Embargo period compliance
We had an issue a while back, where a user was confused about what date to measure his embargo date from, and we were equally confused about what constitutes the publication date. This conversation is recorded in the now-archived mss-ui-feedback Slack channel. We ended with the following discussion. Was this ever resolved? It's not clear to me.
audrey [15:51] I have an objection @michele @Lynne what you've changed the message to is not, as far as I am aware, what the system actually DOES (edited)
michele [15:56] So what happens now? In the live system?
franrogers [15:57] ah, I think the user is confused thanks God As stated in Section 3.5 (i) of the RCUK policy, “where the RCUK OA block grant is used to pay Article Processing Charges for a paper, the paper must be made Open Access immediately at the time of on‐line publication, using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence - https://www.ukri.org/files/legacy/documents/rcukopenaccesspolicy-pdf/.” To be compliant, the MRC also requires all publications to be deposited in Europe PubMed Central (PMC) (https://europepmc.org/) at the earliest opportunity, and certainly within 6 months of publication. Being available on the publisher’s website is not sufficient to be compliant. For further information, please see section 9.2 of the RCUK Policy on OA - Frequently Asked Questions europepmc.org Europe PMC Europe PMC is an archive of life sciences journal literature. so If it is gold OA it has to be OA at time of online publication (edited) if it’s in EPMC they just use publication
audrey [15:59] @michele the release delay is calculated from the print publication date—except for Nature publications, where they send us a list of exact embargo dates and we use those (It's not clear exactly how those are calculated by them) (edited)
franrogers [15:59] for Nature it is ePub date of final version I believe
audrey [15:59] Right but it doesn't necessarily line up with the epub date in our system
franrogers [16:00] true
michele [16:07] Ok, so going back to @FranRogers comment earlier, “we are probably inherently non-compliant on the online publication thing, unless we are chatting VoR online rather than ePub ahead of print” I’m not sure how to resolve this confusion for users where they (or their authors) are funded by an organisation who has a policy such as UKRI. Hopefully it is not a biggie.
franrogers [16:08] well we have to wait for the PubMed publication date and I am not sure when that is in existence