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Francis Alÿs: Ricochets at the Barbican – Exploring Creative Commons Licensing for Artists

Jul 26, 2024

“I do not in any way want to commercialize the films. We do it because we love it. And for the vanity of the arts. Putting them into the domain of the Creative Commons is a direct, clear statement”

After a busy day at the Library coalface, last night I headed to the Francis Alÿs exhibition at the Barbican hoping to switch off from work and enjoy a bit of culture.

Alÿs is a Belgian artist based in Mexico working in a wide range of media, including film, painting, photography, performance and video. The Barbican exhibition focuses on a long-term project over the past two decades led by Alÿs and his team of collaborators that documents children’s play around the world. Since 1999, Alÿs has recorded the lived experience of children at play in different contexts and environments in over 15 countries as part of his Children’s Games video series. Now approaching 50 in number, the Barbican exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of the Children’s Games series to date.

The exhibition opens with Imbu, #30 in the series, a mesmerising film of a crowd of children at dusk in the Democratic Republic of Congo mimicking the sound and movement of a swarm of mosquitoes above them.

At the end of the film credits a Creative Commons logo briefly flashed up. I see this logo at least a hundred times a week as part of my work in the Library at Goldsmiths managing our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) and supporting and advocating for open access publication. I initially thought that I was getting a flashback to work and was slightly irritated at the fact that I never seem able to completely switch off from my job. But as I watched more of the films of children at play in Nepal, Denmark, Cuba, Mexico, Iraq, Hong Kong, Morocco, Afghanistan and London, the Creative Commons symbol was displayed every time at the end of the credits, and it was clear that Alÿs is using Creative Commons licensing as a crucial element of his practice.

In my role as Open Access Adviser, I help to support practice researchers in the visual and performing to arts to create an effective digital representation of their research on the GRO repository. I know when speaking to practice researchers that defining and protecting intellectual property in practice research is complex and it is an area that many researchers in the performing and visual arts understandably lack confidence in.

As I spent more time at the exhibition, I began to think that exploring Alÿs’s work would be an interesting route into discussing what Creative Commons licences are, how they can work for artists and practice researchers, and how Alÿs and other artists have found Creative Commons licensing to be beneficial to their work.

What are Creative Commons licences?

Creative Commons is a system of licences for digital content. They provide a way for creators to licence the use of material they create and share. Creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work.

Creators can build a license which suits their needs and authorise the appropriate use of their work. There are six main licences; the more letters in the licence, the more restrictive it is:

  • CC BY (Attribution Licence): anyone can reuse the work as long as attribution is made to the original creator of the work (i.e. they must cite the original work). This allows maximum dissemination, and it enables all kinds of academic and creative reuse.
  • CC BY-SA (Share Alike): the work can be reused for all kinds of purposes, but any newly created work must also be shared under the same licence (e.g. you could not create a new work and then issue it under a more open or more restrictive licence).
  • CC BY-ND (No Derivatives): the work can be reused as is, without modification. This might be useful if the integrity of the original work is important.
  • CC BY-NC (Non-Commercial): all kinds of reuse are permitted as long as they are for non-commercial purposes.
  • CC BY-NC-SA (non-commercial, share alike): re-use permitted only for non-commercial purposes; any newly created work must be shared under the same licence.
  • CC BY-NC-ND: the most restrictive CC licence. It only allows others to freely download and redistribute the work for non-commercial purposes, but not modify or build upon it for any purpose.

Francis Alÿs licences his films CC BY-NC-ND which enables the example below to be shared on this blog. Further examples of Alÿs’s films are available on his website.

Alÿs, F. (2015). ‘Cut’ (CC BY-NC-ND)

The licences allow other people to know how to use a work in an appropriate way without infringing copyright, ensuring creators get the appropriate credit. Creative Commons licences do not replace copyright; they let users of digital works to know what they can and cannot do with that content. It protects the rights of creators, while helping them achieve wide distribution of their work.

Creative Commons licencing underpins the system of open access publication and is now commonly used to licence journal articles, monographs, edited collections, PhD theses and research datasets. Although, the licences can be used for any digital content they are yet to be widely applied to licence work produced by practice researchers in the visual and performing arts.

How do Creative Commons licences work for artists and practice researchers?

Defining and protecting intellectual property rights in practice research can be complex. Practice research is often collaboratively produced and can make use of multimedia documentation which can have particularly complex copyright and licensing implications.

Creative Commons licencing will not be appropriate for every practice research project, but many practice researchers have found that making their work openly available under a Creative Commons licence is the most efficient and ethical route for sharing practice research outputs.

In addition to institutional repositories such as GRO which have been the cornerstone for preserving practice research outputs and making them discoverable, there are many interesting examples of practice researchers making their work available through new open access platforms.

Research Catalogue is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research with much of its content made available under a Creative Commons licence. The platform hosts several open access journals that disseminates artistic research, including the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), Journal of Sonic Studies and HUB — Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society.

Other examples include The Journal of Embodied Research which focuses on the dissemination of embodied knowledge through the medium of video, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Studies a peer-reviewed journal of videographic film and moving image studies, Screenworks  an open access publication of practice research in film and screen media,  PARSE an international artistic research publishing platform, and Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies, a five-year research project exploring Africans’ contributions to contemporary screen worlds and audiovisual cultures that makes content available under a Creative Commons licence.

Francis Alÿs on Creative Commons licensing

Francis Alÿs has spoken about the benefits that Creative Commons licensing brings to his work:

“I do not in any way want to commercialize the films. We do it because we love it. And for the vanity of the arts. Putting them into the domain of the Creative Commons is a direct, clear statement. Also, before I start filming, I always tell all the people involved that they will be able to download and watch the films, that the films will not be commercialized, and that nobody is making money out of this. This makes the relation much healthier.

