The Higher Education Funding Councils have issued guidance stating that, in order to be eligible for a future Research Excellence Framework, journal articles and conference proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 will have to be made openly accessible via institutional repositories, with deposit into the repository being made at the time of acceptance for publication.
HEFCE has commissioned the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham to develop a new service to support authors and institutions in meeting the new requirements, building on the current portfolio of SHERPA services (RoMEO, JULIETand FACT).
Research Consulting is currently undertaking a stakeholder consultation on behalf of HEFCE and the CRC in order to inform the specification for this service, and is therefore seeking responses to two short online surveys, one for authors, and another for librarians and research support staff. The links can be found below, and all survey respondents will be entered into a draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher (or another e-retailer of their choice):
- Authors: http://fluidsurveys.com/s/SHERPAauthor/
- Librarians and research support staff: http://fluidsurveys.com/s/SHERPAsupportstaff/
Thank you for taking the time to fill these in – this should take no more than 15 minutes, and your opinions and thoughts are highly valued by the SHERPA/REF team as contributing to defining a successful service.
We are aware that Jisc is launching a separate survey looking at other SHERPA services – RoMEO, JULIET, OpenDOAR, FACT and RSP – to which we hope you will also contribute.
We would also greatly appreciate the help of librarians and research managers in circulating details of the author survey to researchers in their institutions.
The surveys will close at midnight on 28 January 2015, and if you have any general comments or suggestions on the proposed SHERPA/REF service please get in touch.
