Reading a policy result 

Welcome to this tutorial video on Reading a policy result. This video will demonstrate how to read a publisher policy result following the updates to Sherpa Romeo in June 2020. 

In this video I will explain how policy information is stored on Romeo and we will take a live look at some different journals on the new website, where I will talk-through how to interpret the publisher policy results. 

Policy records contain information on how articles can be made open access for the published, submitted and accepted versions. Policies are stored on Sherpa Romeo as a set of pathways. Each pathway represents a way in which a document can become open access. Authors can refer to these pathways to understand how to make their article open access. Properties within pathways are represented by icons to give users a glanceable summary of publisher policies.  

Following extensive feedback from our Romeo user community, we have removed Sherpa Romeo colours.  

The publisher policy section sets out the published, accepted and submitted versions of an article in a linear design that is clear for the user. 

For more detail on publisher policies, the links below will take you to information from the publisher. 

Properties of pathways are represented by icons, that give the user a glanceable summary of the policy. 

The icons give the user a condensed version of the policy, that makes it easy to compare across different pathways. To see the full policy information simply click on the plus symbol to expand the section.  

As you can see, the full information for this policy is here, and full details of the different available locations are here. 

The icons represent aspects of publisher policy. The document symbol represents… (etc.) 

For more information on publisher policy icons, please refer to our Publisher Policy Icons tutorial video. 

Each version of an article contains one or more pathways through which the article can be made open access.  

Here is an example of what we mean by a pathway. This example is taken from Child and Family Law Quarterly. For the accepted version of this article, there are two different pathways through which the article can be made open access. The key difference between the two pathways is the prerequisite funders. 

The author must follow pathway a or pathway b, depending on who the article is funded by. To go down pathway a, the article must be funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council. This pathway will include a 2 year embargo, and a CC BY-NC licence will apply to the article. The article will be available on any repository, or non-commercial website. Two conditions also apply to this pathway. 

To go down pathway b, the article must be funded by HEFCE, HEFCW, Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland, Scottish Funding Council, or the Economic and Social Research Council. With this pathway, there is a 2 year embargo. A CC BY-NC licence will be applied, and the article can be available in any repository or a non-commercial website, and there are two conditions that apply to the pathway. 

We will now take a live look at publisher policies in the demonstration part of this tutorial. We will start by taking a look at the Nature journal, so I am going to type Nature into the search box and hit enter.  

This takes me straight to the journal page. I am going to hide the publication information here, because I don’t need to see this. So now I can see the publisher policy information. 

If we take a look at the published version, overview of the publication policy. For full details of the policy, simply click on the plus symbol here. 

I can see that open access is not permitted for this version, as indicated by the cross icon here. 

For the accepted version, I can see that there are some prerequisites, a 6 month embargo and some conditions. I can also see three locations where the article can be stored. I am going to click on the plus symbol here to get more details on the prerequisites and conditions. So, I can see that the prerequisite here is that the article must be a research article. The conditions are that it must link to the publisher version, the publisher source must be acknowledged and DOI cited, and post-prints are subject to Springer Nature re-use terms. 

I am going to hide this section now and take a look at the submitted version. So again I can see through the icons that that there are some prerequisites, no embargo and some conditions. I can also see the three locations where the article can be stored. Again I am going to click on the plus symbol here to get more details on the prerequisites and conditions, and I can see that these are the same as the accepted version.  

I am going to go back to the search page now and search for a new journal. This time I am going to search for the Cancer journal. So I will type in my query, and I can see that it has appeared in the lookup here, so I am going to click there and this takes me to the journal page. 

Again I am going to hide the publication information and scroll down a little bit so that I can see the publisher policy. 

I can see that there are three pathways associated with the published version. If I take a look at pathway a, I can see that this pathway has an open access fee associated with it; this pathway includes open access publishing; there is no embargo; the licence is CC BY; the authors are the copyright owner; the publisher will deposit the article in PubMed Central; and there are five locations where the article can be stored. The condition that applies to this article version is that the published source must be acknowledged 

I am going to hide pathway a now and take a look at pathway b for the published version. I can see by glancing at the icons that the key difference here between the two pathways is the licence. So, I am going to use the plus symbol to view the full policy information. So, I can see that the key difference here is whether the article should be made available commercially or not. Pathway a allowed the article to be available anywhere, but pathway b requires a CC BY-NC-ND licence, and can be available in non-commercial repositories. 

I am going to take a look at the accepted version now, so I can see that there is just one pathway here. The symbols indicate that there is a 12 month embargo, some conditions that must be applied to this version, and several locations where the article can be stored. I am going to click on the plus symbol to see the full policy information, and now I can see the various locations and the two conditions that apply to this article version. 

Finally, for the submitted version, I can see that there is no embargo, again some conditions that must be applied to this version, and several locations where the article can be stored, so I am going to click on the plus symbol to see the full policy information. Again, I can now see full details of the various locations where the article can be stored and the conditions that apply to this article version. 

If I wanted to get a bit more information about the publisher’s policies, I can use the links here to view the policies on the publisher website. I am going to imagine that I want to get a bit more information about Wiley’s self-archiving policy, so I am going to open this link in a new tab, and I can see that this link has taken me to the Wiley website, specifically Wiley’s self-archiving policy. 

I am going to return to the Sherpa Romeo search page now and conduct a final search. For this search, I am imagining that I am an author who wants to know what I can do with the accepted version of an article for Age and Ageing. 

So, I am going to search for Age and Ageing, this time using their ISSN. So, I am going to type the ISSN into the search box which is 0002-0729, and I am going to hit the return key. I can see that this has taken me straight to the journal page. I am going to hide the publication information as I don’t need to see this for the purposes of my search. I am only interested in the accepted version, so I am going to scroll straight down to this section of the publisher policy. 

I can see that there are three pathways for this version. The icons tell me that the three pathways are quite different. I can see that between pathways a and b, there are some key differences with the embargo and the location of the article. So, I can see that for pathway a, I can make the article available immediately with no embargo, but only on my homepage. There are some conditions that apply to this, so I will click the plus symbol to see what they are, and then I can see the three conditions listed here. 

For pathway b, I can see that I can make this available in non-commercial institutional and subject repositories, but only with a 12 month embargo. Again, there are some conditions that apply to this, and if I click the plus symbol, I can see that there are three conditions that apply to this pathway here. 

For pathway c, I can see that the article can be deposited in PubMed Central, but only with a 12 month embargo. I can also see that there are some prerequisites with this version, so I am going to click the plus symbol to see what these are. Ah so I can now see that there is a prerequisite funder here, so I can only select pathway c if the article is funded by the National Institutes of Health.  

This information has satisfied my query, and I now have all the information I need to select a pathway for the accepted version. 

For more information about Sherpa Romeo, please refer to the about section of the Sherpa website. You can also refer to the help section of the Sherpa Romeo website. For further information about the June 2020 updates to Sherpa Romeo, please refer to the other videos in this series, all of which are all available on the new help page. For any feedback and queries, please direct these to help@jisc.ac.uk.