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Library services for researchers - Open research

Open access publishing 

Open access publishing allows for readers around the world to access your findings without having to pay for the resource. Your publications will reach a wider audience including practitioners, policy makers, the broader public, and researchers from low and middle-income countries. 

When your research is freely available it may lead to: 

  • Compliance with funder mandates, such as NHMRC and ARC 
  • Increased exposure to your work, including developing countries and the public 
  • Increased citations (Piwowar, H et al., 2018
  • Increased practitioner access to your research 
  • Increased engagement through social media and news mentions 
  • Increased potential to influence public policy. 

Image created by UOW Library and shared under CC BY-SA licence.

As part of a diverse publishing environment, or bibliodiversity, there are different types of open access publishing for both journals and books. You will have some considerations when thinking about where to publish your research, for example, what are your funder’s requirements, institutional requirements, collaborator requirements, and do you have the research funds to pay article processing charges (APCs)?

UOW's open access principles further the University’s strategic goals for a better future through education, research and partnership. These principles demonstrate University and researcher commitment to sharing our research as broadly as possible.

Most publishers charge an article processing charge (APC) for journal-based open access or a book processing charge (BPC) for book-based open access. However, if you don’t have the research funds available to pay an APC or BPC there are other options available to you.

More information about publishing can be found in the Strategic publishing section of this guide.

Types of open access publishing

Read & Publish agreements

UOW Library participates in Read & Publish (R&P) agreements with selected publishers, through the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) consortium. These agreements allow UOW staff and students to both access the subscription content for research and publish eligible articles open access in the included journals, at no cost to the researcher. 

UOW funding for publishing

UOW staff have access to the Open Access High Impact Grant scheme (OA-HI), established to provide support for the publication of research in open access, high quality journals for maximum impact.   

Further details are available on the Researcher Toolkit (UOW staff intranet).

Subscribe to open agreements

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a model that some smaller publishers are using to move their journals to fully Open Access for a particular year when they receive enough Library subscriptions.  

From a researcher’s perspective, when a journal is part of a Subscribe to Open agreement, the current year’s publications are all published open access with no APCs charged to authors. More information can be found in our Open access publishing agreements: Subscribe to open agreements guide

Free to publish

Not all open access journals charge an APC to publish an article, some are free for authors to publish in as well as being free for readers to access. You can use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to locate journals without fees. As with all journal publishing, it is advisable to use Journal selection strategies to check the relevance, quality and appropriateness of the journal before you submit.

Repository-based open access

If you’re unable to publish open access immediately in the journal or book, you can self-archive author accepted manuscripts (AAM) and NTROs via UOW's open access repository or a subject repository.  

Most commonly the AAM or the final author-created version of the manuscript – including any changes made after peer-review and acceptance for publication, but before the publisher's final copyediting, typesetting, and formatting – can be added to an open access repository. It’s important to check your author agreement, as there may be a specified embargo period on making your AAM available in a repository.   

The following are a selection of cross-disciplinary open access repositories:   

The Directory of Open Access Repositories (openDOAR) can be used to discover reputable open access repositories in your discipline. 

Preprints 

Preprints are early versions of research outputs that have not yet been peer reviewed. Typically, these are shared on preprint servers using Creative Commons licences. 

The following are a small selection of cross-disciplinary pre-print repositories:   

The Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories (DOAPR) can be used to discover reputable preprint servers in your discipline. 

Open access book publishing

Publishing an open access book allows for the book or chapter to be read, reviewed, shared and cited independent of it being purchased or libraries stocking it. You should ensure that when you publish an open access book that either a DOI or an ISBN is assigned to the output, to aid discoverability and a permanent record. 

In the same way as journals, this model of publishing can attract a fee or BPC alternatively you can find open access book publishers using the Directory Of Open Access Books (DOAB) or Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA). 

Open peer review

Open peer review describes various combinations of openness across the review process and can support transparency and integrity of the research and publication process. This may include:

  • Author and reviewer identities are disclosed to each other, and to the reader
  • The review reports are published alongside the paper
  • The wider academic community can contribute to peer review.

Author agreements and rights retention 

When you sign an author agreement as the copyright holder, it is important to understand the rights you are retaining and the rights you are granting to the publisher. This is both important for authors publishing in an open access journal or book and authors self-archiving the author accepted manuscript (AAM) into a repository. 

If your published work will not be open access, you will need to retain the rights to be able to apply a Creative Commons licence and archive the AAM in your preferred repository. 

Further information Creative Commons licences and understanding your rights can be found in our Open access publishing agreements: Understanding your rights guide. 

Funder requirements  

If you have funding for your research, your funder may require you to make the outputs from this work openly available. 

The ARC and NHMRC both have mandatory open access requirements as part of their funding policies. If you have funding from either of these bodies or another funder, you will need to ensure you are compliant with their requirements: 

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