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

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.

See the video below for a visual representation of Gold and Green publishing routes:

An increasing number of publishers require authors to make the data which underlies their papers openly available, to maximise the applicability of their research findings.

The international open access advocate CHORUS has created a directory of publisher policies on data availability:

https://www.chorusaccess.org/resources/chorus-for-publishers/publisher-data-availability-policies-index/

Information for University of Hull researchers about options for making your data open:

• Research Data Management Guide

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!