What are the inclusion criteria for Journals?

Our inclusion criteria for journals are as follows:

• Journals must have a valid ISSN listed on their website — to be valid it must appear on the ISSN portal.
• Each website must clearly state its editorial board.
• All licences, open access policies and copyright statements must be readily available online.
• We will only add the policy as it appears on the publisher/journal website – if the policy does not state something, we will not include it in the policy information.
• Your open access policy should include at least one way that an article (any version – published/accepted/submitted) can be made open access.
• In return for listing journals in our dataset, we expect our publishers to help us maintain the quality of the data that we hold. This means alerting us to changes in the publisher, policy or metadata information in good time for us to make the amendments.
• We do not include monographic series or conference proceedings in our data. (Though book policies can be added through the OA books route).

What are the inclusion criteria for Publishers?

Our inclusion criteria for publishers are as follows:

• Contact details must be readily available
• Publication ethics policies must be clearly stated on the website

We use COPE Guidelines on publication ethics as a guide to best practice when evaluating publishers for inclusion. We recommend that publishers follow these guidelines.

All publishers must also have journals and/or book policies listed in open policy finder – please refer to the inclusion criteria for these records separately.

Please also note we are currently not accepting new publishers for listing in open policy finder (unless part of a pre-existing collaboration) while our acceptance criteria and collection management policies are under review. This information will be updated further in January 2025.

What are the inclusion criteria for Funders?

Our inclusion criteria for funders are as follows:

• The funder must provide research funding to researchers who operate outside of its own organisation
• The funder must have a policy on at least one of:
  • Open access archiving
  • Open access publishing
  • Open data archiving

What are the inclusion criteria for Books policies?

Our inclusion criteria for books policies are as follows:

• There must be a clearly stated books policy (any version – published/accepted/submitted) on the publisher’s website for immediate open access or self-archiving.
• All licences, open access policies and copyright statements must be readily available online
• We will only add the policy as it appears on the publisher website – if the policy does not state something, we will not include it in the policy information
• In return for listing book policies in our dataset, we expect our publishers to help us maintain the quality of the data that we hold. This means alerting us to changes in the publisher, policy or metadata information in good time for us to make the amendments.
• We do not include trade books and textbooks in our data. We also don’t list options for flipping books published through traditional routes to open access.