The theme of this year’s Open Access week is “what are the benefits of making scholarly outputs openly available”.

Although the benefits of Open Access publishing are numerous, one crucial benefit is eligibility for the next REF exercise. In the UK in order to be eligible for submission to REF 2021 the following conditions must be met:

• The authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts (Author’s Accepted Manuscripts) must be deposited in an institutional/subject repository (such as STORRE) within 3 months of  acceptance  for publication.
• Deposited material should be discoverable and free to read and download (although the policy allows repositories to respect publishers’ embargo periods).
• The requirement applies to journal articles (including systematic reviews) and papers from peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
• The policy does not apply to monographs, book chapters, other long-form publications, working papers, creative or practice-based research outputs, or data.
• The policy applies to research outputs accepted for publication after 1 April 2016.

Complying with the REF OA Policy

To comply with the REF policy, Stirling researchers should submit their publication details to the Research Management System (RMS) and attach the full-text file of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts within 3 months of acceptance for publication. The file will be automatically copied from RMS to STORRE, the University’s institutional repository.

RMS help guides are available here

If you have any difficulties, please contact Betsy Fuller, a.k.a. the repository librarian, at repository.librarian@stir.ac.uk.

Lisa Haddow

Library and Archives Research Support Manager