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Open Science holds the promise to make scientific endeavours more inclusive, participatory, understandable, accessible and re-usable for large audiences. However, making processes open will not per se drive wide reuse or participation unless also accompanied by the capacity (in terms of knowledge, skills, financial resources, technological readiness and motivation) to do so. These capacities vary considerably across regions, institutions and demographics. Those advantaged by such factors will remain potentially privileged, putting Open Science's agenda of inclusivity at risk of propagating conditions of ‘cumulative advantage’. With this paper, we systematically scope existing research addressing the question: ‘What evidence and discourse exists in the literature about the ways in which dynamics and structures of inequality could persist or be exacerbated in the transition to Open Science, across disciplines, regions and demographics?’ Aiming to synthesize findings, identify gaps in the literature and inform future research and policy, our results identify threats to equity associated with all aspects of Open Science, including Open Access, Open and FAIR Data, Open Methods, Open Evaluation, Citizen Science, as well as its interfaces with society, industry and policy. Key threats include: stratifications of publishing due to the exclusionary nature of the author-pays model of Open Access; potential widening of the digital divide due to the infrastructure-dependent, highly situated nature of open data practices; risks of diminishing qualitative methodologies as ‘reproducibility’ becomes synonymous with quality; new risks of bias and exclusion in means of transparent evaluation; and crucial asymmetries in the Open Science relationships with industry and the public, which privileges the former and fails to fully include the latter.

Recent years have seen fast growth in the number of policies mandating Open Access (OA) to research outputs. We conduct a largescale analysis of over 800 thousand papers from repositories around the world published over a period of 5 years to investigate: a) if the time lag between the date of publication and date of deposit in a repository can be effectively tracked across thousands of repositories globally, and b) if introducing deposit deadlines is associated with a reduction of time from acceptance to public availability of research outputs. We show that after the introduction of the UK REF 2021 OA policy, this time lag has decreased significantly in the UK and that the policy introduction might have accelerated the UK's move towards immediate OA 1 compared to other countries. This supports the argument for the inclusion of a time-limited deposit requirement in OA policies.

When entering the research world, Early Career Researchers (ECRs) may encounter difficulties building a good reputation for their research, its quality and the research results. Open access is the movement that could assist ECRs to: (a) widely disseminate their scholarly outputs, (b) demonstrate the research and societal impact of their work and, (c) organise online research portfolios that can be accessed by all researchers, as well as prospective employers. AbstractScholarly Communication

Funding bodies for higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom (UK) have recently introduced policies with a strong focus on open access (OA). The Research Councils UK (RCUK) 'Policy on Open Access' mandates OA compliance through either hybrid or pure OA journals, or through self-archiving. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has recently introduced a self-archiving policy for journal articles and conference proceedings. Both policies have necessitated new practices among UK HEIs that relate to advocacy, adoption of internal OA policies, managing article processing charges (APCs), and monitoring and reporting compliance with them. This case study details the path Royal Holloway University of London, has taken to navigate its way through these recent changes and challenges. Developing strategies to ensure compliance with funders' open access policies Background: UK funders' open access policies Over the past two years, the UK has been experiencing a growing interest in open access (OA), with its government and funding bodies taking an active stance to improve free-ofcost access to scholarly literature. The controversial 'Finch' report 1 was the first official government document to recognize the importance of openness to publicly funded research and was followed immediately by a policy on OA from RCUK 2. Only a year later, in March 2014, HEFCE introduced its own 'Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework' 3 , which is expected to cause major changes in the landscape of the future Research Excellence Framework (REF), an exercise that assesses the research quality of UK HEIs. There are several similarities between the policies. Firstly, both policies require open access to journal articles and conference proceedings only, recognizing that this practice is already widely accepted and applied, both by researchers and publishers. Secondly, when OA access is provided via the green route, i.e. self-archiving in a repository, both policies allow a maximum 12-month embargo period for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and a maximum 24-month embargo period for arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS) subjects. Finally, both policies require the adoption of a more liberal licence than the traditional 'all rights reserved', with the minimum requirement being that authors should retain the right to self-archive their outputs in a repository. The two main differences between the policies are that, firstly, the RCUK OA policy is a preferentially-gold policy, which means that compliance is preferred via paid-for publication in a journal. To support the gold route to OA, RCUK has distributed a block grant to most UK HEIs to cover the article processing charges (APCs) related to this type of publishing. Unlike RCUK, the HEFCE policy is a green policy, thus, compliance is possible only when the output is self-archived in a repository, either institutional or subject. The second, and probably most important difference between the two policies, is ...