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.<\/p>\n
The two main routes to open publishing are described as Green and Gold<\/p>\n
Green open access<\/strong> 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).\u00a0 This \u2018self-archived\u2019 version becomes freely available, usually after an\u00a0embargo\u00a0period set by the publisher, and no charges are paid.<\/p>\n Gold open access<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018self-archiving\u2019 by the author must comply with the publisher policy.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0AFBI 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\u2019s policy.<\/p>\n