Open Access

"Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." (Peter Suber, Open Access)

Three common forms are

• gold OA: the publisher (journal/conference) makes the publication OA on their platform, usually the final 'version of record'

• green OA: the author or their institution makes the publication OA on their platform (an author or institution repository), usually the accepted manuscript, meaning the last version you submitted in response to which you got the notification that your manuscript is accepted for publication.

• diamond OA: the publisher (journal/conference) makes the publication OA on their platform, and publishing with them is free of charge for the author and their institution.

Importantly for us, the IGGI funder EPSRC has its own standard when something counts as OA, which aligns with the standard set up for when a work can be submitted to REF, the large research evaluation exercise every four years that determines how quite a chunk of government research money is distributed to universities.

To summarise those standards, to 'count' as OA for our funder and universities,

journal articles and conference papers published as part of proceedings with an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) must be 

• deposited as soon after point of acceptance as possible, and no later than 3 months after this date as the accepted manuscript to a repository, and 

• be freely accessible for anyone on the Internet 

  • either as green OA with an embargo of at most 6 months – meaning the journal/conference publisher allows people to freely access the accepted manuscript

  • or as gold OA, meaning published by the journal/conference under a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

You should totally read the specifics at your uni: each has slightly different standards, procedures, how to get money for OA, what journals they may have bulk discounts with that allow them to publish OA without extra charge, etc.

• University of York: https://www.york.ac.uk/library/info-for/researchers/open-access/

• Queen Mary University of London: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/library/research/open-access/

• Goldsmiths University: https://research.gold.ac.uk/openaccess.html

1. There is tons of evidence that work that is open access gets found, read, used, and cited more.

2. Our work is funded by the public, so the public should be able to access it freely.

3. Subscribing to paid journals is very expensive to libraries, so many libraries have to choose which journals and conferences to subscribe to, and researchers working at those unis or researchers not affiliated with a uni may not be able to access your work if it is published in a paid journal.

4. Our funder EPSRC expects that research funded by them is published open access whenever possible. To motivate researchers to comply, only open access work can be submitted to REF, which, see above, means money to the university. Hence, your supervisors and you (should you go to the academic job market) will be asked by departments/unis to maximise your "REFable" publications.

1. Every uni has different standards and procedures: have a look at the open access info at your uni. York for instance expects all work to be submitted as author-accepted manuscript to its own repository PURE within three months of acceptance. As students, you don't have automatic access to PURE, so work with your supervisor to have it submitted.

2. Consider where to publish before submitting – there are good diamond OA journals and conferences, and unis have deals with certain published and journals where you can publish gold OA without extra charge. Importantly, different publishers have different fees (article processing charges) for making a paper gold OA, some of which are quite extortionate, and different archiving and embargo policies for green OA: if your target journals has a 12 month embargo period, it doesn't qualify for green OA, and you must pay the gold OA fee to make it OA for EPSRC standards. And if that fee is very hefty, it is nice to your colleagues and prudent for the public money you spend to look for a different outlet with better policies and/or lower fees.

3. Again, check your uni OA site in advance to find out who your local OA team is. They handle OA and can answer any questions you may have.

Many journals and conferences charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) for making an article open access. UKRI gives each university (usually the library) an annual "block grant" to pay these fees. Therefore, your first port of call for paying open access fees is the open access team at your university, usually based in the library services. 

Because UKRI already funds the block grants, it says that IGGI cannot be used to pay for APCs – with one exception. Since more and more people are publishing open access, there is more demand than supply for open access funds, so unis set policies what kinds of fees they pay. Still, they sometimes run out of their block grant later in a year – as happened for QMUL in 2020. We got confirmation from EPSRC that if your block grant has run out for the year and if there is no other way to comply with REF open access requirements with the publication outlet you chose (i.e., it allows green open access publishing of your author manuscript on your uni repository with an embargo of no longer than 6 months), then you are allowed to use other UKRI/EPSRC grant money like IGGI to pay open access fees. Since block grants refresh annually, the situation may change. For instance, QMUL may be out of block grant monies in February, allowing QMUL students to tap IGGI monies, but come April, the block grant is refreshed and they should go to the open access team again.