Open access compliance: supporting Springer Nature authors - BioMed Central blog
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-09
Summary:
"In the small number of cases where articles fail to achieve compliance on publication, our new post-publication checks are designed to identify non-compliant licence choices and catch any failures in PMC deposition, making sure that articles can be made compliant as quickly as possible.
As a starting point for our checks, we went through the records of our OA publications from the past two years, identifying cases where the authors’ choice of OA licence would not allow them to meet the requirements of their research funder’s OA policy. We’ve been working with these authors to re-publish their papers under a CC BY licence, allowing them to fully meet their licence requirements of their funders. We’ve also taken measures to verify that all OA articles in indexed journals are available in PMC in their final published format, and are re-depositing articles where issues are identified. We will be working to carry out these post-publication checks on regular basis to so that we can be sure all our authors can achieve compliance with every OA policy in all possible cases, even after publication.
The success of our efforts to date is reflected in the Wellcome Trust’s recent analysis of OA compliance among 2015/16 recipients of Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) APC funding. Average compliance was at 91% across all publishers, and Springer Nature reached 96% compliance (97% when cases of misreporting where no APC was paid to Springer Nature are removed). We’re proud of the progress made from previous years, though we recognise that there’s still room for improvement.
As one of the first signatories of the Wellcome Trust’s publisher requirements, which come into effect this April, Springer Nature is committed to improving levels of OA compliance, and not only for those authors supported by the Wellcome Trust. By taking these steps we hope to reduce the burden of OA policy compliance for authors, and to assist funders and institutions in ensuring that the research they have supported is made openly accessible in the manner that they intended."