1.
The UK Scholarly
Communications Licence –
supporting academics with
open access
Dr Torsten Reimer
Head of Research Services
Torsten.Reimer@bl.uk / @torstenreimer
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8357-9422
ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) conference
London, 08 December 2016

2.
www.bl.uk 2

3.
www.bl.uk 3
Context: funder open access mandates
• Funding Councils: manuscripts of scholarly articles
deposited within three months of acceptance
(or published as immediate ‘gold’ open access)
• RCUK: all scholarly articles open access by 2018,
preference for ‘gold’ OA
• Medical charities: all articles OA (EPMC deposit)
• H2020: all scholarly articles OA
 Policy stack: entirely possible to make article OA
and only meet some or even no requirements

4.
www.bl.uk 4
Problem: copyright transfer & embargos
https://www.flickr.com/photos/143601516@N03/27571322193/
CC BY 2.0 Mary Henderson

5.
www.bl.uk 5
UK-SCL Model
• Research organisation retains a non-exclusive licence
• Licence allows to
– make the peer-reviewed manuscript publicly available
– assign it a Creative Commons licence
– sub-license all authors and their host institutions
• No action from author required
• The licence is binding on the publisher, provided
the publisher has previous knowledge

6.
www.bl.uk 6
Workflow
Steps 2-4 happen already (but with embargo restrictions / different licensing)
Step 1 only required once
Consortium
informs
publishers
Author signs
copyright
transfer form
on acceptance
Author
deposits at
(institutional)
repository
Manuscript
made available
(CC BY ND)
on/shortly after
publication

7.
www.bl.uk 7
• Model originally (2008) developed at Harvard
• Now adopted to UK legal and policy context
• Process originally led by Imperial College London
(Chris Banks & Torsten Reimer)
• Now UK-wide initiative, involving ~70 institutions

8.
www.bl.uk 8
A few points
• A transitional solution until a sustainable OA model emerges
• Does not restrict academics: they can still publish in journal
of choice, regardless of whether it supports compliant OA
• Academics can request a waiver for specific outputs
• Aim is to help academics, not to fight publishers
– Open Access is increasing citations
– Universities don’t have to blacklist non-compliant journals
– Publishers can develop new business models

9.
www.bl.uk 9
Imperial College citation data
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
2015 2014 2013 2012 2011
Open Access: In Spiral and/or DOAJ
Likely to be Open Access: In Europe
PubMed Central only
Possibly Open Access: In arXiV only
Not known to be in an Open Access
Source
Average citations for articles in
journals published 2011-2015
Citations sourced from Scopus

10.
www.bl.uk 10
Next steps
• UK-SCL steering group just been formed (representatives
from Bristol, British Library, Cambridge, Edinburgh,
Imperial, Jisc, Kent, Nottingham, Sussex, UCL)
• Institutions preparing for implementation in 2017