Open Access FAQ
This page supplies answers to some of the more commons questions that researchers and academic support staff have about Open Access in higher education.
If you have a question or concern that is not addressed below, please contact the research support/publications team at PublicationsRepos@rvc.ac.uk.
There is also a wealth of information about open access available from public and government and charitable bodies that either fund or create policy on open access. Some especially valuable resources are:
- - a HEFCE funded service: search by journal title or ISSN to find out whether a journal in which you wish to publish (or have published in) allows you to comply with the REF requirements for open access to research.
- - a search tool for finding out the open access/archiving policies of journals and publishers.
- - contains information about open access, FAQs, and policy documents including the HEFCE OA policy, the Finch report on open access in HE, and the UK government's of its recommendations.
- - includes compliance tools and guides for researchers and administrators, as well as links to JISC resources such as:
- - Research Councils UK page on OA policy, which includes a link to the RCUK policy and a FAQ section which addresses the OA responsibilities of RCUK grant recipients.
- - Wellcome Trust's open access policy and links to various guides and reports, as well as information about the
- - 'Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.' This site offers information on how to use CC licences to share your work openly under different conditions.
- - information about your open access options if publishing in an Elsevier journal.
- - information about Wiley's support for open access. The side menu includes a link to the .
What is open access?
Open Access refers to material that is free to all readers at the point of use. There are two routes into Open Access - gold or green.
Gold Open Access is where the author makes their article Open Access in a journal, sometimes for a fee. This journal may be exclusively Open Access, or it may have a mixture of Open Access and subscription-only articles.
Green Open Access is achieved when the author deposits the accepted manuscript of a published article into an institutional repository upon acceptance. This version must be free of the journal's formatting or layout - a word document for example, or a rich text format (RTF) document. Depending on the publisher's policies, this document can be made openly available on a repository after an embargo period (typically 12 months from publication).
The 91做厙's repository can be found at .
Why should I make my work open access?
Open access research is more visible, more influential, and more open! Furthermore:
- It is the responsibility of publicly funded researchers and institutions to make their research outputs available to the public.
- Most public and charitable funding bodies (e.g. RCUK, Wellcome Trust) require that the products of their research be made openly available.
- As of April 2016, only papers that are deposited on acceptance to an institutional repository are eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF.
What am I expected to make open access?
HEFCE policy applies "only to journal articles and conference proceedings with an International Standard Serial Number. It will not apply to monographs, book chapters, other long-form publications, working papers, creative or p