Spread your research and distinguish yourself: Open Access at the EUI

A new EUI Open Access Policy was adopted by the EUI academic council on 15 November 2017.

The new policy corresponds more to the reality of today and is more service oriented than procedure oriented. It consists of five main points:

1. Cadmus and self-archiving (‘Green OA’)
2. Cadmus as publisher (‘EUI imprint’)
3. Open Access journals
4. Licences
5. Identifiers

It defines Open Access (OA) as the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need. The basic idea of OA is simple: make research literature and outputs available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Cadmus is defined as the EUI’s institutional solution for dissemination and preservation of published outputs.

Through the new policy EUI members grant the EUI and its authorised staff permission to make the allowed full-text versions of their academic publications available in Open Access. In practice this makes it possible for Library staff to facilitate the procedure for authors to make their publications Open Access. Library staff will check which article version is allowed, and informs the author which PDF of an article is allowed and therefore required for Cadmus inclusion. The policy states that EUI theses must be deposited in Cadmus (according to the EUI Academic Rules and Regulations) either in immediate Open Access or under Embargoed Access. All other EUI imprint publications, such as e-books, working papers, lectures, policy papers, research reports, journals, must be made available in Open Access in Cadmus.

EUI members are also encouraged to consider publishing their articles in high quality Open Access journals. Moreover, authors are encouraged to retain their copyright and grant adequate licences to publishers, and to distinguish themselves, i.e. to be uniquely identifiable, through identifiers which are persistent, open and interoperable (such as ORCID). In fact, as of November 2017, the EUI became a member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID is a non-profit organization supported by a global community of organisational members, including research organizations, publishers, funders, professional associations, and other stakeholders in the research ecosystem. At the time of writing there are 846 ORCID member organizations and 4,449,512 ORCID  IDs. These figures are growing rapidly (100 more members today, and nearly 500,000 more IDs compared to the figures in November 2017.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes an author from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognised.

During spring 2018 the EUI Library will finalise the integration work (that started in the Autumn/Winter 2017) between EUI, Cadmus and ORCID. The Open Access policy limits itself to published work while EUI recommendations on Open Research Data are contained in the EUI Library Research Data Guide and the EUI Guide on Good Data Protection Practice in Research. It also makes no statement on Article Processing Charges (APCs) but this may need to be discussed and successively integrated into a revised version.