OpenAccess@StAndrews

Last week the St Andrews Research Repository reached a new milestone: 8000 items!

The last major content milestone we celebrated was when we reached 5000 items, this was back in February 2015. The blog post we wrote in recognition of this mentioned that the upsurge in activity was largely down to research funders and HEFCE (the folks behind the Research Excellence Framework) requiring authors to self-archive their publications. 17 months on and this trend is continuing.

In April 2016 the Research Excellence Framework open access policy came into effect (to find out more read our previous blog post). This means that to ensure compliance with the policy authors must deposit their accepted manuscripts for journal articles and conference proceedings into the University's research information system (Pure). To ensure all St Andrews researchers are aware of the policy we have been working hard to deliver the message: 'Act on acceptance: deposit in Pure'. This slogan, which is em…

Wellcome Open Research is a new initiative which allows researchers to publish their results faster and more transparently. The service is powered by F1000Research which is an innovative publishing platform that uses post-publication peer-review to eradicate publication delays. By using this platform Wellcome research will be published immediately on submission (presumably with the status 'awaiting peer-review' if it follows closely the F1000 processes), this is then followed by formal peer-review. Wellcome also say that peer-review will be transparent and open, with referees' reports and names published alongside the paper. This is said to encourage more constructive feedback, as well as allowing reports to be cited.

Besides publication speed, another advantage of using WOR (or F1000 for that matter) is that there is wider scope for the sorts of material that can be published. As well as standard narrative articles researchers can also publish negative results and dataset…