How to make your research open access

YES

Funders such as UKRI, Wellcome Trust, European Commission etc., have different open access policies. Some publishers (e.g. Elsevier) do not offer self-archiving policies that fulfil funder requirements. It is researchers’ responsibility to select a compliant journal, thus we advise to familiarise yourself with your funder mandate before choosing a journal.

Visit our webpage ‘Funder open access policy’ to find information, links and tools that will help you to comply with your funder mandate.

Funders often provide funds specifically to support gold open access publishing. You can find information about funds available and how to apply here. The University offers transitional agreements with different publishers where corresponding affiliated authors can publish gold open access at no cost in selected journals.

NO

If your research is not funded, you have no open access obligation, unless you want your output to be considered for REF (find out about REF open access requirements). Nonetheless, the University of Aberdeen encourages open access for all research outputs via either the green or gold route.

The University offers transitional agreements with different publishers where corresponding affiliated authors can publish gold open access at no cost in selected journals. If the journal of your choice is not covered by one of the agreements, please consider publishing via green open access route, or your availability of funds (e.g. start-up or school funds) to pay for APCs if you wish to submit in a fully open access journal.

Please contact openaccess@abdn.ac.uk if you have any queries about our agreements, open access funds and journal compliance with funder policies.

With so many journals available choosing the right one for publication can be overwhelming. We recommend asking your colleagues or supervisor for advice. Think. Check. Submit. is a helpful resource to ensure that you pick a trustworthy publication.

Journals usually use indexes based on article citations to promote themselves (the most popular is the ‘impact factor’). The University of Aberdeen is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA); as such it recognises that research outputs should be recognised on the merits of those individual outputs, rather than on the metrics of the Journal where the article is published. Alternative ways to measure the impact of your research such as Altmetrics are available (learn more on Altmetrics on our dedicated webpage).

Authors are advised to familiarise themselves with the open access options available from their chosen journal, and to contact the openaccess@abdn.ac.uk ahead of submission with any queries.

APCs for Gold Open Access vary extensively depending on the Journal with an average price around 2000£. There is no direct correlation between APCs cost and the prestige of a Journal, and hybrid journals cost on average more than fully open access journals.

Block funds can only be used to meet the open access requirements of the relevant funder. Please contact openaccess@abdn.ac.uk to make sure there are available funds to cover publication costs prior to submission.

Where possible, research outputs should include a data availability statement regarding accessibility of the data underlying the research. It is important that data is available to other researchers to ensure transparency and make your work reproducible.

• Read more about open data on our webpages. 
• Read about the University open research statement.

Authors’ listing of scientific scholarly output does not provide enough information about the actual individual contributions to the work. The Contributor Roles taxonomy (CRediT) comprises 14 contributor roles, including conceptualisation, project administration, data curation, software, visualisation, as well as writing, which allow different contributions to a research paper to be formally recognised. Some publishers, such as Elsevier and PLoS, have already adopted this system and require authors to describe author contributions using CRediT.

You can find more about CRediT on our webpage.

Copyright is a statutory right of ownership of an intellectual property (written, printed, graphic, electronic or performance). As author of any research output you (and your co-authors) own the copyright of your work. In the publishing process, however, publishers request authors to sign an agreement which transfers copyright ownership of the work to the publisher. As consequence, authors lose the right to share and re-use their work freely (this may vary according to the agreement signed). An example, is the embargo imposed on accepted manuscripts deposited on repositories. Transfer of copyright is a standard procedure when publishing via subscription route.

On the other hand, publishing gold open access allows author/s to retain copyright of their work. Authors can select a license, the most used are Creative Commons Licenses, which allows to make their work available for reuse under a range of clearly defined terms and conditions and as long as the work is properly cited. 

Find more information about copyright and licensing on our webpages.

As soon as you have a research output (journal article, conference contribution, blog, book, chapter, etc.) accepted for publication please send

• Acceptance email
• A copy of the author accepted manuscript (AAM)

to paperaccepted@abdn.ac.uk and we will deposit the article in Pure/AURA in accordance with REF and publisher self-archiving policies.

To arrange an open access APCs payment previously agreed with the open access team, please send to openaccess@abdn.ac.uk

• Acceptance Email
• Your school name
• Grant number