Fundamentally, open access is the process of making the outputs from your research freely available, enabling as many readers as possible to find and use them regardless of economic circumstance.
More specifically, open access (OA) scholarly literature is digital, online, free of charge, and often subject to less restrictive copyright and licensing than traditionally published works, for both users and authors. (Peter Suber)
For an interesting perspective on open access, watch this video : Open Access Explained!
Open Access enables:
When a paper is Gold OA, it is open access on the journal website with a Creative Commons licence.This means that it is free to access by anyone with an internet connection. And readers can repurpose the article in a variety of ways in accordance with the terms of the licence.Gold OA usually has a cost attached to it in the form of an article processing charge or APC.See further information under ‘Paying for Open Access’ below.
When a paper is Green OA, a version of it (usually the peer reviewed accepted manuscript prior to publisher formatting) is made openly accessible via a repository such as Pure.There is sometimes a journal-specified embargo required of between 6 and 24 months; open access staff will apply the embargo when they validate the record. There is no cost attached to Green OA.
The University of Bath Open Access Mandate requires research active staff to deposit their outputs in Pure. You must deposit your peer-reviewed journal articles and conference outputs published conference in proceedings, and you are encouraged to deposit other types of research outputs such as book chapters, reports, working papers and conference presentations.The University of Bath mandate aligns with the REF Open Access policy.
The 'author’s accepted manuscript' (AAM) also known as the 'postprint' is the version of the paper that is normally deposited in Pure; it has had peer review comments integrated and has been accepted by the journal but has not yet been copy edited typeset by the publisher's editorial staff. Any reviewer suggestions must have been implemented in the author's accepted manuscript as the intellectual content must be equal to that contained in the final published version.
Institutional repositories are databases that allow institutions make their research available in a way that meets Open Access mandates and policies. Bath's institutional repository is located within a research information system called Pure. Pure is a combined research information system (CRIS) which facilitates the collection, preservation, and dissemination of Bath’s intellectual outputs in digital form; this is then made accessible via the Bath Research Portal.
The primary advantages of institutional repositories are:
All members of staff in academic and research related posts should automatically have Pure accounts set up for them. Pure accounts may be requested for other members of staff (such as support staff) by emailing pure@bath.ac.uk
Log into Pure and click on the green ‘Add new’ button at the top right, select ‘Research output’ and choose one of the following 3 options:
More guidance about using Pure is available from the Pure team at: https://www.bath.ac.uk/guides/pure-user-guides/
To be eligible for submission to REF, research and review articles, and conference outputs published in proceedings with an ISSN must be open access.
This can be achieved either by depositing your accepted manuscript in Pure within three months of acceptance – open access staff will check the details and make the manuscript open access immediately upon publication or after a publisher-defined embargo period.
OR by publishing in a fully open access journal with a Creative Commons licence and adding the DOI or link to the final published version to Pure.
REF OA policy requires deposit of accepted manuscripts in Pure within three months of acceptance. You need to record the full date of acceptance in the Pure record; i.e. the date you received an email from the publisher stating that your article had been accepted for publication. The presence of this date enables Pure to calculate the timeline and the open access team to confirm REF OA compliance.
If an embargo is required by the publisher on the deposited AAM, Pure (see definition above) can support this. It is not essential to specify the embargo while uploading your manuscript as the OA team will check publisher requirements before validating any new record. The record will not be visible on the research portal until it has been validated. Validations are normally carried out withing 7-10 working days.
If you are planning to submit to , or have had an article accepted for publication in a journal that does not have an open access option, please contact the open access team for more information about compliance and possible choices.
For all items uploaded to Pure, open access staff will check publisher policies and implement the appropriate access controls (where necessary) and apply the appropriate licensing. As a result, manuscripts can be posted as 'open'.
No. The REF OA policy states that authors are not required to pay fees to make their outputs open access. They can instead use a repository such as Pure to upload the full text of their outputs and make them open access via the research portal, sometimes after an embargo period.
Sometimes an open padlock on the journal website is just an indication that the content is available through a University of Bath library subscription. Publishers often make papers freely available for a limited period of time, in which case they will often be labelled "free" or "free to view".In these cases, the accepted manuscript still needs to be uploaded to Pure. It is not the same as gold open access, which means the paper will be openly available in perpetuity on the publisher's website, with a licence that permits copying and reuse. It is normally labelled "open access", and usually contains a Creative Commons licence statement.
