SHERPA/FACT, the funders and author's compliance tool, has been found to be more than 95 percent accurate when checking publisher policies against funder mandates for open access – significantly higher than even experienced repository managers.
A study by the SHERPA/FACT advisory group compared the information provided by SHERPA/FACT with a control made up of members of UKCoRR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories), who manually checked the policies.
Where a discrepancy was identified between the two sets of data, the advisory group made an investigation into which returned the correct result, and found that SHERPA/FACT was correct in almost all of the cases, against 57 percent of the time for human checking.
For researchers, this should come as clear evidence that SHERPA/FACT can provide accurate results on journal and funder policy alignment on open access, better enabling them to decide where to publish their research outputs to meet funder requirements.
The study was commissioned by the SHERPA/FACT Advisory Board – which includes representatives from UKCoRR, Jisc, Wellcome Trust, Research Councils UK (RCUK), CRC Nottingham, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Publishers Association and SCONUL.
SHERPA/FACT works by syndicating information on journal policies on open access and reviewing this against the funding requirements of RCUK and Wellcome Trust. It draws this information from the SHERPA/RoMEO and SHERPA/JULIET databases respectively.
Funded by RCUK, Wellcome Trust and Jisc, SHERPA/FACT is developed and maintained by the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham.
