Research Publications & Copyright Policy (2021)
This policy supersedes and updates the first University of Edinburgh Research Publications Policy passed by University Court in 2010.
Academic staff at the University of Edinburgh have traditionally, when publishing research outputs, exercised an independent right to assign or give away their scholarly works (in addition to the University’s right). This has enabled the current process of the corresponding author assigning copyright to publishers, which results in many journal articles and scholarly works now being under partial or complete ownership by the academic publishers.
In order for the University and its researchers to comply with funder requirements, and to enable the University to disseminate its research and scholarship as widely as possible, whilst enabling its staff to publish their work in a journal of their choice the University of Edinburgh will adopt the following mandatory policy which applies to all staff on research contracts :
The key parts of the policy which starts in full on 1 Jan 2022 are described below:
Upon acceptance of publication each staff member with a responsibility for research agrees to grant the University of Edinburgh a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, or a more permissive licence.
After granting the licence each staff member with a responsibility for research will provide an electronic copy of the accepted manuscript (AM) of each article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the University of Edinburgh in an appropriate electronic format (such as PDF).
The University of Edinburgh will deposit the AM in a digital repository, with article metadata usually available immediately upon deposit and the AM being made accessible to the public on the date of first online publication (or the conference end date for conference proceedings) under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.
This policy applies to all scholarly articles, including conference proceedings, authored or co-authored while the person is a staff member of The University of Edinburgh, which includes any third party content where rights in that content have been secured. Any articles submitted, or accepted, for publication before the adoption of this policy are exempt.
Whilst the policy does not apply to monographs, scholarly editions, text books, book chapters, collections of essays, datasets, or other outputs that are not scholarly articles, the University strongly encourages researchers to make them as openly available as possible.
The University recognises that there may be situations outwith a staff members control where it is difficult to follow this policy exactly. In this case it will be permissible for staff to voluntarily opt out of the requirement for immediate open access upon publication, or the assignation of a CC BY licence. However this may cause the research output to be non-compliant with funder policies. To opt-out we simply ask authors to contact the Scholarly Communications Team with details of the publication.
This policy requires all University of Edinburgh research outputs to be easily identified as being from the University of Edinburgh in order to ensure full credit is given in bibliometric searches carried out for the assessment of research, league tables or other purposes. All researchers should use an address in the form below when submitting an item for publication. As a bare minimum the phrase “The University of Edinburgh” must be used, but the following format is preferred:
<Centre/Unit> , <Institute/School> , <The University of Edinburgh> , <Postal Address>.
The University of Edinburgh strongly encourages researchers, if they have not already done so, to claim, create and populate their ORCID record. This can be done automatically via information already held in the institutional repository. The University of Edinburgh then asks researchers to use their ORCID in research outputs.
To comply with the policy we recommend that future submissions should include the following text in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and any cover letter/note accompanying the submission:
For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission
Furthermore we recognise that other members of the University community - for example, professional service staff, teaching staff, and Research Postgraduate students - also publish research outputs and may wish to voluntarily opt-in to the policy. Please contact the Scholarly Communications Team for information on how to do this, or if you have any follow up questions.
Further help and information
Scholarly Communications Team
Contact details
- Email: scholcomms@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
Information Services
Floor F East, Argyle House
3 Lady Lawson Street- City
- Edinburgh
- Post Code
- EH3 9DR
Availability
You can book a one-to one video consultation with an expert from our team. If you want to find out more about open access (journals, funding, policies etc ), Copyright & Intellectual Property, General publishing activities (request an ISBN or DOI), or research metrics (using Web Of Science or Scopus) please contact our team via email to book a session at a time that suits you.