What do the new UK #OpenAccess (#OA) policies mean for authors? | Elsevier Connect

April will be a busy month for open access, particularly for UK authors. On April 1, new open access policies come into effect at the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK (RCUK). All eyes are on the UK to see how successful its new approach will be. As the political discussions continue, we thought it was important for UK researchers — and everyone else — to understand what exactly the policies are and how authors can comply with Elsevier journals ... To help authors understand the details, the Publishers Association has published an author decision tree. The tree outlines three routes for authors wanting to publish UK publically funded research.  1. The first route is to publish in a journal that is either open access or has an option to publish open access.  Authors can use funds provided by Research Councils UK or the Wellcome Trust to pay for publication fees associated with publishing open access. Publishing this way is referred to as Immediate Gold OA in the decision tree.  2. The second route applies when their journal of choice offers open access but the authors do not have funds available to pay the publication fee. In this case, the policy states that authors can publish in a subscription journal and — after an embargo period of at least 12 months (for science, technology and medicine) or at least 24 months (for humanities and social sciences) — self-archive and post their manuscript on their institutional repository. This is referred to in the decision tree as Green OA after 12-24 months ... 3. The last route is for authors whose journal of choice does not have an option to publish open access. In this case, in order to be compliant with UK policies, the publisher should permit authors to self-archive and post their manuscripts on their institutional repository within six months of publication for science, technology and medicine or 12 months for humanities and social sciences. This is referred to in the decision tree as Green OA after 6 months . Elsevier supports all three options, and we are currently deploying options 1 and 2 across all of our journals. We offer option 1 in open-access journals and via open articles for all authors, and option 2 with embargos of 12-48 months for authors funded by the Research Councils UKand the Wellcome Trust ... Elsevier publishes over 35 open-access journals and provides the option for authors to publish open access in more than 1,500 established journals via our open-access articles. In our open-access publications, we now give all authors the choice of three Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-NC-ND). The article publishing fee is journal-specific and ranges from $500 to $5,000 to reflect the diversity and range of Elsevier journals.  Elsevier is actively engaged with the research community and is committed to providing authors with a choice of options that can be tailored to their publishing needs."