His long-time collaborator Rafael Ortega added that:

“When you put something in the domain of the Creative Commons, people make it theirs. This is very interesting for me because it puts me into contact with a lot of people. I meet will all kinds of people who work with children or, for instance, visit refugee camps to help children as part of NGO work. Some of these people have used the Children’s Games as a trigger to talk to children in particular situations. A friend of mine works as a psychiatric researcher and uses Children’s Games with some of the patients to talk about their memories of childhood. The series has become something completely and gloriously uncontrollable.” (Claes, G. and Symons, S. (2023). ‘Interview with Francis Alÿs and Rafael Ortega, Nov. 9 2022’, in Claes, G. and Symons, S. (ed.) Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp.51-52)

Although, Creative Commons licensing will not be appropriate for every practice research project, it is inspiring to see artists engaging with open licensing and speaking so eloquently about the benefits it can bring in widening access to their work and enabling groups and individuals to reuse the films in novel ways.

Further help and support

If you want to find out more about open access, Creative Commons licensing and using GRO you can read our LibGuide.

In the Library, we support practice researchers at Goldsmiths to create an effective digital representation of their research on GRO. If you need help or advice on adding your practice research to GRO or would like to arrange a 1:1 training session you can contact gro@gold.ac.uk.

Pieter Sonke, Online Research Collections

New UKRI Open Access policy for monographs – what you need to know, how to comply and how we can help

Nov 24, 2023

UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s)  Open Access policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections comes into effect on 1 January 2024.

If researchers receive funding from UKRI and plan to publish a monograph, an edited collection or a book chapter, they will need to comply with the UKRI open access requirements.

In this post, we will outline the key policy points our researchers at Goldsmiths need to know to ensure compliance and what the Online Research Collections (ORC) team in the Library are doing to help our researchers meet the new requirements.

The monographs policy compliments the UKRI open access policy for peer reviewed research articles which has been in force since 1 April 2022. For information on how to comply with the UKRI open access policy for peer reviewed research articles you can visit our guidance page. We have also created a resource that guides authors through the steps we advise them to take to ensure that their research articles meet the UKRI requirements.

How do I find out more about the policy?

There will be a training event on Thursday 7 December which will summarise the UKRI policy and provide guidance to UKRI-funded researchers on the actions they need to take prior to the submission of a book proposal, as well as licensing requirements, policy exemptions, managing third-party copyright and funding options. You can register for the event  here.

The Online Research Collections (ORC) team in the Library have prepared guidance on the new policy.

The team have also created a guide on open access monographs aimed at all researchers at Goldsmiths.

If you have any questions about how the new policy affects your work, please email gro@gold.ac.uk.

Context

The new UKRI policy builds on earlier open access initiatives that focused on research articles with the aim of improving access to monographs and other long-form publications. Alongside UKRI, both the Wellcome Trust and Horizon Europe/ ERC have brought monographs into scope of their open access policies.

It is expected that that there will be an open access requirement for long-form publications for REF2028. The expectation is that any formal open access requirements for long-form publications will be more flexible than the UKRI policy. When the details of the new REF open access policy are announced, the Online Research Collections team will provide guidance and support to researchers at Goldsmiths.

UKRI acknowledge that open access is less established for monographs than for research articles. In anticipation of the new policy, they have been working alongside JISC to develop new open access publishing models and initiatives for monographs. These activities complement other projects such as COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) that aim to build an effective infrastructure for open access book publishing. UKRI will also be providing dedicated funding to support the new policy through a centralised fund of £3.5 million per year that will open for applications on 28 November 2023.

Policy requirements for monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024

Monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024 (unless a contract has been signed between the author and the publisher before this date that prevents adherence to the policy) which acknowledge funding from UKRI will need to be made open access.

There are two routes to compliance:

  • Making the Version of Record free to view and download on the publisher’s website within 12 months of publication
  • Making the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) free to view and download on a repository such as Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) https://research.gold.ac.uk/ within 12 months of publication. The policy allows the author and publisher to agree the appropriate version to self-archive on a repository.

The open access versions of monographs, book chapters and edited collections must be published under a Creative Commons licence. UKRI has expressed a preference for a CC BY licence, but other Creative Commons licences are permitted. UKRI in collaboration with Jisc have produced a guide on ‘Publishing under the UKRI open access policy: copyright and Creative Commons licences’ which provides advice for UKRI-funded researchers on copyright and licensing.

Exemptions to the policy

Authors should seek to publish open access wherever possible, but UKRI allow a number of exemptions to the policy. Please email gro@gold.ac.uk if you are considering applying for one of the following exemptions:

  • The policy does not apply to trade books (defined by UKRI as an academic monograph rooted in original scholarship that has a broad public audience), scholarly editions, exhibition catalogues, scholarly illustrated catalogues, textbooks, and all types of fictional works and creative writing (including artist’s books).
  • The only appropriate publisher for the publication, after liaison and consideration is unable to offer an open access option that complies with the policy.
  • Reuse permissions for third-party materials cannot be obtained and there is no suitable alternative option available to enable open access publication.
  • Authors have signed a contract with a publisher before 1 January 2024, which doesn’t enable open access in compliance with UKRI’s policy.
  • Where a monograph, book chapter or edited collection is the outcome of a UKRI training grant (including UKRI-funded studentships) open access is encouraged but not required.

Selecting a publisher

Authors are advised to choose the publisher most appropriate for their research, provided UKRI’s open access requirements are met. To ensure compliance, authors should inform their preferred publisher that the publication is in scope of the UKRI open access policy and check if they can offer a compliant open access publishing option prior to the submission a book proposal and before entering into any contractual agreement.

Although open access publication is most commonly associated with journal articles, there are a growing number of options for making monographs, edited collections and book chapters openly available.

A publisher may charge a book processing fee for open access (the typical cost of a book processing is charge is between £5,000 and £12,000 depending on the publisher and the length of the book) or offer free open access supported via alternative funding models, such as subscribe to open models (for example the MIT Press Direct to Open model) or ‘diamond’ open access. Information on the different publishing models for open access monographs is available here.

