Understanding Publisher Policy Icons

Welcome to this tutorial video on Sherpa Romeo version 2: Publisher Policy Icons. Sherpa Romeo is a service that provides information on self-archiving policies and the open access policies of journal publishers. This video will give an overview of the new icons that are used in the second version of Sherpa Romeo, released in June 2020.

The icons represent complex aspects of publisher policy. Publisher policies are stored in Sherpa Romeo as a set of pathways. Each pathway represents a different way in which a document can become open access. Pathways have different policies, and the icons represent the properties within the pathways. The icons were selected by Jisc’s team of open access specialists, and were user tested with a sample of industry professionals. 

Here is an example of how the icons are laid out on a journal page, this particular journal is Age and Ageing, and we will take a live look at a journal page later in this video.

As you can see here, the icons give the users an ‘at-a-glance’ summary of publisher policies. To help users in getting used to the icons, users can hover over the icon to see what it represents. Each section can be expanded and collapsed using the plus symbol on the right. The about page contains a key to the icons which will also be helpful for users whilst getting used to the new icons. 

The publisher policy icons represent properties within different pathways that allow documents to be published open access. This section will explain the property that each icon represents.

Open access publishing is represented by the document icon. This icon indicates that the pathway includes open access publishing.

The pound icon indicates that there is an additional open access fee required (in addition to the normal publication fees that may be required) to make the document open access.

The cross icon indicates that no open access pathway exists for the article version.

The copyright icon indicates the copyright owner that the pathway requires.

The tick list icon represents the conditions that apply to the pathway.

The licence icon indicates the licences that the pathway requires.

The exclamation icon represents prerequisites. These are requirements that must be met to allow the pathway to be used. These may include prerequisite funders, subjects, or permissions from the publisher.

The folder icon indicates the location of the article. This indicates the websites on which the pathway allows the article version to be available. This includes self-archiving and publisher-deposit locations, including the website of the journal.

The pen icon represents additional notes that might apply to this policy.

The cloud icon represents publisher deposits. This is where the publisher will deposit on your behalf in the location specified.

Finally, the timer icon indicates the embargo that the pathway requires. Unless stated otherwise, the embargo starts on the date of publication.

We will now take a look at an example of a publisher policy so that we can see the icons in use. For the purpose of this demonstration, we will look at Age and Ageing, which uses many different icons to represent the various facets of its publisher policy. 

Here is the Age and Ageing journal page. For the purpose of this demonstration, I just want to look at the publisher policy, so I am going to hide the publication information and scroll down to the publisher policy.

As you can see, there are two different pathways that the author can go down in order to achieve open access with the published version of the article. The icons indicate the different properties with each pathway, and offer an at-a-glance summary of the policy. As a first-time user of the Sherpa Romeo v2, I am going to expand on this section using the plus symbol to get a better understanding of what these icons represent for this pathway. So I am going to click on the plus symbol here, and I can now see that:

This pathway has an Open Access fee associated with it, as indicated by the pound sign here

I can also see that this pathway includes open access publishing, as represented by the document symbol. I can see that there is no embargo, and I can see that there are two different licences required with this pathway. I can also see the publisher deposit which is PubMed Central and I can see that there are four different locations where this article can be stored. Finally, the checklist icon indicates the conditions of the article, so I can see that that the published source must be acknowledged with citation and must also link to the published version with DOI. 

I am going to hide that pathway now and take a look at the accepted version. So, if we look at the accepted version, I can see that there are three different pathways associated with this version. So if we have a look at pathway a, we can see that the icons here represent that there is no embargo associated with this pathway, the article can be stored on the author’s homepage, and there are three conditions associated with this pathway.

Finally the submitted version has just one pathway, so if we click here we can see again what these icons represent, so we can see that there is no embargo, the different locations as to where the article can be deposited, and four conditions that apply to this version.

For further information about the Publisher Policy Icons, please refer to the about section of the Sherpa Romeo website which gives some more information about publisher policies as well as they key to the icons.

For further information about the updates to Sherpa Romeo v2, please refer to the other tutorial videos in this series.
For any feedback or queries, please direct these to help@jisc.ac.uk and the Sherpa Romeo team will get back to you as soon as possible.