wide distribution of their work.
Under the licensing system, authors retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work. Creative Commons licences guarantees open access to the publication in the future and prevents third parties from restricting access at a later date. For more information go to the Creative Commons website.
The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence is the chosen default licence in our Research Publications and Copyright Policy as maximises the opportunities for re-use and also ensures compliance with funder and REF open access requirements.
If you think a different licence would be more appropriate for your publication, please see the ‘Is it possible to opt out?’ section.