LibGuides: Open Access: Why Open Access?

What is Open Access?

"Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”

(Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication, 2004 http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm)

The Open Access movement dates back to the early '00s, although discipline-specific initiatives began earlier. One of the first formal declarations of the movement's principles was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), defining "world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds" as a public good.

The two most commonly-used mechanisms for achieving open access are often called the ‘gold’ and ‘green’ routes:

Gold – publishing your output on a platform which provides immediate e-access for everyone, free of charge, with a licence which permits re-use. Publishers can recoup their costs through a number of mechanisms, including through payments from authors (known as article processing charges, or APCs), or through advertising, donations or other subsidies. Some publishers operate a 'hybrid' model, with open and paywalled articles on the same platform.
Green – providing open access to the author's final manuscript or published output in a searchable archive, commonly known as a repository, maintained by the author's institution or a scholarly society/professional body. The publisher may impose an embargo on open access to the file, normally in a range of 6 to 24 months.

Please direct all enquiries to openaccess@hull.ac.uk

University of Hull OA Policy

The University of Hull Open Access Policy can be found in the University's Hydra repository. This came into force on 1st April 2015 and was updated in April 2019.

Under the terms of the policy, authors are responsible for depositing their research outputs in Worktribe, and the University takes responsibility for making these discoverable with green open access, in compliance with publisher terms.

Enquiries regarding the Open Access Policy should be directed to openaccess@hull.ac.uk.

What's in it for me?

Open Access to your research publications can bring many benefits.

Increased citations: 46 studies demonstrating this advantage were identified by SPARC Europe in 2015
Fostering collaboration: Open Access advocate Brian Nosek has outlined his own experience of large-scale collaborative research in a 2016 article for eLife
Reaching new and wider audiences: a 2015 analysis of articles published in Nature Communications detected that open access articles received higher levels of social media attention
Supporting open scholarship: political scientist Patrick Dunleavy has written about his experience of authoring an open-access textbook relying entirely on open access sources (LSE Impact Blog, 2018)
Potential for impact beyond academia: open access articles are significantly more likely to be cited in Wikipedia than paywalled articles (J. Assoc. Information Science & Technology, 2016).

Last but not least: meeting REF criteria!

Research Data Management

Do you have data to support your publication? Should it be open access?

Research Data Management Guide

Help LibGuides

Open Access: Why Open Access?

What is Open Access?

University of Hull OA Policy

What's in it for me?

Research Data Management

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