

Open Access
Find out how to make your research publications and theses Open Access. For open sharing of research data and other associated outputs, please see our open data page.
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) is free, unrestricted online availability of research literature such as peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters and monographs. According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative:
"By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
Over the years, the scope of Open Access has expanded beyond traditional publications to include any tangible products arising from research, including early versions of manuscripts (preprints, theses, data sets, software, patents and creative works (compositions, literary works, performances), as well as any other outputs supporting the analysis, interpretation and, where applicable, reproducibility of the research findings.
Why Open Access?
Scholarly publications, including journal articles, conference proceedings and monographs, are currently the main avenues to disseminating research, but often people need to pay for access; even then, they are limited in how they can re-use the work.
Open Access to publications aims to remove these barriers. Open Access publications are freely available online, without the need for payment or passwords, and free from most re-use restrictions.
Resources
- The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
- Open Access explained! A video from PhD comics
- Paywall: the movie: a film explaining the background of Open Access
- SPARC: the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
- Directory of Open Access journals (DOAJ)
- Full guide to transitional agreements from JISC
- OpenUK Guide to OA monograph publishing (PDF)
- Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual.