This latest blog in our publishing series is a must read for all researchers, not just those in medical education.
In this blog research support librarian Kate Holmes will introduce you to Open Access publishing, why it matters, a few handy tools, and how it might influence where you decide to place your article.
You’ve decided you want to write an article. You’ve thought about your structure, maybe using some of the support and advice from this blog. Maybe you’ve even begun to think about where you’d like to place it. So, how might publishing Open Access influence the process?
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) is free, unrestricted online access to research outputs.
This means that anyone with an internet connection can read your work because it is available without someone having to go through a paywall or log into a system.
There are two common routes to Open Access:
Gold: where the library pays the publisher to make the article available on the publisher’s website free of charge to readers, with their formatting and copyediting.
Green: where you upload the Author Accepted Manuscript to an online data repository such as Pure for anyone to read. (This is the last word document you sent the publisher prior to copyediting and typesetting.)
The UK Reproducibility Network have a great introducing the open research practice of open access and why it is important:
Why do it?
- Research Culture
Paywalls prevent people from reading your research because not every institution can afford to pay for subscriptions to every journal. This means that much of the research conducted is inaccessible to researchers who don’t have access to libraries with large budgets, such as those in the global south, or to patients who want to learn more about their own conditions.
Unsurprisingly, Open Access articles are read and cited more, allowing them to make more impact in the academic community and to interested parties, such as patients.
Choosing to publish Open Access means that you are participating in open research practices and a movement that aims to improve research culture. These practices improve research rigour by being as transparent as possible about how research is done.
Publishing Open Access is one element of open research; you can see it as the front door to wider open research practices.
- Funder requirements
Publishing Open Access is required by some funders like the UKRI’s Medical Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK. These organisations provide funds to cover Gold Open Access costs for the research they have funded. You can find out if you can request these funds by contacting your institutions library and filling out an open access form (see also University of Bristol Article processing charge guidance).
If this is the case, your funder will commonly ask you to:
- apply a CC-BY licence,
- acknowledge your funding by quoting their name and the grant number in the article
- provide a data access statement for any data you created to write the article.
It is important that you include this information and that you publish your article Gold Open Access because this is a condition of their funding your work. Seek advice from your institutional OA team for the specific details of funder requirements so that they can help you understand them more (see also University of Bristol Open Access Policies). Note, not complying may lead to a funder blacklisting an institution or imposing financial penalties.
- Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UKs system for assessing the quality and impact of UK research. We’re still waiting to hear exactly what the Open Access requirements are going to be for REF 2029. However, we currently need to ensure that we upload the Author Accepted Manuscript to Pure within 3 months of its acceptance for the article to be eligible to be submitted as part of REF.
Many institutions, including Bristol, have developed policies to support researchers to make their work more accessible. At Bristol this is the University’s Scholarly Works Policy, which supports researchers to post the accepted version of articles to the online repository (Pure) in a way that meets REF and funder requirements. If you do not manage to upload your article in time, then there are sometimes ‘exceptions’ that can be applied, and your library team can help you with this.
What might this mean for choosing where you place your work?
Publishing Open Access benefits society and is part of your duty as a good researcher. The good news is that you can choose how your work appears by making choices about where you publish.
Although Green Open Access publication is great and can be cited in the same way as a journal’s formatted article, most people prefer to have a free version of their article available on the publisher’s website.
If you want this to happen, there are a couple of different routes you can take:
Diamond Open Access: no fees to authors or to readers, making all research free to read and free to publish. These journals are typically funded by libraries and scholarly organisations.
Gold Open Access: final published version of the research is made open access on the publisher’s webpage in exchange for a fee. If you don’t have funding, you can often still publish Gold Open Access (where the library pays a fee). As part of the journal packages your library buys for you to read, OA teams can make articles in certain journals Gold Open Access. These are known as ‘Read and Publish’ agreements. Your library will often have a directory where you can check whether the journal you are interested in is covered, e.g. UoB Read and Publish deal finder tool.
If you want to make the most of your research, then incorporate choices about Open Access into your journal selection process. That way, it can support you to communicate your research as widely as possible!
More author the blog author:
Dr Kate Holmes advocates for Open Access as a Research Support Librarian. She uses her experience in research to help academics understand more about the benefits of Open Access and the requirements they need to fulfil.