Many publishers offer open access of the final Version of Record within 12 months of publication either through the payment of a book processing charge or via an alternative funding model. Information on the open access policies of a range of publishers is available here.

Some publishers may not offer open access of the final Version of Record but may permit authors to deposit their Author’s Accepted Manuscript (a version of your accepted manuscript agreed between you and the publisher) at no cost in an institutional repository such as GRO within 12 months of publication. Information on self-archiving monographs and book chapters in a repository is available here.

If your preferred publisher does not have an open access programme, check for other open access options and consider other publishers before considering an exemption. Authors can contact gro@gold.ac.uk for further advice at this stage.

Working with co-authors and publishers

You should inform any collaborators, (such as co-authors or the editor of a collection you are contributing to) about UKRI’s open access requirements. When contributing a book chapter to an edited collection, you should seek agreement with the editor(s) and publisher for the version of record or the AAM of your chapter to be made open access via the publisher or self-archiving in a repository. UKRI recommend authors inform the editor of the collection and the publisher of the UKRI requirements at the start of the collaboration discussions and before entering into any contractual agreement for the publication. If the publisher charges for making the version of record open access, you may be eligible for open access funding from UKRI.

Third-party material

UKRI does not want the use of third-party materials to be a barrier to making a book, edited collection or chapter open access. They have produced a helpful guide aimed at UKRI-funded researchers that offers advice on how to manage third-party copyright, clear permissions, and use third-party content in line with copyright law.

UKRI also allows authors to claim up to £2,000 to clear third-party material used in an open access book, edited collection or chapter. These costs should be accounted for in grant applications, where possible.

A policy exemption is also available in exceptional circumstances where securing permissions for third-party materials is not feasible, and this means open access is therefore not an option.

Applying for open access funding

UKRI will be providing dedicated funding to support open access monographs, book chapters and edited collections. Funding will be provided through a centralised fund of £3.5 million per year held by UKRI that research organisations will apply for. Successful applications for funding will need to demonstrate a substantial link between the publication and UKRI funding. The Online Research Collections team in the Library are in the process of contacting all UKRI-funded researchers with advice on how to apply for open access funding from UKRI.

UKRI will contribute up to the following maximums (inclusive of VAT, where applicable):

  • £10,000 for book processing charges
  • £1,000 for chapter processing charges
  • £6,000 for participation in an alternative open access model (not exceeding the total cost of participation). UKRI will fund up to another £3,000 where there are two or more eligible outputs.

Funding applications will be in two stages. Authors should send the following information to gro@gold.ac.uk  for a Stage 1 application to be made:

  • UKRI funding reference
  • Author name(s)
  • Title of publication (draft)
  • Name of publisher (if known)
  • Estimated open access costs requested from UKRI (if known; including VAT)
  • Anticipated date of publication
  • Statement about relationship to the UKRI funded project or grant, including the author’s role in this
  • Additional comments and administrative information

The Online Research Collections (ORC) team in the Library will then register the output with UKRI using the information provided by the author. UKRI will confirm if a publication is eligible for funding after a Stage 1 application.

Stage 1 applications open on 28 November 2023. A publishing contract does not need to be signed for a Stage 1 application to be made and it is recommended that an application is made as soon as you have a commitment from an editor to publish your book or chapter as this will help UKRI allocate funds for you.

At Stage 2 Goldsmiths provides final confirmation of publication to allow UKRI to release funds.

Checklist for authors

To comply with policy, the key steps you need to undertake are:

  • Inform your publisher, and any collaborators, (such as editor of a collection you are contributing to) about UKRI’s open access requirements.
  • Check your preferred publisher offers a compliant route. If your preferred publisher does not have an open access programme, check for other open access options, and consider other publishers before contacting gro@gold.ac.uk for advice on applying an exemption.
  • Email gro@gold.ac.uk to request that Goldsmiths submit a Stage 1 application if your publisher requires a fee to publish your work open access.
  • Make your version of record or accepted manuscript open access within 12 months of publication and with Creative Commons licence. For any third-party content within copyright, only include the content under the licence or terms under which the rightsholder has released it.
  • Email gro@gold.ac.uk  to request that Goldsmiths submit a Stage 2 application

Can I publish my monograph, book chapter or edited collection open access if I am not funded by UKRI?

At Goldsmiths there is no institutional fund to support the costs of publishing open access for unfunded researchers.

Although open access funding is limited at Goldsmiths, there are alternative open access publishing models that don’t require the payment of a fee to a publisher. In these models, publishers support the costs of making their books open access via alternative sources of funding such as sponsorship, membership or subscription schemes. More information about publishing models that don’t require a fee is available here.

A list of publishers that provide open access with no requirement for the author or institution to pay is available here. Many publishers will allow authors to deposit a version of their monographs, or parts of their monographs, to the GRO repository at no cost, further information is available here here.

Monograph publishing comprises an important share of Goldsmiths’ publishing profile and several current and former researchers at Goldsmiths have published their monographs and edited collections open access. Many of these titles have been published by Goldsmiths Press, that launched in 2016.

Pieter Sonke, Online Research Collections

 

New UKRI Open Access policy – what you need to know, how to comply and how we can help

The new UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Open Access policy comes into effect on 1 April 2022. The policy applies to:

  • peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2022
  • monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024 (unless a contract has been signed between the author and the publisher before this date that prevents adherence to the policy).

If researchers receive funding from UKRI, they will need to comply with the UKRI Open Access requirements.

In this post, we will outline the key policy points our researchers at Goldsmiths need to know to ensure compliance and what the Online Research Collections (ORC) team in the Library are doing to help our researchers meet the new requirements.

Context

The new UKRI policy builds on earlier Open Access initiatives in the UK that have aimed to accelerate the movement towards openness in academic research. The Finch report, published in 2012, paved the way for a significant change in the way academic journals are published. Following the report, Research Councils UK (RCUK) revised their Open Access policy to require journal articles based on research that they have funded, to be published as Open Access. The Wellcome Trust also developed an Open Access policy and the REF2021 Open Access policy followed in 2016. Open Access is now seen as an integral part of research in the UK with the UK Government emphasising the importance of effective open research practices in the UK Research and Development Roadmap published in 2020.

UKRI is a member of cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders who launched a new Open Access publishing initiative called Plan S, which commenced on 1 January 2021. The aim of Plan S is to make immediate, full Open Access a reality and centres on ten key principles. These principles are the framework behind the new UKRI policy. More information on Plan S is available here.

In the wake of Plan S, Read & Publish agreements (also know as transitional agreements) have now emerged to support the transition to Open Access. These are agreements where the costs of publishing Open Access, through the payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC), is included as part of our Library subscription agreement with a publisher. These deals are seen as a way for publishers to transition their subscription journals to full Open Access and will play an important role in enabling our researchers to meet the new UKRI Open Access requirements.

Peer reviewed research articles from 1 April 2022

Peer reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022 which acknowledge funding from UKRI will need to be made Open Access from the date of publication. The policy applies to all peer reviewed research articles and conference papers published in proceedings with an International Standards Serial Number (ISSN).

There are two routes to compliance:

  • Route 1 (Gold Open Access): Making the Version of Record (published version) free and unrestricted to view and download on the publisher’s website from the date of publication
  • Route 2 (Green Open Access): Making the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) free and unrestricted to view and download on a repository such as Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) from the date of publication

All articles must be made Open Access by the date of publication with no embargo period and be published with a CC BY licence unless UKRI has agreed, as an exception, to allow publication under the more restrictive CC BY-ND licence.

A Data Access Statement needs to be included in research articles covered by the policy, even where there is no associated data or where the data is inaccessible. The statement is intended to inform readers where the underlying research materials associated with a paper are available, and how the research materials can be accessed. The statement can include links to the dataset, where applicable and appropriate.

How do I meet the requirements for research articles?

UKRI expect that the significant majority of venues that publish UKRI funded research articles will be able to offer suitable Open Access options to UKRI-funded authors by April 2022 and they emphasise that researchers can publish in the journal or platform they consider most appropriate for their research, provided UKRI’s Open Access requirements are met.

If authors are using route 1 (Gold Open Access) to achieve compliance, there are several options for publication:

  • Publishing an article Open Access via a Read & Publish agreement. As of March 2022, Goldsmiths has agreements in place with SAGE, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and PLoS. Further information about our agreements is available here. JISC are continuing to negotiate further agreements with a range of publishes on behalf of UK academic libraries. They have recently secured a Read & Publish agreement with Elsevier, and we will communicate information about agreements available to authors published by Elsevier and other publishers when they become available.
  • Making use of the block grant we receive from UKRI to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). UKRI funds for paying APCs can only be used if the journal meets the JISC requirements for transformative journals or transitional agreements (authors should email gro@gold.ac.uk at the submission stage for confirmation that a journal requiring an APC payment is compliant with the policy). UKRI favours journals that are part of a transitional Open Access arrangement as they are seen as committing to transitioning from being a subscription journal to a fully Open Access one and therefore help advance the long-term aim of Plan S to shift the focus of academic publishing from the subscription model to making Open Access the default.

If authors are using route 2 (Green Open Access) to achieve compliance, they must include the following set statement provided by UKRI in 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’

The statement will allow authors to post their AAM in a repository such as Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) with a CC BY licence and no embargo regardless of the standard policy of the publisher. This element of the new UKRI policy is aligned with the Plan S ‘Rights Retention Strategy’ which intends to avoid the situation where authors sign exclusive agreements with publishers that inhibit immediate Open Access.

Most journals require an embargo on the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM), and do not allow it to be made Open Access under a CC BY licence. It is therefore essential that authors using this route are clear with their journal at the point of submission what UKRI requires of them in terms of Open Access and that they check that their publication agreement is compatible with UKRI requirements.

Monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024

There is a new requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024 (unless a contract has been signed between the author and the publisher before this date that prevents adherence to the policy) which acknowledge funding from UKRI to be made Open Access.

There are two routes to compliance:

  • Route 1: Making the Version of Record free to view and download on the publisher’s website within 12 months of publication
  • Route 2: Making the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) free to view and download on a repository such as Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) within 12 months of publication. The policy allows the author and publisher to agree the appropriate version to self-archive on a repository.

Long form outputs must be published under a Creative Commons licence. UKRI has expressed a clear preference for a CC BY licence, but the more restrictive Creative Commons licences CC BY-NC and CC BY-ND are permitted if an exception is agreed with UKRI.

In 2022 UKRI will publish further guidance on exceptions around the use of third-party materials where permissions for reuse in an Open Access book cannot be obtained and exemptions where the only appropriate publisher is unable to offer an Open Access option that complies with the policy.

The policy does not apply to trade books (defined by UKRI as an academic monograph rooted in original scholarship that has a broad public audience), scholarly editions, exhibition catalogues, scholarly illustrated catalogues, textbooks, and all types of fictional works and creative writing. However, a trade book is considered to be in scope of the policy where it is the only output from a UKRI-funded research project.

How do I meet the requirements for monographs, book chapters and edited collections?

UKRI’s policy on long-form publications won’t be implemented until 1 January 2024, and much of the guidance on this part of the policy has yet to be released.

UKRI has committed to providing a dedicated fund of £3.5 million per year to support the long-form publications Open Access policy. The process for allocating the funds and the definition of eligible costs is being developed. The funding will be held at UKRI in a central pot, and it is anticipated that the funding will be available via an application process.

Although Open Access publication for monographs is less well developed than for research articles, support for fully Open Access books is on the rise with projects such as COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) and Opening the Future working towards building a strong infrastructure for Open Access book publishing.

In anticipation of the new UKRI policy, JISC are working to develop new Open Access publishing models and initiatives for monographs (for example book processing charges and membership models that support Open Access). We will monitor these developments and communicate them to our researchers at Goldsmiths.

If I am funded by UKRI, what should I do?

Our previous messaging around Open Access compliance for REF2021 emphasised the importance of authors acting upon acceptance, but the new policy will require authors to consider whether a publishing platform offers compliant Open Access options prior to selecting venues for publication.

Given the complexity of the policy we are advising that authors email gro@gold.ac.uk at the submission stage for confirmation that their chosen publishing venue is compliant, and we will offer advice to authors on the next steps they need to undertake.

JISC in collaboration with UKRI is currently developing an online tool that will enable researchers to identify whether a journal offers an Open Access option that complies with the policy. Once this resource is released the process of identifying eligible journals should be a lot easier for authors.

If you want advice on whether the journal or publisher you wish to submit your research to is compliant, please email gro@gold.ac.uk.

Is this the announcement of the next REF Open Access policy?

The UKRI policy is not the announcement of the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) Open Access policy. However, the policies are expected to align and UKRI have made it clear that compliance with their Open Access policy will also ensure compliance for the next REF.

Although the REF 2021 publication period closed on 31 December 2020, researchers should continue to comply with the REF 2021 Open Access policy by depositing the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of journal articles and papers in conference proceedings with an ISSN to GRO within three months of acceptance.

How do I find out more about the policy?

The Online Research Collections (ORC) team in the Library have prepared guidance on the new policy which is available here.

If you have any questions about how the new policy affects your work, please email gro@gold.ac.uk.

Pieter Sonke, Open Access Adviser

Exploring Goldsmiths’ Theses Collection

Over the summer, the Online Research Collections team in the Library, along with our cataloguing colleagues Diana Stevenson and Joanna Martin have been working on a project to make all Goldsmiths theses from 2020 to July 2021 available on our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO). Providing access to our theses from the last two years has been delayed due to a variety of factors relating to COVID-19 so it is great to finally make them available.

The PhD theses we hold are a unique record of the academic, intellectual and research culture at Goldsmiths from the 1960s onwards. Our thesis collection is one of our most heavily used digital collections, so now that our most recent theses are accessible online, we thought it would be a good time to provide an overview of our collection and highlight its richness and diversity.

PhD research at Goldsmiths

In the 1960s and 1970s Goldsmiths rapidly expanded its portfolio of courses and started to offer postgraduate studies and research opportunities across the arts and humanities.

The earliest doctorate thesis that we hold is Marie Cecilia Wragg’s The development of emotional and social maturity in boys and girls in certain grammar, comprehensive and modern schools awarded in 1964. Dr Wragg was an educational psychologist and teacher who worked extensively in England and around the world. During her PhD research Dr Wragg clearly made much use of the Library, noting the help of ‘the assistant librarians at Goldsmiths’ College’ in her acknowledgements. While completing her PhD in the 1960s, she worked at Goldsmiths as a senior lecturer in the Education department and as a Hall of Residence Head. Following the completion of her PhD, Dr Wragg travelled widely in India, writing a number of journal articles about her investigations into educational psychology, teacher training and higher education in the country.

It was only in the 1980s that a large volume of theses started to be produced at Goldsmiths, with the Library holding 114 theses from the decade. In the 1990s, 138 theses were produced and in the 2000s the number had risen to 486, with numbers now averaging around 100 theses per year.

Our theses collection

The Library holds over 1,500 bound copies of theses. Our full collection of hard bound theses is available on Library Search. In normal circumstances, all bound theses on the catalogue can be consulted in the Library but due to COVID-19 restrictions this service is currently suspended.

The requirement to submit both an electronic and bound copy of a thesis has been in place at Goldsmiths since 2010, with our electronic thesis collection held on our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO). In addition to that, we have retrospectively digitised theses from earlier years, as a part of the British Library’s EThOS service . Due to COVID-19 adjustments, PhD candidates in 2020-21 have been asked to submit their final thesis in digital format only.

In total, there are over 1,300 theses available in GRO (these are also accessible through Library Search). To browse our full digital collection on GRO just go to the browse menu and select ‘Item Type’ followed by ‘Thesis’. A range of FAQs on accessing digital theses on GRO is available here.

Moving from a collection of hard bound theses held in our store, to a digital collection accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection has increased the visibility of our thesis collection and reduced barriers to accessing these valuable and unique resources. Providing free, online access also benefits our authors by increasing the reach of their work and the potential that it will be cited, as well as helping to promote their research during the early stages of their academic career.

Highlights from the collection

Our earliest electronic thesis dates back to 1982. Some of our earliest electronic theses from the 1980s include work produced by researchers still associated with Goldsmiths including Alan Pickering, Sophie Day, and Heidi Safia Mirza  , who wrote a short account of her experiences completing a PhD as a single mother in the 1980s which is well worth a read.

Our repository collection covers a huge range of areas and includes creative writing and practice research theses. The collection includes work by a number of former and current Library colleagues, along with theses by notable alumni such as the art historian and broadcaster David Dibosa , the Booker Prize winning author Bernardine Evaristo, the 2021 Turner Prize nominee Daniel Fernandes Pascual , and the joint winner of the Turner Prize in 2019 Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Theses are amongst the most downloaded items in GRO. Over the past year our most downloaded thesis Valerie Welbanks’ Foundations of Modern Cello Technique; Creating the Basis for a Pedagogical Method has been accessed over 3,320 times. Our next most downloaded thesis, Rosa Crepax’s The Aesthetics of Mainstream Androgyny: A Feminist Analysis of a Fashion Trend has 1,470 downloads, followed by Jennifer May Brand’s From Design to Decline: Boosey & Hawkes and Clarinet Manufacturing in Britain, 1879-1986  with 1,268 downloads.

Our list of the most downloaded theses of all time gives a sense of the diverse range of postgraduate research taking place ate Goldsmiths and emphasises the value to authors of making their thesis open access.

Author Title Downloads
Sandra Gaudenzi The Living Documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality in digital interactive documentary 16,432
Andrew Sockanathan Digital Desire and Recorded Music: OiNK, Mnemotechnics and the Private BitTorrent Architecture 13,172
Christopher Brauer Netmodern: Interventions in Digital Sociology 12,852
Jacqueline Cooke Art ephemera, aka “Ephemeral traces of ‘alternative space’: the documentation of art events in London 1995-2005, in an art library” 11,351
Fiona Anne Seaton ’They Opened Up a Whole New World’: Feminine Modernity and the Feminine Imagination in Women’s Magazines, 1919-1939 11,335

Statistics collected 16 August 2021

 Further help and resources

If you wish to explore theses produced outside Goldsmiths, our Open Access Libguide includes links to a range of resources that will help you access theses produced in other UK universities and beyond.

As well as providing access to our PhD collection Library Search also includes many theses from other UK universities that are available through the British Library EThOS service.

For further guidance or questions about accessing our thesis collection, please get in touch with the Online Research Collections team at gro@gold.ac.uk

Pieter Sonke, Online Research Collections team

2021: Year of REF (and some other things), or What’s an Assessment For?

 

 

REF 2021 was completed and submitted earlier this year, in March 2021. The assessment by the REF panels is underway now, with results expected to be announced in Spring 2022.  In the following Goldsmiths Library blog post, Fred Flagg, one of 3 REF Project Officers at Goldsmiths supporting REF 2021, reflects on this colossal undertaking and on the wider picture of rankings and assessments.

For the first Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014), the named year (2014) was the year of the assessment and release of the results. The work of submission was done by the end of 2013 with the results released in December 2014 (with a submission date in late November 2013 and all of the submitted work had to be published before 2014).  For the second REF, 2021 will be both the year of submission and most of the assessment. The REF 2021 results are expected in approximately April 2022.  The deadline was postponed four months until March 31st and the Goldsmiths, University of London submission to REF 2021 was submitted on March 25th (announced and celebrated in a 9th April Goldsmiths all-staff email from David Oswell, Pro-Warden for Research, Enterprise & Knowledge Exchange and Jane Boggan, Research Excellence Manager; email summarised at https://goldmine.gold.ac.uk/AdviceInformation/Pages/REF-2021.aspx (Please note that this link is to an internal Goldsmiths intranet site which is not publicly available).

Many other things were on our minds over 2020 and 2021, and the global SARS-COV2/COVID-19 pandemic put an exercise like the Research Excellence Framework in a harsher light than before.  How do you weigh and prioritise an exercise to measure national research during a global pandemic? There were debates within the academic community throughout 2020 (example of a case for a longer postponement at LSE Impact blog here, and against further postponement at Wonkhe here).  The delay of four months was the biggest mitigation made by Research England, but there were others, mostly allowing for delays caused by the pandemic (REF links here and here).

National assessments like the REF have been accumulating somewhat since the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) was launched as part of the Office for Students in 2015/2016.  The first Knowledge Exchange Framework was completed and published to little fanfare on 1st March 2021 (see dashboard of results here).  Reviews of both the TEF and National Student Survey have already been released this year (with the Subject component of TEF definitively removed, and the NSS largely unchanged for now.  Science minister Amanda Solloway discussed the REF in an October 2020 speech, stating that the reforms following 2016 Stern Review didn’t go far enough and that Research England and its counterparts in Northern Ireland, Scotland & Wales will be starting “a plan for reforming the REF after the current exercise is complete.”

Along with these completed (and anticipated) national reviews, it is worth reflecting on the immense local undertaking REF 2021 has been at Goldsmiths.  Colleagues across all academic departments, in the Library and across Goldsmiths have completed a large amount of difficult work, in circumstances far more difficult than usual.  In the Library Online Research Collections team, as the team that looks after the open-access institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online, we are responsible for the primary source of data on publications by Goldsmiths researchers.  We are currently reflecting on the work behind Goldsmiths’ REF 2021 with the goal of making the next submission as smooth as possible, whenever it rolls around.

Whatever happens with the national reviews and whatever we turn up in our local reflections, the open-access component of the next REF will follow the REF 2021 open access policy for the time being: any research published in a publication with an ISSN will be required to be made open-access within three months of the date of acceptance for publication (following publisher embargo periods as required).  The REF open-access policy is linked to UKRI’s open-access policy, so it is expected to change after UKRI releases the new version (expected ca. Summer 2021).  The UKRI OA policy consultation gives Research England and UKRI a deadline of “no later than six months after the UKRI policy is announced” for the release of the new REF policy.  As the UKRI policy will include a stronger open-access mandate, and is phasing in a new requirement for open-access for books and monographs, it is expected that the new REF policy will also include books and monographs eventually, but not expanding to include them until at least 2024.  This would be consistent with the current relationship between the RCUK (now UKRI) OA policy and the REF OA policy, with more strict open-access requirements for work funded by UKRI than for work submitted to the REF.

For anyone who is curious about a different format of research assessment, the Hidden REF is an alternative inspired by the REF that has recently closed (on 14th May) that plans to release its results in June.  For another thought-provoking take on metrics and assessment, Lizzie Gadd’s recent post at the LSE Impact blog extends the challenge of re-thinking research assessments even further, to considering the value and ethics of university rankings, with some constructive ideas for change included.  National assessments and rankings are not going away, and this observer suspects they are not likely to change drastically anytime soon either.  With all of the work, resources and employment invested in assessment, accreditation processes and rankings, it is still worth asking serious questions about them.

Fred Flagg

Open Access Week, 19 – 25 October 2020

Open Access Week is happening worldwide between 19 – 25 October 2020. It is an annual global event that aims to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access. It also aims to promote the benefits of Open Access and to give practitioners an opportunity to share their experiences and inspire wider participation in the movement.

