Open access and rights retention

If you wish to publish your work Gold Open Access (Routes B and C), your publisher will usually request an Article Processing Charge (APC) for articles or a similar charge for another type of output. 

The library has read-and-publish agreements with some publishers that cover these costs for eligible articles.  If you work is not covered by one of these agreements there is support with Open Access charges which you can apply for.

The REF open access requirements relate to articles published in journals or conference proceedings with an ISSN.

These must be deposited in SHURA within three months of the date of acceptance. You do this by uploading the output to Elements.

You must also provide proof of the date of acceptance, usually in the form of an email from the journal editor or conference organiser. 

If you follow the checklist to publish your scholarly articles open access, your articles will meet the REF open access requirements.  The REF open access requirements page provides more information. 

The date of acceptance is the point at which the author is notified that:

• their output has been reviewed by the journal or conference (normally via peer review)
• all academically necessary changes have been made in response to that review
• the article is ready to be taken through the final steps toward publication (normally copy-editing and typesetting).

By this point, the paper should have been updated to include all changes resulting from peer review as well as any changes of an academic nature requested by the journal editor or conference organiser. At this stage, the journal editor or conference organiser normally notifies the author that their paper has been ‘firmly’ accepted (as opposed to any earlier point of ‘provisional’ acceptance e.g. conditional on major or minor revisions being made) and the paper is ready for copy-editing or typesetting; it is the date of this notification that should be taken to mean the date of acceptance.The date of acceptance for conference proceedings is not the date at which your contribution to the conference was accepted for presentation, but rather the date at which your fully authored research output was accepted for publication in the conference proceedings.

For journal articles and conference papers, it is the author accepted manuscript (or post-print) which should be uploaded to Elements.  The is the version of the article including all changes resulting from peer review as well as any changes of an academic nature requested by the journal editor or conference organiser.  You cannot usually use the copy-edited, typeset, or published paper,  known as the ‘proof’ or ‘version of record'.