Some journals require a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND licence to be applied to all accepted manuscripts made open access via repositories. Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs, is the most restrictive license offered by Creative Commons. With this license, the user (while attributing the original creator) can only share the work but not change it in any way or ever use it commercially. If you wish to apply a less retrictive CC licence to your AAM, or to ensure compliance with your funder’s open access policy, you will need to include a Rights Retention Statement below in the Acknowledgements section of your submitted article and in any covering letter you include with it.
"For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising"
The statement asserts author copyright to any arising accepted manuscript (following peer review and relevant editorial processes), including the application of a CC-BY licence to that accepted manuscript when deposited in a repository. The licence can be selected from the drop-down menu in the Pure record.
When uploading your full-text AAM to the Pure record, please select the relevant licence from the Licence drop-down menu. The licence will be displayed on the coversheet when your AAM is downloaded by anyone accessing it via the research portal. In addition, you will need to apply a licence statement to your AAM document. For example:Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a CC-BY - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License -https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
If you are including any 3rd party content in your article which has been published under a different licence, you need to mark this content with the correct licensing terms and copyright holder (eg Copyright © Susan James. All rights reserved. or This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License")
The REF policy requires all journal and conference items to be placed in an institutional repository, but this is only a "minimum requirement". Long-form (book) publications are not included in the minimum requirements; however Research England has stated that institutions should be proactive in making these outputs openly accessible as well. Those who can demonstrate such proactivity will be rewarded under the "People, Culture and Environment" component of REF2028.
Not all publishers allow full text deposit of chapters from long-form publications; open access staff will always check a publisher's policy before validating any material in compliance with their requirements.
PLEASE NOTE: Authors publishing a book or chapter which is funded from a UKRI research grant will need to comply with UKRI's open access policy for monographs, book chapters and edited collections. This requires outputs to be open access within 12 months of publication. See further details within the 'Meeting Funder Requirements' section of this libguide.
You should make the corresponding authors aware that you will require the access to their accepted manuscript in order to upload it to the repository within 3 months of the acceptance date. Alternatively, the journal may be able to provide you with a copy that you can use.
If you have not been able to obtain the final accepted manuscript, contact the open access team.
It is a requirement that all peer-reviewed journal and conference outputs within scope of the REF open access policy are deposited in Pure, whether or not it is anticipated they will be submitted to REF.The REF assessment will include an assessment of the institution’s overall engagement with open research practices, including open access to research outputs.
It is mandatory to create a record in Pure for all your research outputs, and if the output has not been published gold open access, to deposit a full-text version of the accepted manuscript even if the paper is available through a pre-print server (eg: arXiv, bioRxiv, chemRxiv, medRxiv or SSRN) or another platform. These services cannot easily be used to demonstrate compliance with the REF open access policy because they do not usually identify the version that was uploaded. However, where a version identical to the accepted manuscript/final version was uploaded to a preprint server before first online publication, the paper can be treated as compliant with the REF open access policy under a special provision.
In this case you can create a link in the Pure record to this deposit. Alternatively, contact the Open Access Team, providing the URL of the paper in the other repository.
If the accepted manuscript has been deposited in a repository within the required timeframe by one of your co-authors, it is possible to create a link to the deposit and set the correct deposit date in Pure. Please contact the open access team who will assist with this.
These social networking sites lack repository services such as preservation, adherence to publisher or funder policies, and visibility on scholarly search engines like Google Scholar. There is no verification of article details (metadata) by the open access team. Therefore we would advise the following:
After depositing your research output in Pure, utilize the resulting Bath Research Portal link for other repositories, platforms or websites. This guarantees that any changes made in Pure will automatically update other associated links.
No. You do not need to upload full text in order to comply with the policies. Outputs can be eligible for submission to the REF and qualify for an exception from the open access requirement, where:
Yes. It is important that all outputs that are in scope of the policy are uploaded, so that they are eligible for submission - regardless of where the authors are based at the time of the next REF.
When an output is added to Pure, it goes into a holding area to be checked and validated by the open access staff.This can take 7-10 working days. Once validated your output will be visible on the portal. If changes are subsequently made to the record, the output may require re-validation and is thus not visible for a short period of time while this is in progress.If you have an urgent request for validation, please contact openaccess@bath.ac.uk
Many publishers allow the self-archiving of author accepted manuscripts. This means you can upload a version of your work to Pure. Often, a single chapter can be deposited and made openly available after an embargo period. The Library’s Open Access Team can advise you about different publisher policies. Please contact openaccess@bath.ac.uk for more information, and see our guidance on uploading content to Pure.
