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Using Sherpa Romeo to check publisher open access policies

Please note: This feature is optional, only available for Figshare for Institutions, and can be activated on a per group basis. You may or may not see this functionality in your institutional instance of Figshare. If you have any questions about whether this functionality is configured for your institution, please contact your administrator.

What is Sherpa Romeo?

If you don't know what Sherpa Romeo is, here’s a description direct from them:

Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyzes publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.”

More information is available at https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/.

How does the integration work?

The data behind our integration is updated every day to keep things as accurate as possible. Here’s how it works: 

Go to Create a new item in a group on Figshare that has the integration enabled on and you’ll see an option in the area to the right of the form to check the publisher Open Access policy. Clicking on this will open the new functionality. 


You can search here by Publisher or Journal/ISSN, just like on the main Sherpa Romeo site. You can also navigate and browse if you aren’t 100% sure of what you are looking for. 


Once you have found the title you are looking for, you’ll get a quick view with some hover over states of what you can and can’t upload as your repository version. The quick view may well be all you need, but if you need more information, click on the dropdown for all the details. 


If you still need to know more, you can view the original policy on the Sherpa Romeo site by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page. 

Saving the policy will allow you to go back and view at a later date, as well as helping your institutional administrators by allowing them to see quickly what journal policy you looked up and why you made the decisions you did.

Please note: this information is not part of the public metadata, it's just between yourself and your institutional administrators.

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