If you have concerns about the REF-compliance of a particular paper, please contact repository@essex.ac.uk with the details. However, there are several reasons why a REF compliant paper may show on the system as not compliant:

• Articles may display as not compliant if no acceptance date has been included in the publication record. Missing an acceptance date in the RIS doesn’t make a paper not REF compliant on its own, but it can make the automated part of the system that checks for compliance less accurate. To add an acceptance date, you will need to create a manual publication record in RIS alongside data from external sources such as Crossref and Scopus which rarely include acceptance dates.
• The RIS automated compliance checker is also unable to distinguish between open and paywalled access outputs. If your paper was published open access by the journal, it will almost certainly be compliant and should have an additional label marked ‘Exception:Deposit6’ which indicates that it is gold open access. These labels are added manually and so may not be shown if your paper was published recently.
• An article may also show as not compliant because the paper isn’t live in the repository yet. We aim to process green open access deposits from subscription access journals as quickly as possible to ensure compliance with the REF OA policy but may not do this for gold open access articles. As noted above, gold OA articles should be REF compliant on publication without the need to have deposited an Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) on acceptance.