Increasingly commercial publishers are offering the option to pay to make your book (or book chapter) openly available. Open access fees can range from £2,500 to £10,000 depending on length, number of colour illustrations, and so on. Examples of commercial publishers which offer open access monograph publishing include: Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Oxford University Press, Palgrave, Routledge, Springer, Policy Press, and Ubiquity Press. It is also worth considering university and scholarly society presses as a way to publish your book openly. Examples of university presses which offer open access monograph publishing include UCL Press, University of Huddersfield Press, Cardiff University Press, and White Rose University Press.
Finally, we have a subscription to Open Book Publishers which enables University of Bath authors to publish open access books with no book processing charges. In some cases this tool has been used to make previously out of print books available online in a new edition. Please contact the Open Access team for advice.
The Library has also produced a useful guide to ebook academic publishing considerations for authors.
From 1 January 2024, UKRI funded monographs, book chapters and edited collections need to be made open access within 12 months of publication, either via gold (paid-for) open access or via deposit of accepted manuscript into a repository such as Pure. Further details are available on our Meeting Funder Requirements page. Wellcome Trust's open access policy includes monographs and book chapters. Funding is available for the cost of making monographs open and authors should apply directly to the Wellcome Trust for reimbursement of the costs. For more advice, please contact openaccess@bath.ac.uk.
Check the 'Paying for open access' web pages to see if your journal is included in a publisher open access agreement.These are available to all Bath corresponding authors and provide open access publishing at no additional cost to the author.
If not included in an agreement, you can either email openaccess@bath.ac.uk or submit an APC Request form (available from the ‘Paying for Open Access’ page) to apply for funding.
Before you submit to the journal please check whether it is included in one of Bath's open access agreements.Details of agreements of agreements can be found on the page: Publisher open access agreements.
If not,the APC request form should be completed and submitted.A member of the team will be in touch if further information is required, and to advise on the payment and publication process.
It is preferable, but not essential that an AAM is deposited while we await gold publication, to ensure compliance and in order that funder acknowledgements may be checked.At the point of acceptance, please create a record in Pure for your output and upload your accepted manuscript.
However, under the REF rules, if your paper is published as gold open access on the journal website - under a licence that permits copying and reuse - you do not need to upload it to Pure. The paper complies with the REF open access policy. Most gold open access papers are published under a Creative Commons (CC) licence - which cannot be revoked. If your paper is open access, but does not have a Creative Commons (CC) licence, you should upload the final accepted manuscript to Pure within the required timeframe.
Hybrid journals are subscription journals that offer authors the option of publishing open access articles. These journals combine closed access articles (access by subscription only) with open access articles – sometimes known as hybrid open access.
This model requires the payment of an article processing charge (APC) to the publisher – payable on acceptance of the article by the journal after peer review, or on publication. Note that libraries pay a subscription to the publisher to access the articles in these journals which are behind a paywall.
A ‘persistent identifier’ is a short string of letters and numbers that is unique to one specific thing, whether that ‘thing’ is an article, a dataset, a person or an organisation. Because they are unique, persistent identifiers are used in research to disambiguate items from each other, but they can also be used to create links between them.
Persistent identifiers are usually identifiers that are:
-Globally unique: The identifier should only be given to one thing on the whole of the internet and must not be reused for anything else at any time
-Actionable: The identifier can be converted into a URL, that when clicked will take you to the item or information about it
-Persistent: They must continue to be globally unique and to be actionable for a long time. This means that the organisation linking an identifier to an item should commit to maintain that link for the long term.
Globally unique and persistent identifiers make it easier to link and attribute the outcomes of research with their creators and funders. These links in turn support search, discovery, access and metrics across the research landscape.
DOIs stands for ‘Digital Object Identifier’. DOIs are persistent identifiers for research outputs, such as journal articles, datasets, code, posters, videos and samples. When an item has been cited with a DOI, a reader can locate that item with just a click.
The ‘Digital’ part means that the identifier itself is digital, not the item it represents. DOIs can in fact be associated with non-digital items(such as people) as long as information about them exists digitally.
Because DOIs are globally unique, any use of the DOI to cite or link to an item can be easily and unambiguously tracked. This makes DOIs the perfect way to track citations anywhere – from reference lists, to reading lists, blogs, news items and social media.
The majority of journal publishers will usually assign a DOI to every paper they publish, with exceptions typically being small independent presses. Many books and book chapters are now assigned a DOI by the publisher.
