Open Access: What is open access?

University of Bath Open Access Deposit Mandate

1. The University of Bath's Open Access Mandate states that all new peer-reviewed journal articles and published conference proceedings should be deposited in Pure, in full-text form, within three months of the publisher's acceptance date. Compliance with this mandate will mean that you are also meeting REF open access requirements.
2. Optional deposit of other research outputs such as book sections, reports, working papers and conference presentations is encouraged. These items will be identified as peer-reviewed or non-peer-reviewed as appropriate.
3. The library provides support for this activity and will check copyright permissions on all deposited papers.

Why do this?

1. Increasing the public availability of full-text, peer-reviewed research papers will lead to improved citations and usage. 
2. Not all potential readers of your work are able to subscribe to the publication in which it appears. Increasing journal subscription prices and university budget cuts will see open access copies more widely utilised.
3. Publication details entered into Pure will be re-used to reduce duplication of effort by researchers.  These details feed through to the university’s researcher profile web pages and will be used for the university’s REF submission.  Lists can also be exported for appraisal or CV purposes.
4. Research England have made open access a requirement for the next REF for journal articles and for conference papers published in journals with an ISSN. Adding these to Pure, once they have been accepted for publication, will meet this requirement.
5. Open access is strongly supported by many funders including the UK Research Councils (UKRI), the European Commission, Wellcome Trust and other charities. These bodies already mandate that publications arising from such funded research are made publicly available. 
6. Some publishers only allow authors to make their papers publicly available if it is mandated by the institution or funder. 
7. Many other research-intensive universities have established open access mandates. These include: University College London, University of Bristol, University of Oxford and others. Institutions that do this benefit from increased dissemination and availability of their publications.

What does it mean for researchers?

• The Open Access Mandate requires researchers to deposit full-text copies of their peer-reviewed journal articles and papers in the University of Bath research repository, Pure.
• Uploading a copy of your paper and its details to Pure takes only a few minutes. All papers are copyright-checked by the library to comply with publisher policies and permissions and it is a means of safe and legal online storage. The library also offers help and guidance as needed.

Are you REF-ready?

• Research England’s open access requirements include the condition that outputs can only be submitted to the REF if the final article / version of record has been published open access OR if the author accepted manuscript (of journal articles or conference outputs published in proceedings with an ISSN) has been deposited in an institutional or subject repository within 3 months of acceptance.
• To ensure that your articles can be considered for the next REF, researchers need to follow these three steps:

Keep, Upload, Contact.

1. Keep your author’s accepted manuscript for journal articles and conference proceedings (that have an ISSN). This activity is not currently necessary for books, chapters or other output types.
2. Whether you are the sole author or a co-author, a postgraduate or a professor, you need to keep this version of your paper.
3. Upload the author’s accepted manuscript to Pure at the point of acceptance. When the publisher sends you an acceptance notification, log into Pure to add the basic publication details and upload the document*. Make sure you add the full acceptance date (YYYY/MM/DD) to the record.
4. The library will check the document and set the embargo date if required.
5. The library will make regular checks to see if the article has been published and will update the publication details in Pure, once they become available.

*If the final version of your research output is to be published immediately open access with a Creative Commons licence, you do not need to upload your accepted manuscript into Pure (unless you want to!). Instead, in the Bibliographical Note box in Pure, please indicate: ‘publishing OA'.  

Green Open Access

• Outputs are published in the traditional manner but a version of the work is archived in an open access repository, such as Pure
• The permitted version is normally the author accepted manuscript (AAM) however publishers are increasingly stipulating which versions can and can't be uploaded to repositories
• This route involves no fee to the publisher
• Publishers often require an embargo (typically 12-24 months) be put in place before the research becomes freely accessible via the repository
• If you want to check whether the journal that you want to publish in has an embargo period or any other notable licensing requirements then use SHERPA RoMEO to find out about your publishers' conditions for open access archiving.

Unless you choose the Gold route to open access, the University of Bath Open Access Mandate requires that the Green route is followed by all staff publishing peer-reviewed journal articles and published conference proceedings. This requirement is in place because these outputs must be openly available to be eligible for the next REF. For further information, please visit our pages about REF open access requirements.

Gold Open Access

• An Article Processing Charge (APC) is paid to the publisher, who then makes the final, published version of an output freely available on the journal's website.
• There is no cost for the reader to access the work, and no embargo is required.
• The work should have a license that allows maximum reuse, such as a CC-BY license (see our OA licensing tab for further details of Creative Commons licenses).
• This route to open access is available via journals which only operate a Gold model for publishing their articles.
• Alternatively, many journals that continue to operate the traditional subscription-based model also allow authors to pay for their papers to be made openly available; these journals are known as 'hybrid'.

Some funders, including the Research Councils and Wellcome Trust, prefer their funded authors to choose this route. Subsequently, they provide funding to cover the cost of these fees. Please see our pages on funder requirements and paying for open access for further information.

Open Access book publishing

Although many open access policies focus on journal articles, it is also possible to publish books and book chapters openly.  UKRI and the Wellcome Trust include monographs and book chapters in their open access policy requirements.

The OAPEN Foundation has launched a new open access (OA) books toolkit for researchers and academic book authors. The toolkit is a free-to-access, stakeholder-agnostic resource that aims to help authors better understand OA for books, increase trust in OA book publishing, provide reliable and easy-to-find answers to questions from authors, and to provide guidance on the process of publishing an OA book.

The toolkit was created in collaboration with Springer Nature and The University of Glasgow and has been written by a global and diverse group of stakeholders from the academic community and scholarly communications organisations. 

The Library’s Open Access Team can assist you in making the right publishing choice for your work if you are considering pursuing this route. Your options will depend on whether or not you have already published your book.

Funder Requirements

Please visit our meeting funder requirements page for more information about the UKRI Open Access Policy for Monographs, Book Chapters and Edited Collections - and how to access the funding available to publish open access.

Wellcome Trust's open access policy includes monographs and book chapters. Funding is available for publishing open access and authors should apply directly to the Wellcome Trust for reimbursement of the costs.

For more advice, please contact: openaccess@bath.ac.uk

Below is a selection of tools to help you find open access publications.

New ways to locate open material are appearing all the time so this list should not be considered comprehensive.

Research outputs produced by University of Bath researchers, including open access publications, are available via the University's Research Portal.

CORE provides access to millions of scholarly outputs from hundreds of repositories:

Subject repositories:

Directories of open access journals, books, repositories, policies and mandates:

Tools to find open access publications and theses:

Predatory practices in scholarly publishing: protect your research and reputation 

The scholarly publishing landscape is complex, with new journal titles regularly appearing and a wide range of publishing models for books and articles.  Although the term "predatory" is problematic - as a loaded and divisive word, it potentially penalises new entrants to the publishing and/or conferencing world while 'allowing unethical practices in established quality ones to go unabated' - it first entered the lexicon when American librarian Jeffrey Beall created his Beall’s list of ‘potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers and journals’.

Predatory publishing practices have been an unfortunate by-product of the move to open access publishing and the pay-to-publish model. These predatory and questionable practices:

• prioritize self-interest over scholarship
• lack transparency
• deviate from best editorial and publication practices
• corrupt the scholarly record
• threaten the credibility and integrity of research
• promote pseudo-researchers

All researchers need to carry out due diligence before submitting their manuscripts and papers to a publisher or conference. In the past, researchers were encouraged to check established lists, such as Beall’s, to avoid predatory journals. However, there are inherent biases in any list and there can also be difficulties in maintaining their currency. This page aims to present some essential tools and resources for researchers to build confidence in their publishing decisions and avoid pitfalls.

Definitions 

Predatory journals solicit articles from researchers through practices that exploit the pressure on researchers to publish.

Features of predatory journals include:

• rapid pay-to-publish models without rigorous peer-review,
• fake editorial boards falsely listing respected scientists,
• fraudulent impact factors,
• journal titles that are deceptively similar to those of legitimate journals,
• paid review articles that promote fake science,
• aggressive spam invitations to submit articles, including outside of a researcher’s expertise.

Furthermore, it is common practice for predatory journals to exploit the “author-pays” model of open access for financial gain. 

Predatory conferences are a growing part of the academic landscape. They may be organised by these same publishers, or by specialised for-profit conference groups. They exploit the pressure on researchers to present their work, especially to international audiences. These conferences are characterised by a similar lack of peer review of submitted abstracts and papers, may charge high fees with respect to the services provided, and often invite researchers to speak on topics outside their area of expertise; in the case of fake conferences, they do not take place at all. 

Source: Elliott, Tracey (dir.)., 2022. Combatting predatory academic journals and conferences. The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP).

Tools and resources

Checklists

Abstracting and indexing services 

Reminder: checking if the journal or book is indexed in discovery services is only part of the due diligence process. Abstracting and indexing services are fallible and can contain papers from predatory journals. 

These links are provided for ease of access, please ensure you consult the relevant Think. Check. Submit. checklist first.

Other useful resources

Reading materials

• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)., 2022. Principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing.
• Elliott, Tracey (dir.)., 2022. Combatting predatory academic journals and conferences. The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP).
• Shen, C. and Shah, L., 2023. Predatory publishing practices: what researchers should know before submitting their manuscript. Insights, 36.