Open Access LibGuide

To mark this year’s Open Access Week , the Online Research Collections in the Library have created an online guide that provides an introduction to and overview of Open Access. The aim of the guide is to give a comprehensive introduction to Open Access publishing and it supports our commitment to making Open Access as easy as possible for our researchers at Goldsmiths. It is also aimed at students wishing to access Open Access resources, providing links to some of the key Open Access resources and browser tools.

Publisher Open Access Deals

The team have also created an introduction to the Publisher Open Access Deals Available to Goldsmiths Authors. These agreements, commonly known as Read and Publish agreements, combine the Library’s journal subscriptions with Open Access publication, enabling papers with a Goldsmiths corresponding author, to be made Gold Open Access. Goldsmiths currently has deals with SAGE, Springer and Wiley.

Plan S

One of the biggest current issues in Open Access is the implementation of Plan S.

At the end of 2018, cOAlition S – a consortium of research funders (including UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Wellcome Trust among others), supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council – launched a new Open Access publishing initiative called Plan S, which comes into effect on 1st January 2021. Plan S is an initiative that hopes to make immediate, full Open Access a reality by committing to the Open Access publication without embargo of all scholarly publications that result from research funded by public grants.

The team have put together a guide that explains Plan S and its impact on our researchers at Goldsmiths.

Open Access at Goldsmiths

There are articles on various aspects of Open Access on the Library Blog that give a taster of the range of Open Access activities taking place at Goldsmiths, including a reflection on Open Access from the perspective of a postgraduate student at Goldsmiths, Open Access developments in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, a short introduction  on using Open Access Button and Unpaywall to discover Open Access content online, and even an Open Access Limerick .

The Online Research Collections team support and develop Open Access provision at Goldsmiths through our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) and our Open Access journal platform Goldsmiths Journals Online (GOJO).  For all Open Access enquiries, please contact the Online Research Collections team at Goldsmiths gro@gold.ac.uk

Open Access and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Image by Jack Adamson as part of the UN COVID-19 Response, available on Unsplash

Open access to research has been in the news from the beginning of the SARS CoV2 – COVID-19 pandemic and it continues to be a hot topic as the world’s academics and universities grapple with the worldwide emergency. Open access can be hard to define; the best short definition is: “free availability and unrestricted use” (courtesy of open access publisher PLoS and author and academic Peter Suber). Much of the world’s research literature is not freely available and is heavily restricted by copyright, behind the barrier of expensive subscription paywalls, making global research collaboration difficult. Fred Flagg, from the Library’s Online Research Collections team, looks at the open access developments unfolding throughout the year so far in response to the pandemic.

Pre-prints

Open access pre-prints are getting tons of publicity, and rightly so as they enable researchers to share initial information rapidly. Pre-prints are early manuscripts of research outputs released to the public before peer review, and they are one of the founding elements of open access, with the Physics & Mathematics pre-print subject repository ArXiv freely available and widely used since 1991. The Biology subject repository BioRxiv was one of the first places to make available COVID-19 related preprints (starting January 2020). Since pre-prints and working papers (as they are called in the social sciences) are draft versions, it is risky to draw final conclusions from them (for more about pre-prints, see this short article by open access expert Danny Kingsley, and for a list of subject repositories see the Open Access Directory).

Pandemic open access

With most libraries closed (Goldsmiths Library resources available at this Goldsmiths LibGuide) many publishers have been quick to extend access to their journals and e-books which are under paywalls in ordinary times. This “pandemic open access” includes many offers of free access to research publications related to COVID-19. For one list see this Wellcome Trust announcement, and for an example of a subscription article now made freely available by its publisher, see Rhodes, Lancaster & Rosengarten 2020.  There are also publishers providing expanded access to e-books.  For one list of COVID-19 vendor e-book access, see this list by University Information Policy Officers.  Many of these publisher access offers are likely to be temporary, so it is debatable if they count as open access, although “pandemic open access” is still an improvement over paywalls.  Also temporarily, additional large scale open access to digitised books has been made possible by not-for-profit organisations The Hathi Trust and, not without controversy, The Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library (available worldwide, despite the name).

Goldsmiths Research Online open access during the COVID-19 pandemic

By contrast, anything that is available in Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO, https://research.gold.ac.uk) is available permanently, and copyright and permissions for each item are confirmed by the Online Research Collections team in the Library (also known as the GRO team).  Academics at Goldsmiths have been writing and publishing widely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We are adding these pandemic-related items to GRO with the keyword “COVID-19”, and a keyword search currently returns 24 items (including Rhodes, Lancaster & Rosengarten 2020 above, Will Davies in the London Review of Books, Angela McRobbie in the Verso Books blog, and several articles in Discover Society to name just a few).  This number will increase as more is published, and although it is not always possible to provide an open access version, GRO has made several of these available to all by obtaining permissions from authors and publishers.  Of the 24 items tagged with “COVID-19” in GRO, 12 of these have full text copies available now, and more will become available as publisher embargo periods expire in 12 to 24 months.

Library Reps: Introductory session to Open Access

Otto (2012) Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson http://research.gold.ac.uk/6756/ Creative Commons: Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0

The Online Research Collections team in the Library was recently invited to deliver a training session to the Goldsmiths Student Library Reps.

Open Access at Goldsmiths

The concept of Open Access is central to everything that the Online Research Collections team do. Open Access is the process by which online research outputs are made free for anyone to view, read and download, without the need to log in or make a payment. Where possible, Open Access materials should be free of most copyright restrictions.

The team support and develop Open Access provision at Goldsmiths through our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) and our Open Access journal platform Goldsmiths Journals Online (GOJO). Currently, there over 21,00 Open Access items on GRO that can be accessed by anyone in the world with an internet connection and there have been nearly 3 million downloads from the repository since 2006.