You can also get DOIs for your other outputs - such as grey literature (reports , theses, non- published articles)data, code and posters - by submitting it to a repository. The University of Bath’s data repository will assign DOIs, making your research data independently citable. Most other national and international subject data centres provide a DOI to datasets they publish. You can check if the data centre you are submitting to assigns DOIs by checking their entry on re3data.org.
If you would like to assign a DOI to an unpublished work such as a report, please contact the open access service at: openaccess@bath.ac.uk
The only change you need to make to citations using a DOI, is that you should include the DOI URL alongside the other standard information. When referencing items from the web, always use a DOI if there is one, and not the link copied from the address bar. The link in the address bar could change at any point in the future, and your link will break. The DOI will not break.
Examples of citations using DOIs:
-Citing a dataset using Harvard Bath style:
o“Wilson, D., 2013. Real geometry and connectedness via triangular description: CAD example bank [Online]. Bath: University of Bath. Available from: https://doi.org/10.15125/BATH-00069 [Accessed 20 April 2016]”
-Citing a preprint using Harvard Bath style:
-Citing a blog post, IEEE style:
-Citing a video, APA (7th) style:
An ORCID iD or just ‘ORCID’ for short, is an identifier for authors and contributors to scholarly works and outputs. An ORCID can allow you to disambiguate your authored items, which makes it easier for others – such as funders – to see your specific contributions to research.
ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven service that also provides a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to individuals. These identifiers, and the relationships among them, can be linked to a researcher's output to enhance the scientific discovery process and to improve the efficiency of research funding and collaboration within the research community.
Any researcher can register for an ORCID.You can do this via your Pure profile or by going to https://orcid.org. You can connect your Pure profile with ORCID to ensure that any ouputs you add to Pure will appear in your ORCID profile. As the researcher, you are the sole authority on your ORCID record, and you can add your employment history, outputs and funding, and give permission for trusted parties to make changes to your record. We strongly recommend:
-including your ORCID when submitting new grant applications or papers, to make it easier to link directly between you and your work
-including your ORCID when providing datasets to the University of Bath data repository
-adding your ORCID to your University of Bath Pure record.
Within ORCID you can also allow the system to automate addition of new works to your ORCID profile. When you do include your ORCID with a journal submission, this can be automatically added to your profile, without further work from you. More details on this can be found at: https://library.bath.ac.uk/research-analytics/ORCID .
A Scopus Author ID is an identifier linked to your Scopus author profile. Unlike ORCID, this profile is automatically generated and assigned to authors by Scopus. The profile includes a list of publications, along with citation metrics, affiliations, research interests, and other information. Because the Scopus author profile is automatically generated, there may be some errors, for instance papers assigned to you that you did not author, and you may find you have more than one profile under your name and your papers are spread across those two profiles.
We strongly encourage you to check your Scopus author profile for errors – particularly missing and wrongly-attributed papers.
In addition to DOIs for outputs and ORCID iDs for authors and creators, you may find the following identifiers useful when you can apply them to your work.
-Funding and Funder IDs: Identifiers for your funder or for awarded grants. If your funder provides you with a DOI for them or for a grant they have given you, you should be sure to mention that ID in any outputs you publish.
-Affiliation IDs: This is a unique identifier for the University of Bath as an organisation. If you are asked for an ID for your affiliation, please use the following ROR ID: https://ror.org/002h8g185
-ISNIs: The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an identifier created by national libraries to disambiguate authors and copyright holders. It is automatically generated from bibliographic metadata, and so unlike ORCID, it holds identifiers for authors who are no longer active and so are unable to claim their own ORCID. This makes it particularly useful for disambiguating authors in older materials. But current authors are also likely to have an ISNI, as are organisations. To find out if you have an ISNI, you can search https://isni.org/page/search-database/. The ISNI for the University of Bath is https://isni.org/isni/0000000121621699
Project IDs: An emerging service called RaiD (Research Activity ID) aims to be able to bring together activities from a single project together under a single ‘umbrella’ ID. This will be particularly useful for portfolio-like projects and outputs. Find more information at https://www.raid.org.au/.
Email: openaccess@bath.ac.uk
Post: Library Research Services, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
Phone: 01225 385114
Please address any questions regarding outputs in Pure to openaccess@bath.ac.uk.
Other queries related to other aspects of Pure eg: impact, equipment and awards should be addressed to pure@bath.ac.uk.