About Open Access

What is Open Access (OA)?

Open Access (OA) refers to the process of making the full text of published research content freely available online to read, download and distribute.

OA compliance

OA involves compliance with both funder mandates and publisher copyright.  Research funders (e.g. UKRI) expect OA for research publications that are supported by funding and acknowledge grants, and where the type of publication is in scope of the funder's OA policy.  For the REF, OA is required as an eligibility requirement for scholarly articles published in journals and conference proceedings with an ISSN. 

Green and Gold OA

The two main routes to OA provided by academic publishers are Green OA and Gold OA:

• Green OA. This is where the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript is uploaded into the University's repository (Pure).  As the publishing lifecycle involves signing a publisher’s copyright transfer agreement, traditionally, the conditions of OA on the Research Portal would be subject to the publisher’s self-archiving policy.  However, the University's Open Access and Insitutional Rights Retention Policy enables UoP authors to self-archive their accepted manuscripts without embargo, and with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license applied, if rights retention text is present. The policy requires the author accepted manuscript to be deposited into Pure as soon as possible after acceptance, and no later than 1 month from first publication.

• Gold OA. This is where the University has to pay the Publisher to make it OA immediately on their website. The author must get approval first for Gold OA, by completing an Article Processing Charge (APC). An open license (typically, a Creative Commons license) is then applied to the published version of record, which will make it immediately OA on the publisher's website and enable its online redistribution. 

Outputs for the REF

In order to comply with the REF OA Policy, for any in-scope research outputs, the peer-reviewed accepted manuscript must be uploaded into Pure within 3 months from the date of acceptance. Once it has been uploaded to Pure, the Research Outputs Team will check it to make sure it has been submitted correctly. If the key eligibility criteria of the REF OA Policy are not met for an individual article, then it may not be allowed to be submitted to the next REF.   For more information read the guidance for uploading research outputs.

Read and publish agreements

The University has some contractual arrangements with a number of core publishers. These are called Read and Publish Agreements. It allows authors to publish original research articles Gold OA in some eligible journals without being subject to payment of an APC. Check the  list of existing publishers that we currently have Read and Publish Agreements.

Contact us

For guidance on OA, you can contact openaccess@port.ac.uk.