Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework

opportunity to respond to the issues you raise ... In your letter, you ask for an explanation of why we selected the acceptance date as the date of deposit. There are a number of reasons for this, as set out in the outcomes 

document published in April and in the FAQs we published in July. To reiterate, we know that policies that specify deposit on acceptance are more effective than those that do not. Authors have their manuscripts to hand when their paper is accepted and are most engaged with the publication process at that point. The date of acceptance is always 

unambiguous and verifiable, whereas the date of publication is often not. It was a natural and straightforward decision to require authors to deposit their papers in a repository at the point of acceptance ... You set out two arguments why the date of publication might be preferable. Both of these arguments rest on technical matters, and I will take these in turn. Your first argument is that repositories need to be able to calculate the embargo from the publication date, not the deposit date. By and large this is true, and would be true no matter when the output were deposited. It is therefore highly undesirable for there to be any link between the date that a repository record becomes accessible and the date that the output is deposited ... You set out two arguments why the date of publication might be preferable. Both of these arguments rest on technical matters, and I will take these in turn. Your first argument is that repositories need to be able to calculate the embargo from the publication date, not the deposit date. By and large this is true, and would be true no matter when the output were deposited. It is therefore highly undesirable for there to be any link between the date that a repository record becomes accessible and the date that the output is deposited ... I'd like to make a few additional points here. The most important point is as follows: it might be desirable for deposited manuscripts to have a complete metadata record that matches the publication’s metadata perfectly, but this is not necessary for open access, nor is it necessary for compliance with the REF policy. The journal title, paper title and author 

names are enough to allow discovery by search engines, to prevent duplicates, and to allow any CRIS to feed metadata across ..."