Open Access Institutional Policy for the scientific output of the University of Vigo

Within the framework of the so-called third mission of the University, it is the wish of the University of Vigo to extent its responsible and sustainable action to the promotion of open access scientific information.

In this sense it is important to remember that the law 14/2011 of 1 June, on science, technology and innovation, stands in a clear positioning in favour of open access policies. According to this law, the agents of the Spanish System of Science, Technology and Innovation must promote the development of open access repositories to the publications of its research staff, to which it is established that "the research staff whose research activity is funded mainly with funds coming from the general state budget will make publicly available a digital copy of the final version which might have been agreed for publishing in research periodicals or serial publications" by means of disciplinary or institutional repositories.

Similarly, Royal Decree 99/2011, of 28 January, upon which official doctorate studies are regulated, establishes in its article 14.5 that "once the doctorate dissertation is passed, the University will store a file in open electronic format in an institutional repository".

According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), open access to scientific literature consist in "its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself". In order to make this possible, the University of Vigo formulates the present policy that expands the open access mandates established by the existing legislation to other documents and publications produced by its research staff. Similarly it is proposed to reinforce this commitment with open access by signing the Berlin Declaration.

In order to materialise these commitments, the University of Vigo will promote, by means of the instruments at its disposal, the free and open access to the scientific output produced by its researchers. Among such instruments figures the current policy and, in connection with it, the maintenance of an institutional repository aimed at the disseminating, management and preservation of the scientific output of its research staff. This repository, apart from facilitating the compliance with the above-mentioned legislation, broadens its scope to other types of publications related with the research that is carried out at the University of Vigo, singularly the articles and research papers published in scientific journals or in publications derived from congresses and scientific meetings. Akin to this, the repository will be able to, given the case, accept the deposit of other types of works and publications different from the above-mentioned, such as, for example, working papers, technical reports, etc., but always linked to research. In such cases, the open dissemination through the repository will be carried out under Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

On the other hand, and within the line of encouraging open access, the University of Vigo aims at the development of its own internal evaluation processes of the scientific output starting from the publications collected and deposited in its institutional repository in that related to articles or research papers published in journals, books and excerpts from books, doctorate dissertations and publications derived from congresses. The mentioned publications must be, at least, referenced in the repository and facilitate the open access to its entire text as soon as possible according to the limitations that might have been imposed by its publishers. In connection with this, the University of Vigo recommends its researchers that regarding the matter of intellectual property they should remain in power of the exploitation rights of their output by not signing them over in exclusive to other agents.

Due to its nature the content to be deposited in the institutional repository of the University of Vigo must have been submitted to any type of peer review or been approved by academic tribunals or scientific assessment panels.

On the basis of the above considerations, the University of Vigo establishes the obligation to its researchers of depositing and disseminating via the institutional repository the publications that are taken into account for scientific output evaluation: articles and research papers published in journals, books and chapters of books, doctoral dissertations read at the University of Vigo and publications derived from congresses. Accordingly are recalled the obligations established by current legislation on doctoral dissertations and research funded by the general state budget.

The deposit of doctoral dissertations will be carried out after they have been approved, taking into account the exceptions laid down in the article 14.6 of Royal Decree 99/2011, of 28 January, which regulates doctorate official titles.

In the case of research papers, it will be deposited the post-print (peer reviewed and accepted for printing definitive version of those papers) in any of its two modalities: the version produced by the publisher if the latter express permission to do so (publisher post-print), or the document reviewed and sent by the author prior to its publication on any periodical (author post-print). Due to this, the research staff of the University of Vigo is encouraged to keep those author post-prints.

These deposits and those from other publications and works which might be included on the repository are entitled to the authors or to the persons delegated by them. For this, the repository will envisage a self-archiving mechanism, although the University Library will verify and validate the deposit with the purpose of ensuring its correctness and reliability.

Based on the deposit of these publications and works on its institutional repository, the University of Vigo is committed to:

• facilitate the free and open access to the publications as early as possible, obviously respecting intellectual property rights which may exist over them;
• try to increase the visibility of the repository and of the contents deposited on it, by means of interoperability collecting mechanisms, as well as subscribing it to national and international directories and harvesters such as Recolecta, OpenDoar, etc;
• to ensure the respect for the intellectual property rights;
• to ensure the preservation of the deposited contents;
• to provide with statistics on the usage of the repository and its contents;
• entrusting the management of the institutional repository to the University Library without prejudice to the possible collaboration of other University’s units or services;
• to create and offer added-value services around the repository to be developed by the University Library;
• to facilitate the authors the necessary training and information to be able to perform effective self-archiving of their output and publications;
• after the approval of this policy by the competent bodies, register it with the ROARMAP, Sherpa/Juliet and Melibea.

Universidade de Vigo Open Access Institutional Policy approved by the Governing Council on the 7th of May 2013.