Partnering on Copyright

There are two ways in which your work can be made available in an Open Access environment, both of which bring significant benefits. The first method is to ‘self-archive’: this means you continue to publish as normal in a subscription-based journal (allowing you to continue to submit work to the established journal which most suits your research), but supplement this by placing a copy of your article online, on your institution’s website or in an institutional or subject-based repository. A list of such repositories can be found in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and a dedicated Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open DOAR) is being developed.

Self-archiving in an IR or subject-based repository is more preferable than on the author’s or departmental Web pages. The work is more likely to be stored and managed more effectively, as well as be more easily searchable and retrievable through both OA interoperability standards and better metadata describing the work.

The second way is to publish in one of the growing numbers of Open Access journals. These offer a level of peer-review and copy-editing comparable with a traditional fee-based journal and are listed in a dedicated directory.

Note also that some publishers, including Oxford University Press and Springer, currently offer a third way, allowing the author to have their work made available on Open Access terms for a fee (otherwise known as the 'author-pays' model), alongside publication in their subscription-based journal.

Both self-archiving and OA publishing is discussed in more detail in the following pages. In all cases, you need to be conscious of copyright issues, as these pages will explain.

Self-archiving means placing work online, either on the author's or institution's web site, or by depositing it in an institutional repository or subject-based repository.

An institutional repository is a digital collection of intellectual output, such as research articles, theses and teaching materials, produced by members of an institution, and stored on the institution's server. Not only do IRs allow for the free access to these materials, but they also provide a way of storing and preserving them.

A subject-based repository, on the other hand, is a freely available digital collection of research output of a particular discipline, or related disciplines, which is stored on a centralised server.

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