What is open access?

Open access publishing means making your research outputs available online, free of charge to individuals who wish to access and read it.

You can publish open access either by depositing your work in a repository such as Spiral or by paying an open access fee or article processing charge (APC) to a publisher for immediate open access on their website.

Yes. Open access articles published in journals are peer-reviewed.

ThinkCheckSubmit is a website that helps you to choose trusted journals for your research.

If it is an open access journal check the following:

• It has an entry in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• Publisher’s membership of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
• Publisher’s membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
• Publisher’s membership of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM).
• Named editor and editorial board – recognised experts in their field who include their editorial commitment on their own research profiles.
• Look at the editor’s profile on their university website, links to their online profiles (for example, on ResearchGate, Google Scholar or LinkedIn) for evidence that they are actual editors. Further indicators are membership of organisations such as the Council of Science Editors (CSE), European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

Check with your journal. Many publishers have hybrid ‘gold’ open access options, making your work open access immediately on publication. This usually involves paying an open access fee or APC.

Yes. Open access articles published in journals are peer-reviewed.

Check with your journal. Many publishers have hybrid ‘gold’ open access options, making your work open access immediately on publication. This usually involves paying an open access fee or APC.

The Library does not provide general advice to authors on the location of where to publish research, instead we recommend authors ask fellow academics in their department for advice. For authors with a particular interest publishing on open access, the Directory of Open Access Books can be searched by subject, language, and publisher.

If you are funded by one of the constitute research councils that make up UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) its Open Access Policy from 1 January 2024 includes a new open access requirement for monographs, book chapters and edited collections to be made open access within 12 months of publication via a publisher’s website, platform or repository, with a Creative Commons licence.

If you hold a grant from the Wellcome Trust and author or co-author original scholarly monographs and book chapters you must make it available from NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC as soon as possible. Where an open access publishing fee has been charged, works must be available without embargo and licensed in ways which support their re-use. CC BY is also strongly preferred by the Wellcome Trust.

Contact the Library’s Open Access team

Book a one-to-one with the Open Access team

Contact your subject Librarian

You can publish open access either by depositing your work in a repository such as Spiral or by paying an open access fee or article processing charge (APC) to a publisher for immediate open access on their website.

Research Gate and Academia.edu are social networking sites aimed at researchers. They regularly encourage researchers to upload and share their latest research papers but just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should.

Read our guidance to using ResearchGate‌

Open access publishing means making your research outputs available online, free of charge to individuals who wish to access and read it.

Fully open access journals make all their published content open and freely available to any reader, usually under Creative Commons licences. The majority charge an open access fee or article processing charge (APC), but there is no traditional subscription charge to pay.

Hybrid journals are ‘traditional’ subscription-only titles for which publishers now provide ‘gold’ open access publishing options at a charge. Content in these journals will be a mix of freely available open content (if an open access fee or APC was paid for the article to be published) and subscriber-only content.

ThinkCheckSubmit is a website that helps you to choose trusted journals for your research.

If it is an open access journal check the following:

• It has an entry in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• Publisher’s membership of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
• Publisher’s membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
• Publisher’s membership of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM).
• Named editor and editorial board – recognised experts in their field who include their editorial commitment on their own research profiles.
• Look at the editor’s profile on their university website, links to their online profiles (for example, on ResearchGate, Google Scholar or LinkedIn) for evidence that they are actual editors. Further indicators are membership of organisations such as the Council of Science Editors (CSE), European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

The author accepted manuscript (AAM). You can search for the journal in Jisc’s open policy finder to find out your publisher’s policy.