Total number of items on GRO 21,053
Total number of Open Access items 7,487
Total number of downloads (all time) 2,998,225

 Open Access for students

In the past, our training and advocacy activities have largely focused on academic staff members and PhD students. Undergraduate and taught postgraduate students have largely been left out of our conversations around Open Access, so this was a great opportunity for us to engage with a new audience.

Our current training activities emphasise the benefits Open Access to researchers and the way that it can improve the global visibility, readership and impact of their work, both within academia and more widely. However, Open Access is also enormously beneficial to students as it offers easy access to research outputs, and they can benefit just as much as those further into their academic careers by knowing how to find, evaluate, and use Open Access resources.

Introducing Open Access to the Library Reps

Our session with the Library Reps started with an introduction to the concept of Open Access and then explored some of the key issues around copyright and licensing. We then demonstrated how to find Open Access resources on GRO and Library Search . We also introduced the Reps to some of the key Open Access resources available and useful browser tools to help them discover Open Access content online such as Unpaywall and Open Access Button .

The session was a really good way of raising awareness of Open Access with a new audience and the team is very enthusiastic about delivering future sessions to our students at Goldsmiths.

Marco Pace, Library Rep for Music, on Open Access

 Marco Pace, the postgraduate Library Rep for Music, attended the session and was invited to reflect on the relevance of Open Access to his studies and its impact on his role as a Library Rep.

As a Masters student, I believe that the session with the Open Access team was very useful in letting me understand an extensive range of resources that are available, whose existence I was not aware of. These databases would have helped me, for instance, preparing the piece of academic writing needed for my application to Goldsmiths: as a mature student who had been several years out of higher education, the only access I had to academic literature was through books I bought. Also, it is important to know that when I leave Goldsmiths I will still have considerable access to specialist research such as PhD theses and Goldsmiths researchers’ output.

Databases such as EThOS, the British Library electronic theses online service, provide me a wealth of resources which are extremely focused, all of which also include in their literature review up-to-date introductions to their topics. As an example, I remember last term struggling to find information contained in a thesis of which I could only access a preview of, while a quick search on this database immediately produced incredibly suited (and free to access) entries that I could have used for my PhD research proposal.

The team offered a thorough explanation of how GRO and Open Access systems in general assist the dissemination of the findings of researchers, and how the world of academic research publications work. As a student considering pursuing a career in academia these are valuable insights, which will also help me strengthen my PhD research proposal – I can more effectively state that my findings would be shared in an openly accessible form.

On this regard, as part of the Student Library Rep Project, I was asked yesterday to add a book to the library which is in fact a published version of a recent PhD thesis. It represents high quality research on a very narrow topic (while I must prioritise items that would be helpful for the most students), and the book in itself is quite expensive: I can now put that request on hold in case more relevant items are requested in the next month, and in the meantime explain to the student who requested it how to access it through Open Access systems.

I believe that Open Access systems and especially GRO should receive more attention from Masters students too, especially in the induction week at the beginning of the academic year when the resources of the library are presented. I would not exclude the idea of mentioning these resources somewhere in the “how to apply” page for postgraduate courses: consider returning students who have been out of academia for a while or students coming from conservatoires where they were never asked to write essays (both applied to me), awareness of these tools would highly simplify the preparation of academic writings, personal statements or research proposals.

-Marco Pace

Open Access and REF: from 1 April

201603-LibraryBlog

From 1 April 2016, HEFCE will require that any peer-reviewed research article or conference proceeding with an ISSN must – to be eligible for REF2021 – be deposited into an institutional repository (i.e. Goldsmiths Research Online, GRO) and made Open Access.

In order that we send out useful, consistent and ultimately compliant information, Goldsmiths requires from now that all research active staff add their manuscripts (peer-reviewed research article/conference proceeding with ISSN) to GRO within 3 months of the final acceptance date
 
What needs to be deposited into GRO?

·      Article details: title, authors, journal
·      Full text: the author accepted manuscript, the final version after peer review and edits but without publisher formatting/pagination

What assistance is there to help staff?

·      The GRO team (James Bulley, Ozden Sahin and Jeremiah Spillane) are managed by Andrew Gray, Academic Services Librarian (a.gray@gold.ac.uk, 020 7919 7161)
·      They will check publisher permissions, apply relevant embargoes, input additional publication details and metadata, record issues and ‘exceptions’
·      Advice, training and assistance are available in person, via email gro@gold.ac.uk or over the phone (020 7919 7166)
·      Detailed information on the policy will be added to the Research & Enterprise website in the next month. Current information is available at http://research.gold.ac.uk/openaccess.html 
·      Tracy Banton, Head of Research Office, will be able to answer any REF queries that are not GRO-related ( t.banton@gold.ac.uk, 020 7919 7772)

Goldsmiths Research Online – August 2015 Update

GROBlog-2015.08

Overview

40,585 items were downloaded from GRO this month. The countries that downloaded the most were Germany, United Kingdom and United States.

This month’s top downloaded item is a PhD thesis by Sandra Gaudenzi from the Centre for Cultural Studies.

PhD theses are again the most popular items in GRO. Two of the three top downloaded items this month were PhD theses:

The Living Documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality in digital interactive documentary (2013) by Sandra Gaudenzi. (244 downloads)

Journalism: a profession under pressure? (2009) by Tamara Witschge and Gunnar Nygren. (211 downloads)

“On an Equal Footing with Men?” Women and Work at the BBC 1923-1939  by Catherine Murphy (189 downloads.)

New in GRO This Month

The GRO staff have been depositing the retrospective research outputs by faculty across the College this month. Research output that have been recently added to GRO can be found from the main GRO page

More about GRO Stats

We are publishing brief reports every month if you are interested in seeing GRO’s monthly upload and download activity. You can access the August report here.

Deposit Your Work

If you are an academic or a PhD student at Goldsmiths, you can deposit your research outputs on GRO. If you need any help or guidance, please email the GRO team at gro@gold.ac.uk.