Open access & recording publications in Pure (CCBS guidance)

UoE implemented a policy in April 2022 that all peer-reviewed research publications must be made available open access immediately (within 1 month of publication). If the paper is not published gold open access, this requirement can be fulfilled by including the rights retention statement in the acknowledgments section of the manuscript, which then permits the release of the author's accepted manuscript (AAM) in Pure upon publication.

The AAM is your unformatted version of the accepted paper, in Word or PDF form. It is before the proof stage, where the journal has done the formatting. It’s also not a preprint, because this is not peer-reviewed.

Usually the lead or corresponding author will deal with this. However for belt and braces we’re happy to receive multiple notifications from different authors (better that than none at all). The paper only has to be uploaded once across UoE, so if you’re co-publishing with someone from say Usher Institute, and your colleague has submitted it to Usher’s open access pipeline, there’s no need to send it to CCBS too, although if this happens, it’s not a problem.

Yes please do still let us know, even if you upload a paper yourself. Meeting the requirements is not simply a matter of importing the paper to Pure from, for example, Scopus or PubMed. There are additional fields to be completed, and a version of the manuscript must be uploaded that is compliant with OA policy. This can be a bit of a minefield.

Importantly there is also a validation step that is only available to Pure administrators; the validation step is essential for compliance. If a record is not validated, it will not appear on Research Explorer.

This does inevitably happen. If you really can’t obtain the AAM don’t worry. Sometimes the College Pure team can obtain it from their colleagues at another institution. If even this fails, the paper will not be compliant for REF, but you would be unlikely to choose this one to submit to REF anyway. The only downside is the negative effect on the CCBS compliance ratings.

Yes you are welcome to submit it to us, but it’s not so important, as this would be unlikely to be selected for submission to REF. However you can use Pure as the repository to keep your own publication record up to date so for that reason it’s good to have it complete.

Did you know you can export your publication list from Pure in various formats and even use Pure to create CVs in various formats?

We don’t need to know about preprints for REF compliance purposes, as they’re not peer-reviewed. If you would like to upload your preprint, you are welcome to do it yourself. However please still notify ccbs-openaccess@ed.ac.uk that you’ve done this, so that when the paper is peer-reviewed and published by a journal, we don’t end up with duplicate records.

Yes please! We are still obliged to upload to an institutional repository for REF compliance. But the timing is not so critical. You also don’t need to attach the AAM, as we will upload the final PDF using a creative commons license instead.

Publications only appear on Research Explorer (which is the public portal for Pure) once a Pure administrator has validated the record. We only validate records once the paper is published and we have ensured that compliance has been met (or we have decided that compliance is not possible). So you will not see your ‘in press’ papers on Research Explorer. Please wait a couple of weeks until after the paper is published, to give us time to update and validate the Pure record, and then check again before enquiring. (This is another good reason to notify us if you upload a publication yourself, because any records you create yourself won’t be validated and hence won’t appear on Research Explorer.)

Unfortunately not. There are however some funds available at central UoE, for manuscripts that acknowledge funding from Wellcome, UKRI, CRUK or BHF (as long as corresponding author is using an ed.ac.uk emai address. There are also a growing number of ‘read and publish deals’, whereby UoE has negotiated deals with publishers so that you can publish gold OA without additional charge. Please see www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/publish-research/open-access or contact the Scholarly Communications team on openaccess@ed.ac.uk.

Please contact the central UoE Scholarly Communications team on openaccess@ed.ac.uk. Unfortunately we can’t deal with this at Centre level.

Yes, if you include the full title or funder reference number of the associated funding when you submit your notification to ccbs-openaccess, we can link the two for you. Please note we can only do this with external research grants as it is only this type of funding that automatically comes through to Pure. For other types of funding (e.g. donations, internal funding, you can add these to your own Pure profile manually as 'Projects' and then add the link to publications.

Researchfish is a web interface for reporting funding outcomes that is used by many funders most notably UKRI. Publications that have been associated with a particular grant in Pure will be automatically transferred to Researchfish once a year just before the UKRI reporting window (Feb-Mar); this will save you populating Researchfish manually. If you would like to associate a new publication with a grant(s), when you send the ccbs-openaccess notification please let us know the job code or funder’s reference of the grant you would like the association to be made with.  Unfortunately we don’t have the capacity to go back and associate older publications with grants, but you are welcome to do this yourself in Pure.

No other categories of activities in Pure currently interface with Researchfish; this is a UK-wide work in progress.

The uploading of publications is done part-time by Fiona Stephens, CCBS Administrator. This is a big job as CCBS authors publish ~500 papers per year.

The notification you send also goes to UoE Press Office, to give them the heads up about papers coming out. However please do not rely on this route as the Press Office staff sometimes do not have time to scan all the notifications; if you would like to discuss media activity associated with your publication, please contact the Press Office directly on press.office@ed.ac.uk.

For questions related to other aspects of Pure that don’t relate to the uploading of publications, please contact Fiona Stephens, CCBS Administrator