Section 1: Additonal Reporting on ERA 2015

Open Access

As part of the ERA 2015 submission process, institutions were required to indicate whether a research output submitted to ERA had been made available in an open access repository. Eligible institutions were required to answer yes or no to this new and mandatory data requirement.

This open access data requirement will give the ARC some insight into the open access publishing trends in eligible institutions. However, open access data did not form part of the evaluation process and was not made available to peer reviewers or Research Evaluation Committees (RECs).

Since the supply of information on open access by institutions was a data requirement for ERA 2015 subsequent to the collection of the research outputs by institutions, in many cases the institutions had to retrospectively answer this question. Institutions were asked to provide as accurate information as was possible. Therefore, the information should be treated with caution and will only form a baseline for more accurate reporting in any future rounds.

Please note: the ARC Open Access Policy took effect from 1 January 2013. According to the policy, any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a 12 month period from the date of publication. The ARC Open Access Policy incorporated all ARC Funding Rules and Agreements released after 1 January 2013. The policy does not apply retrospectively to pre-existing Funding Rules and Agreements.

Where depositing research outputs in an ‘open access’ repository is a condition of any funding which enabled the research to be undertaken, full public access to the research output(s) should exist, irrespective of the ERA submission process, as a result of the eligible researcher complying with that funding condition.

Percentage of open access research outputs in ERA 2015 submissions