The University of Bristol’s new #OpenAccess policy
September 17, 2015
A quick note to say that I got an email today — the University of Bristol Staff Bulletin — announcing some extremely welcome news:
(Admittedly it was only the third item on the bulletin, coming in just after “Staff Parking – application deadline Friday 18 September”, but you can’t have everything.)
This is excellent, and the nitty-gritty details are encouraging, too. Although HEFCE recently wound back its own policy, as a transition-period concession, to requiring deposit only at the time of publication, Bristol has quite properly gone with the more rigorous requirement that accepted manuscripts be deposited at the time of acceptance. This is wise for the university — it’s future-proofed against HEFCE’s eventual move back towards the deposit-on-acceptance policy that it wanted — and it’s good for the wider world, too.
Hurrah!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
September 18, 2015 at 4:24 pm
Nice to hear. Thanks for the notice.
I was under the impression that a very few prestigious journals (Nature, for example) requires that any submitted material be subject to a complete blackout until the item is published. Would readers be able to access a paper which had been deposited in this archive before it was published? If so, will this discourage authors from submitting to journals such as Nature?