Following our recent user workshops, we have reviewed our process for adding new publishers to our database along with our inclusion criteria and would now like to share this with our user community. Many thanks to those who volunteered their time to attend the workshops and shared their thoughts and feedback - it was extremely helpful and much appreciated!

New-publisher acquisition process for open policy finder:

• New publishers will be added via collaborations with national groups / organisations / consortia
  • Representatives of national groups, organisations or consortia should email us at help@jisc.ac.uk (mentioning 'open policy finder' in the subject line) to register their interest in the first instance.
  • Some examples of groups we have collaborated with recently include:
    • Mir@bel network
    • TSV, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies
    • GOAL project, Swiss Universities
    • Canadian Association of Research Libraries
  • We will also add new publishers based on targeted checks of lists, such as UKRI, REF and DIAMAS publication lists
  • We no longer accept journal submissions from new publishers via our helpdesk/forms.

Please note the above applies to new publishers (i.e. those who do not already have a journal/policy listed in open policy finder). We will continue to add new journals to existing listed publishers via our new record form.

Our general inclusion criteria remain the same, however we will continue to review these against criteria and recommendations of other sites in the OA community, such as DOAJ and Think.Check.Submit. We believe the introduction of the above process also significantly strengthens our inclusion criteria.

Key themes that emerged from our user workshops were accuracy and reliability of our data - and we believe the above process/policy allows us to continue to grow our database in a targeted manner, to allow our team to carry out regular reviews of our data, and to ensure that the data we are adding is trustworthy and most relevant to our users.

We have collaborated successfully with a number of international groups and organisations in recent years to add new policies to open policy finder and have found this enriches our data and provides extra validation and confidence in the policies we are adding.