Open access and rights retention

There are two main routes to publish your chapters Open Access. 

Green Open Access

You publish your chapter in a book in the traditional way, but you make the Author Accepted Manuscript available to download from the institutional repository, SHURA.

If you are contributing a book chapter to an edited work, it it is increasingly likely that you will be permitted by your publisher to make it Green Open Access. Publishers such as the Association for Computing Machinery, Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Routledge and Sage now allow Green Open Access on institutional repositories. 

If you have written a whole book, you may also be able to make a chapter of the book available as Green Open Access.

To make your chapter green open access, add the details of your chapter to Elements and deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript of your chapter. 

Your publisher may impose some restrictions, such as an embargo period before the manuscript can be made available to the public. The Library will check your publisher's green open access policy and make your manuscript available on SHURA accordingly.

Gold Open Access

The final published version of your chapter will be made available to download for free from the publisher’s website, usually after payment of a fee. 

If you would like your book chapter to be gold open access, some publishers offer this option, even if the rest of the book is not going to be Open access. 

For example Routledge / Taylor & Frances offer a Gold open access option for chapters on research-level books that fit their standard publishing model. The book can be a single- or co-authored book or an edited collection. 

There is usually a charge for gold open access, but you can request support with open access fees from the SHU Open Access Fund. Please apply before agreeing to pay any open access fees.

It is possible to publish a monograph as gold open access. This will usually require payment of a fee to the publisher.  

Some publishers will make an electronic open access version of your monograph available online whilst also selling hard or paperbacks via print-on-demand. There are many other business models and not all publishers offer an open access option.

Publishers offering open access monograph publishing are, amongst others:

• Commercial University presses, such as Cambridge University Press and Manchester University Press
• Open access (‘new’) University presses – these publish journals and monographs irrespective of institutional affiliation and after scrutiny by an editorial board, such as UCL Press, White Rose University Press and University of Westminster Press
• Open access monograph publishers, of which Open Book Publishers and Ubiquity Press are probably the best-known examples
• Commercial publishers with an open access option, such as Palgrave Open, Brill Open, Springer Open and Routledge Books Open Access

If you are unsure about the credibility of an open access publisher you can check:

• Whether their monographs are included in the OAPEN library
• Whether their monographs are included in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
• Whether they are a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)

Use the Think, Check, Submit: books and chapters site for further advice on checking if an Open Access publisher is trustworthy.

The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit is a very useful resource if you are considering publishing an Open Access book. The accompanying FAQs are also useful for answering your Open Access book publishing questions.

For more information you may also find this paper useful:

E. Collins, C. Milloy and G. Stone, ‘Guide to Open Access Monograph Publishing for Arts, Humanities and Social Science Researchers’ (2015): http://dx.doi.org/10.5920/oapen-uk/oaguid

There is usually a charge for gold open access, and this can be quite high for a whole book. However, you can request support with open access fees from the SHU Open Access Fund. Please apply before agreeing to publish your book open access.