The Health Research Board (HRB) supports and promotes research which will improve people’s health, patient care and health service delivery. One of the main outputs of this research is new ideas and knowledge, which the HRB expects its researchers, both clinical and non-clinical, to publish in high-quality, peer-reviewed journals.
The HRB has a fundamental interest in ensuring that the availability and accessibility of this material is not adversely affected by the copyright, marketing and distribution strategies used by publishers (whether commercial, not-for-profit or academic).
The HRB supports the principle that ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research should be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable. Such published research output must be subject to rigorous quality assurance through effective peer review mechanisms. With advances in internet publishing, the HRB seeks to encourage initiatives that broaden the range of opportunities for quality research to be widely disseminated and freely accessible.
The HRB moved to a mandatory Open Access policy as of the 1st January 2010 and now:
- Requires authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free.
- Requires electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal after 1st January 2010, which are supported in whole or in part by HRB funding, to be made available through UKPMC as soon as possible following the date of final publication.
- Encourages authors to archive research papers accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal before the 1st January 2010, which are supported in whole or in part by HRB funding, to be made available through UKPMC as soon as possible following the date of final publication;
- Encourages authors and publishers to license research papers such that they may be freely copied and re-used (for example for text and data-mining purposes), provided that such uses are fully attributed.
The HRB encourages all HRB-funded researchers to make all articles freely available on the UKPMC on the date the article is published. However, a number of the mainstream journals and publishers do not currently have an open access policy and often have restrictive copyright clauses. These journals request a fee of between €1,000 - €2,500, on top of publications costs already incurred by the researchers, to allow manuscripts to become freely available on the date of publication. The HRB will not provide additional funds to cover these costs, although this is currently under review. When articles are published in these journals the manuscripts must be self archived in UKPMC following the embargo period specified by the journal or publisher.
For further information on copyright, fees and embargo periods please use the following links:
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/Guides-and-FAQ/index.htm
To facilitate Open Access of its research, the HRB became a ‘Phase 1’ member of the UK PubMed Central repository (http://ukpmc.ac.uk/) in January 2010.
Launched in January 2007, UKPMC is a free-to-access digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences research. As of November 2009, it holds over 1.7 million full text articles. The ambition of the repository is to become the information resource of choice for European biomedical and health research communities ('Europe PubMed Central'.) Key future developments of UKPMC include providing the functionality – through text and data mining technologies – to integrate research articles with a range of other online sources, such as gene, protein and chemical compound databases, and to integrate a range of bibliographic databases – including Medline, Patents and Agricola – into a single, seamless discovery tool.
Our ‘Phase 1’ membership of UKPMC provides HRB-funded researchers with free access to a manuscript submission system that allows them to archive their papers in the UKPMC repository. ‘Phase 1’ of UKPMC is based on a simple 'Pay-As-You-Go' model in which the HRB is charged a small fee for each author manuscript deposited (to cover the cost of converting the manuscript to XML), thus facilitating HRB-funded researchers to self-archive publications where copyright allows.
The Wellcome Trust, leaders of the UKPMC, will create personal accounts for currently-funded researchers providing them with access details to the UKPMC. Researchers will be able to login and manually self archive their manuscripts in line with journal and publisher copyright conditions. The UKPMC also provide a supportive helpdesk (ukpmc(at)bl.uk) guiding and managing users though the depositing process.
