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Scholarly Communications

Routes to Open Access

Routes

There are 2 main routes for making your research publications Open Access: self-archiving (known as Green Open Access) and pay to publish (Gold Open Access).

  • Self-archiving: the deposit of peer-reviewed Author Accepted manuscripts in an open access repository, such as UEL's Research Repository*. Free of charge. Publishers will often apply reuse restrictions and stipulate an embargo period before the full text can be made available to download.
  • Pay to publish: This route results in free, unrestricted access to the final published version of the research immediately upon publication and is licensed for reuse, often by a Creative Commons license. The publisher will require payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC).

    • APCs: In most cases, you can comply with UEL, REF, and Funder Open Access policies without paying a fee by self-archiving your research in the UEL Research Repository.

There are also other models (Diamond/Platinum) used by some publishers where final published versions are made immediately Open Access without the payment of an APC by the author or institution. You can find journals that do not charge publishing fees listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (filter DOAJ by "without APCs").

*Our institutional repository is an online platform for storing and sharing research publications, including journal articles, books, conferences proceedings, theses, and data.

Use the UEL Research Repository to take advantage of Green OA:

Greater Dissemination

  • Depositing in UEL Research Repository enables greater dissemination via increased access. Publications in the repository are indexed in Google and other search engines.

Research Impact

  • Research released as Green OA benefits from the 'Open Access Citation Advantage'. Piwowar et al., (2018) note OA articles are cited 18% more than average.

Equitable Access

  • By providing free access to your research, you remove barriers to your outputs making your research more accessible to all, worldwide. "A seismic shift in access models for scholarly outputs (i.e., from subscription-based models to OA models) has occurred over the past decade with accessible outputs (i.e. can be read or downloaded without payment) rising from approximately 27% of global outputs published in 2011 to over 49% of all outputs published in 2020 being accessible in some form (Neylon & Huang, 2022)." - quoted from Huang et al., 2024.

Easy

  • The Scholarly Communications team ensure compliance with copyright, embargo periods, and other publisher policies.

No Cost

  • There are no fees or charges associated with making your research Green OA through UEL Research Repository.

How UEL can help you

How the UEL Repository Team can help

 

1. Upon acceptance: send details of the publication, the date of acceptance, and a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to repository@uel.ac.uk.

What is the AAM? The AAM is the version of an output which is post-peer review, but before:

  • publisher proofreading, copyediting, formatting, and typesetting.
  • It is usually written in plain text in a Word .doc or .pdf, but publishers can provide templates to be used.
  • It can be referred to as the post-print or pre-proof, depending on the publisher.
  • It is NOT the pre-print (submitted version). It is NOT the proof (undergoing publisher editing). It is NOT the version of record (published version).

2. Alternatively, you can upload to the system yourself: login at https://research.uel.ac.uk and click 'Add output' on the right-hand side of the page. After submitting for approval the Scholarly Communications team will check for all copyright or publisher requirements, including embargoes, and will upload to the UEL Research Repository for you in accordance with all relevant conditions.

 

Adapted from Deakin University Library (CC BY 4.0)

 

Log in to add your research to the repository

 

How to add your research to the repository: