Open access and rights retention

Elements is the University's publications management system.  

All Sheffield Hallam authors are required to deposit a copy of all their research outputs in Elements. These will then be made available to the public via the University's repository SHURA, where possible.

• On your Elements Home page, choose the action 'Deposit accepted scholarly & creative works'.
   
• Choose to deposit a journal article or a conference paper.
   
• Follow the steps to add the details of your output. 
  Elements may be able to find the details of your article or you may need to add the details manually.

• If you manually add the details, you will be asked to indicate whether you research is in scope of the new policy and whether you included the Rights Retention Statement in your submission.
   
• When you reach the ‘Link funding’ screen, make sure you link your paper to the correct grant, if applicable.

• When you reach the ‘Deposit publication’ screen, select the file you wish to upload and then please add a licence and an embargo period.
   
• In most cases you would select the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and ‘no embargo’ as you will have followed one of the routes to open access that enables this. If your chosen route is green open access and you intend to opt out of the policy (request a waiver), you can choose another licence and/or another embargo.
   
• Click on the 'Deposit' button.

• Go to your publications in Elements.
   
• If your article is in your 'Pending' list, claim it so that it appears under 'Claimed'.
   
• Click on the title of the journal article or conference paper to see the full record.
   
• Scroll down to the 'Repository' section and choose 'Deposit'.
  
   
• When you reach the ‘Deposit publication’ screen, select the file you wish to upload and then please add a licence and an embargo period.
   
• In most cases you would select the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and ‘no embargo’ as you will have followed one of the routes to open access that enables this. If your chosen route is green open access and you intend to opt out of the policy (request a waiver), you can choose another licence and/or another embargo.
   
• Click on the 'Deposit' button.

You can deposit scholarly and creative work of many types on Elements - books, chapters, reports, presentations, exhibitions, etc.

• From the 'Scholarly & creative works' section on your Home page, click on the '+ADD NEW' link and select the type of scholarly work you would like to add.
   
• Alternatively, from your 'My claimed scholarly & creative works' page, click on the large plus icon at the top of your list of works to choose a type of scholarly & creative work to add.
   
• Follow the steps to add the details of your work.
   
• Deposit a manuscript or file.  Your manuscript will be made available on SHURA if possible and according to your publisher's policies.

Please note that the rights retention aspects of the SHU Research Publications and Copyright Policy applies to scholarly articles in journals and conference proceedings only.

In most cases, you will be depositing your scholarly articles on Elements at the point of acceptance, before you know the publication date.

However, Library Services need to know the publication date of  journal articles and conference papers so that they can be made open access as soon as possible.

When you know that your article has been published, please let Library Services know.  You can add the publication date to the record on Elements.  Alternatively you may find it quicker to send an email to elements@shu.ac.uk with details of the publication date and which journal article or conference paper it applies to.

To add a publication date to a journal article or conference paper in Elements:

• Go to your publications in Elements and click on the title of the article.
   
• Scroll down to the ‘Data sources’ section.
   
• If there is a manual record present, click on the ‘Edit record’ button to the right 

.

• If there is not a manual record already present, click on the Plus icon at the bottom right of the data sources box to 'Add manual record’.  
  A manual record will be created.  It will be populated with details of your article.

• In the manual record please do the following.
  • update the ‘Publication status’ to ‘published’.
  • add the ‘Publication date’.
  • indicate whether you have included the Rights Retention Statement in your submission.
  • Save the record

You can only obtain an opt-out of the following two policy requirements: 

• to achieve immediate open access from the day of first publication 
• to use the Creative Commons Attribution licence

Before opting out, please read this information about reasons and ways to opt out.

If you wish to opt out by requesting a waiver in Elements for an article, please follow the process below:

• Go to your publications in Elements and click on the title of the article.
• Click on the kebab menu in the top right corner and then choose ‘Request a waiver’.

You will be presented with a waiver request form. Please state your department, research centre, or research institute in the address box, and indicate the following two things in the comments section:

• why you would like a waiver (e.g. because of publisher/copyright/co-authors)
• what your requirements are: do you need an embargo period and if so, for how long, and under what licence can your Library make your AAM available? You can also instruct Library Services to apply your publisher’s Open Access policy.  This usually means that a delay of between 6 and 24 months will be applied, and that no Creative Commons Attribution licence will be used.

Once you have requested your waiver, you will be able to download a confirmation in PDF form, from the details page for your paper.

Our pages about Using Elements provide further guidance about Elements, including setting up automatic claiming and searches to find your publications, claiming and rejecting publications, managing your publications list and with other actions that you may want to undertake in Elements.

For help with Elements please email elements@shu.ac.uk.