Open Research

Open Access is about making research publications freely available, enabling the results to be read and built on by anyone.

Making your outputs Open Access maximises the public benefit and helps you to increase your readership, raise your profile and increase your impact.

Without Open Access, your research outputs will only be available to readers with access through their institution, or who pay for a copy or a subscription.

The ‘green’ route to Open Access is via self-archiving of your author accepted manuscript in a repository such as the SHU institutional repository, SHURA, alongside publication in a subscription journal. For all journal submissions you must include the rights retention statement, so that we can make your accepted manuscript available for download from SHURA.

The ‘gold’ route to Open Access involves making the final version of record Open Access via the publisher’s website.  

• The manuscript will be available immediately to everyone on publication
• There are no costs to readers to read the final published version
• Publishing Gold Open access usually requires payment of a fee known as an Article Processing Charge to the publisher by the author, their funder or institution.
• Some journals are fully open access, which means all articles are Gold Open Access.
• Many subscription journals offer you the option to make your article Gold Open Access on payment of a fee.
• Some publishers offer this option for monographs or chapters.

Research whether Gold Open Access is possible in the journal you are considering publishing in:

• is the journal a fully open access journal?
• is it a subscription journal which offers an option to publish Gold Open Access?

If you want to publish Gold Open Access, investigate the costs involved for your chosen journal. 

The library has several transformative deals (also called read and publish deals) with publishers which eliminate the cost to SHU authors in some or all of that publisher's journals. The Library also has deals with some publishers which reduce the costs.

Find out more about the Library deals with publishers and getting funding for Gold Open Access. 

Make sure you have funding in place before committing to Gold Open Access.

It is important to be aware that some journals and publishers operate an exploitative business model (sometimes known as ‘predatory’) by charging Article Processing Charges without providing proper editorial and publishing services, such as peer review.  The journals therefore lack academic rigour and credibility. Make sure you choose where to publish carefully.