Registering and Updating Policies 

Welcome to this tutorial video on registering and updating policies on Sherpa Romeo. This video will cover how to register an open access policy for a publisher or journal, how to update an existing open access policy on Romeo, and inclusion criteria that must be met in order for a journal or publisher to be included on Romeo.  

All information covered in this video is stored on the Romeo About page, so we will go to this page now. You can access the about page by clicking the About tab from the Romeo landing page, which is located just at the top here. 

This page contains information about the service, including information about using the new version of Romeo. 

If we scroll down to the key information here, this section contains all the information you need to register and update open access policies. 

So we will start with registering an open access policy, so I am going to click on the arrow here to find out more. 

To register an open access policy for a publisher or a journal that is not already listed in Romeo, you will need to complete the relevant form listed below in as much detail as possible. Remember to check out our inclusion criteria to ensure the publisher or journal meets our requirements before completing the form. 

I will right click on the New Publisher Policy form and open this in a new tab. Here is the form that you need to complete to register a new publisher policy. All you need to do is complete the form here in as much details as possible, so that our records are as accurate as possible. If any information is missing or unclear, this might cause some delays to the process. If you have more than one policy to add, please complete this form separately for each policy. Each field marked with an Asterix must be completed. We can see here that there is information required about the general policy information, as well as for the different versions of the policy. At the end here we ask for additional information about you. Once you have completed all of the necessary information, simply complete the captcha so that we can confirm that you are a human and click on submit details here. 

We will go back to the about page now and take a look at the new journal form. Again, I am going to right click and open this in a new tab. If you want to suggest a new journal for inclusion on Sherpa Romeo, this is the form that you ned to complete. Again, we need you to enter as much detail as possible about the journal, as well as some additional information about you. Once you have completed all the information, we again require a captcha to confirm that you are a human, and then you simply click on submit details here.  

The team will review the request by visiting the publisher and policy sites and assess it against the Romeo inclusion criteria. If the publisher and the policy meet the requirements, they will be added to our directory, along with the related journals, and as soon as we have done that, the team will notify you. 

That covers how to register a new publisher policy and a new journal. We will now take a look at updating an open access policy on Romeo.  

We encourage our community to submit updates to both publisher and journal records. To update an existing record, you will need to complete an Update Record form which can be found via the ‘Suggest an update for this record' button at the foot of the record. We will take a look at a journal page to see where this button is. This journal is Balance Sheet. So, I am going to hide the publication information and the publisher policy and scroll down past the record information, and you can see this is the button here “suggest an update for this record.” If you click on this button, it will take you to the form that you need to complete to update the record, and you can see the name of the journal title here. 

If you are a publisher who wishes to update multiple titles in your catalogue, you can submit a spreadsheet containing the necessary information to help@jisc.ac.uk 

The Romeo team confirms all update suggestions with the publisher; so, it might take a bit of time for any changes to appear. 

We will now take a look at the inclusion criteria. We recommend that you read through this information carefully before submitting a new journal or publisher to be considered for inclusion. 

Journals must have a valid ISSN, but we do also accept serial publications and conference proceedings with valid ISSNs. Each journal website must clearly state its editorial board. All licences, open access policies and copyright statements must be readily available online.  

For publishers, the governing body must be clearly stated on the website. Contact details must be readily available, and publication ethics policies must be clearly stated on the website. We use COPE Guidelines on publication ethics as a guide to best practice when evaluating publishers for inclusion. We recommend that publishers follow these guidelines. 

This concludes our tutorial video on registering and updating a policy on Sherpa Romeo. For more information, please refer to the about section of the Sherpa Romeo website. The help section of the website gives more information about how to use the new service. For any feedback and queries, please direct these to help@jisc.ac.uk and the Romeo team will get back to you as soon as possible.