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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.

Publishing in a fully Open Access journal. These are journals with no subscription element and are listed on the Directory Open Access Journals.

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

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

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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 31^st and the Goldsmiths, University of London submission to REF 2021 was submitted on March 25th (announced and celebrated in a 9^th 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 1^st 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 14^th 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

Guidance on making the most of the library’s eBook collection.

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I’ve been working in my role as Acquisitions Assistant, at Goldsmiths Library, for 2 years now. Prior to starting this role, I assumed I had a reasonable understanding of what eBooks are, and how they compare to print books and other online resources offered by an academic library.

I soon realised that eBook publishing is complex and getting the most out of the hosting websites’ features, or identifying licensing restrictions, is not always straightforward. I’ve written this blog post and an eBook License Guide to highlight some of the things I’ve discovered.

The role of the eBook has never been as fundamental, to the support of learning and research, as it has been during the pandemic. Though it would be unfair to expect online resources to resolve all the issues that arose from library closures, and limited access to physical collections, there have been significant problems with eBook provision, that ought to be rectified.

One critical issue is the cost of eBooks, which has been well documented over the past year. If you haven’t already, please read and sign the open letter asking the UK Government to investigate the practices of the academic eBook publishing industry. Some publishers have chosen to increase eBook prices during the pandemic, or only offer key texts to libraries as part of expensive subscription packages.

It is clear that most academic libraries prefer to purchase permanent (aka perpetual) licenses for specific eBooks, rather than paying for packages, which may have a few key texts bundled in with less popular or relevant titles. Another inescapable problem is that many titles, particularly those published before the 21^st century, have never been available as eBooks, and certain subject areas, such as art and design, offer limited availability for recent publications.

There is still a tremendous amount of content out there, and it is always worth checking the selection of open access eBooks, available free of charge, including the UCL Press collection. Goldsmiths’ students and staff also have access to eBooks via Senate House Library.

The Goldsmiths Library catalogue acts as a gateway to the available eBook collections, but the websites that host eBook content vary greatly in terms of layout, functionality and access restrictions. Some eBooks are laid out like print books, while others are viewed online as a continuous body of text.

You may have more experience of reading eBooks on an eReader, but academic eBooks are not always compatible with these devices. It may be necessary to download specific software and even then access to full eBook downloads are often time limited. More information on using the websites of the library’s main eBook providers, Proquest Ebook Central and VLeBooks can be found on the eBooks Libguide.

The eBooks available via these 2 providers, alongside EBSCO eBooks, will typically have some Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions, that may limit the number of users that can access a book at the same time, limit the loan length of a full download, or the percentage of the book that can be printed or copied.

Other websites, particularly those hosting content from university press publishers, offer fewer restrictions, and it is often possible to download the full eBook, in PDF format, to keep permanently. An excellent example of this is the Duke University Press collection, for which Goldsmiths Library offers access to all titles.

For reading list materials, it is always worth planning ahead as some eBooks, like their print siblings, will have limited availability at the times when they are most needed by other students on your course. Digitised versions of essential chapters may be available to download via the module’s online reading list. If your reading list specifies a chapter or section to read, it is also advisable to check if that part of the eBook can be downloaded, as a PDF, using the copy or print features on the hosting website.

For guidance on identifying the type of eBook license the library provides, and the restrictions of use, an eBook License Guide is now available on the library webpages. It can be a confusing and at times frustrating topic, so if you have any questions, or specific accessibility requirements, please get in touch with the library for additional support.

Nick Leigh

Open Access and the COVID-19 Pandemic

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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

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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 Button and Unpaywall

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There are few more frustrating things for researchers than finding a fantastic piece of research and then being shut out of reading it by a paywall. If your university library doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal, you might just give up, assuming you can’t get access.

However, there are a couple of tools out there that might be able to help you get free, legal access to paywalled articles.

Open Access Button is a free, open source tool that can be used online via the website or as a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. If you’re online, just enter an article URL, DOI, PMID ID, Title or Citation.

If the article is available, you’ll be provided a link to where it can be accessed (often an institutional repository):

Alternatively, if you’ve downloaded the extension for Chrome or Firefox, just visit the article page on the journal’s website and click the OA button in your browser –

For example, the article below is not part of Goldsmiths’ subscriptions, therefore would theoretically need to be purchased to be read:

Clicking on the Open Access Button shows its availability elsewhere:

Unpaywall is a newly launched browser extension developed by Impactstory, a service that provides altmetrics to researchers, helping them measure and share the impacts of research outputs – not just traditional forms of publications such as journal articles, but also datasets and blog posts – where measuring impact has always been trickier.

The browser extension can be downloaded for Chrome and Firefox and allows you to find free, full text versions of articles, where they exist, with one click.

