Publishing Open Access
Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Many funders, such as Horizon 2020 and the Wellcome Trust, require that research is published open access and increasing numbers of journals are now OA only. There are many advantages to publishing open access including increased impact of research, higher citations and public benefit through free access to research that can inform policy.
The two main routes to open publishing are described as Green and Gold
Green open access involves publishing in a traditional subscription journal and also depositing a pre-publication version of the article in an institutional repository (such as the AFBI Repository). This ‘self-archived’ version becomes freely available, usually after an embargo period set by the publisher, and no charges are paid.
Gold open access means that the published version of the research article is free to access directly from the journal and the reader does not need to pay to read the article. The costs associated with publishing are usually paid to the publisher through article processing charges (APCs), which may be paid by authors or subsidised by a funder.
In the case of Gold OA, copyright is usually retained by the author(s) under a creative commons licence, whereas with Green OA, the copyright is retained by the publisher and ‘self-archiving’ by the author must comply with the publisher policy.
The AFBI Institutional Repository aims to make AFBI research openly available. Where material has already been published it is made available subject to the open-access and copyright policies of the original publishers. AFBI Library staff maintain the Repository and, where necessary, contact the author(s) for a version of the article (such as the Accepted Manuscript) for upload in line with the publisher’s policy.
For further advice on open access publishing please contact us at afbilib@qub.ac.uk