Below is another article that we would not have access to via Goldsmiths:

Look to the right and you’ll see a green circle with an unlocked padlock – click on this to be directed to the free, full text version:

LSE Impact Blog recently ran a piece on Unpaywall and its objectives, but it also provides a brief overview of the tools that are available to unlock research. For example, if you search on PubMed, there’s a LinkOut option, which finds copies of articles in institutional repositories. Recent articles in Nature and The Chronicle of Higher Education also highlight the benefits and successes of these tools. So next time you find an article and you’re being asked for extortionate sums of money for access, try Open Access Button or Unpaywall.

The Curious Case of the CICAM Cloth

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Goldsmiths Textile Collection (part of Special Collections & Archives) houses an array of eye catching & intriguing fabric based objects. From embroideries to cultural significant fashion garments, many of these items have been collected over time with the intention of inspiring creative and academic imaginations from a variety of disciplines. As this blog post will attempt to explore, many of the objects housed within the Textile Collection have a rich cultural and social history that extends far beyond the first impression.

A problem that many academic researchers will no doubt be familiar with is attempting to analyse the authentic story at the heart of a matter. Many an academic have scratched their heads upon finding that deeper inspection of a subject sometimes ends up complicating the matter at hand rather than resolving it. This sort of quandary is an everyday occurrence during research, and the objects based in the Textile Collection are no less exempt from such issues around history and identity. Such is the case for the subject of this blog post, a highly colourful waxed cotton print from Cameroon. This particular object gets quite significant amount of attention here in the Textile Collection, thanks in no small part to an attractive and somewhat psychedelic colour scheme, with a fiery orange hue that evokes vivid sensations of warmer climates south of the equator. Amongst the blazing backdrop is a highly presidential looking figure with the text ‘Republique Unie Du Cameroon/United Republic of Cameroon’, ‘JCNU’ and ‘YCNU’ sitting below it. A small insignia of ‘CICAM’ along the borders of the cloth gives some indication as to who the manufacturers might have been, or perhaps the organisation who might have commissioned production of the cloth.

As far as actual historical detail goes, this is where things get a bit more puzzling for the enigmatic wax cloth. As is sometimes the case with objects donated to archives, we don’t actually have much knowledge of the object’s provenance beyond that. So visual information of the cloth is all we initially have to go on. Crucially, we didn’t know who the presidential figure might be, the year the cloth was made or what it was specifically commemorating. The amount of gaps in the cloth’s story leaves the exact intention somewhat ambiguous, so equal measures of luck, intuition and detective work would be needed in order to ascertain more. Luckily, there is a lot of information on the cloth that can be garnered with the naked eye, and so this was as good a place as any from which to proceed.

Firstly we could arguably identify the cloth as being from Cameroon, as it bears the commemorative text of United Republic of Cameroon – the functioning government for the nation since 1972. Researching the cloth’s manufacturer, CICAM (Cotonnière industrielle du Cameroun), reveals it to be Cameroon’s national textiles company. This confirms both the origin and stately significance of it as an historical object. The cloth is likely commemorative in nature, as it seems to be celebrating both a public figure and an institution from Cameroon. These particular details seemed like a worthwhile place from which to proceed an investigation.

An internet search of ‘Cameroon commemorative cloth’ reveals that cloth making is a popular activity across the sub-Saharan continent, and has a particularly strong following in Cameroon. According to Tommy Miles from tomathon.com, they are referred to interchangeably as Wax Prints, Pagnes or Batiks. As he explains:

I’m using the French term ‘Pagne‘ as sometimes they are called “Pagnes commeratifs”. Coming from Portuguese, pagne really describes the cut of cloth not the patterns or content. It has come to be one of several terms used to denote these brightly colored, intricately designed, and socially significant cotton fabrics produced and worldwide, and especially throughout tropical Africa. In West Africa, these tend to be “Fancy” (i.e. cheaper, one sided) mass produced “roller” prints on cotton. Also known as Wax prints (like the more expensive double sided Waxes, by companies like Vlisco), and occasionally as “Batiks” (which they are not), the names come from the production process. Batiks use hand painted wax to mask off areas from dye. Most roller prints use resins to achieve this effect, but retain the vein like “crinkles” characteristic of hand printed fabrics with wax fixer, a technique also known as starch resist or wax resist. Machine made, they feature repeating patterns rolled onto a long cotton cloth, usually 46 or 47 inches wide. The forms and design traditions are ubiquitous in West Africa. The slightly different “khanga” form of similar cotton fabrics is popular in East Africa and points south.

Tom’s description is useful in providing us with important information for our investigation. He provides detail into the elaborate creative processes that go into producing a commemorative cloth, as well as describing their cultural importance for establishing historical events.

Returning to the visual details of the cloth, it seemed necessary to examine other details so as to get further indications about whom the presidential figure previously described might be. The text of ‘JCNU’ and ‘YCNU’ seems to be politically significant to the design of the cloth. Searching through library catalogues, Churchill Ewumbue-Monono’s Youth and Nation-building in Cameroon (2009) holds some answers as to what these acronyms might represent. JCNU and YCNU interchangeably to refer to the youth wing of Cameroon’s National Union (CNU). The youth party was set up by the CNU’s first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo in 1966, so it’s possible he may be the figure depicted on the cloth.

Former & Current Presidents of Cameroon Ahmadou Ahidjo & Paul Biya

However, the image isn’t a clear match for the one on the cloth so we couldn’t be positive. Furthermore, the cloth seems relatively modern and colourful in comparison to others from Ahidjo’s presidency. However, his successor Paul Biya, could also possibly be the figure in the wax cloth (albeit without the ubiquitous moustache). Biya took the presidency of Cameroon under somewhat controversial circumstances and remains in control to present day. Despite being involved in various scandals throughout his presidency, Biya has expressed a commitment to the JCNU/YCNU. In 1984 Biya began the roll out of a brand new youth policy for Cameroon. This included a New Deal agreement geared towards getting the youth of Cameroon into employment. It’s highly possible that the cloth was manufactured around this period to commemorate Biya’s new hopes for the youth of Cameroon.

Unfortunately, this is as far the investigation into the wax cloth has been able to get. We are unable to provide an exact photo match with the image on the wax cloth, making identification and provenance problematic once more. On the other hand, a high volume amount of information has been pieced together using some highly disparate sources. This information has led to the accumulation of knowledge about a moment in Cameroon’s national history. By getting us to explore further into this particular moment in time, the CICAM wax cloth is very successful in its function as a commemorative object. It demonstrates that the process of research can be a highly enlightening experience in lots of unexpected ways, and that objects of inquiry can be transformative in their effect on reseachers.

If anyone has any more precise information on the Cameroon Commemorative Cloth then we would be very excited to hear from you, so we can add more to the origin story of this unique object. Alternatively you wanted to view the wax cloth or any of our other wide variety of items in person, then contact the Textile Collection at textiles@gold.ac.uk for more details. Opening times are Tuesday – Thursday, 11 – 5.00 pm.

By Jack Mulvaney

Goldsmiths Research Online – August 2015 Update

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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.

Goldsmiths Research Online – May 2015 Update

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Overview

49,667 items were downloaded from GRO this month. The countries that downloaded the most were United Kingdom, Germany, and United States.

This month’s top downloaded item is “Journalism: a profession under pressure?” a paper co-authored by Tamara Witschge, former research associate at the Department of Media and Communications’ Leverhulme Media Research Centre. Witschge’s paper looks at the changing aspects of the profession of journalism, and how these affect the autonomy of journalists.

The three most popular items in GRO this month were:

Journalism: a profession under pressure? (2009) by Tamara Witschge and Gunnar Nygren (377 downloads).

Evaluating the theory of executive dysfunction in autism (2004) by Elisabeth L. Hill. (376 downloads)

FLOSSTV Free, Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS) within participatory ‘TV hacking’ Media and Arts Practices (2012) by Adnan Hadziselimovic (288 downloads).

New in GRO This Month

Research outputs available on GRO range from book chapters to music compositions, from artworks to journal articles. Here is a small selection from the recent deposits:

Gustav Kuhn, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, has recently published an Open Access paper entitled “A framework for using magic to study the mind” in Frontiers in Psychology. You can download the full text here: http://research.gold.ac.uk/11634/

Manuel Ramos Martinez from the Department of Visual Cultures deposited his paper “The Oxidation of the Documentary – The Politics of Rust in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks,” recently published in Third Text. http://research.gold.ac.uk/11557/

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 May 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.

Goldsmiths Research Online – April 2015 Update

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49,665 items were downloaded from GRO this month. The countries that downloaded the most were United Kingdom, United States, and Germany.

This month’s top downloaded item is an unpublished paper “Understanding the t-test as a variance ratio test, and why t-squared = F” by Rory Allen, Associate Lecturer in Psychology. Allen’s paper has reached many people through GRO even though it is not included in an academic publication, which shows the potential of Open Access repositories as a platform to circulate research.

The three most popular items in GRO this month were:

Understanding the t-test as a variance ratio test, and why t-squared = F (2008) by Rory Allen (345 downloads).

FLOSSTV Free, Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS) within participatory ‘TV hacking’ Media and Arts Practices (2012) by Adnan Hadziselimovic (343 downloads).

Journalism: a profession under pressure? (2009) by Tamara Witschge and Gunnar Nygren (311 downloads).

New in GRO This Month

Research outputs available on GRO range from book chapters to music compositions, from artworks to journal articles. Here is a small selection from the recent deposits:

Dhiraj Murthy from the Department of Sociology published a paper entitled “Twitter and elections: are tweets, predictive, reactive, or a form of buzz?” in the Information, Communication & Society. Murthy’s paper looks at the relationship between the political activities on Twitter and the results from the ballot box. http://research.gold.ac.uk/11480/

Tom Perchard from the Department of Music has published a book called After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France, which looks at the ways in which French musicians and critics interpret jazz in the mid-twentieth century. http://research.gold.ac.uk/11486/

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 April 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.