"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.

Creative Commons is a widely-known licensing scheme for open access works. It enables authors and other rights-holders to specify whether readers are permitted to share, modify and/or commercialise the work without further permission.  For more information about the appropriate open licence for your work, start from the Library's guide to Copyright.

Many universities help their successful PhD candidates to make their thesis openly available in their institutional repository, to maximise the audience for this work.  They may also preserve the printed and bound volume in the Library for readers.  The British Library maintains the EThOS database: records of theses from all UK universities, with the file(s) free to download when available.

University of Hull PhD thesis authors are required to deposit their examined thesis in the University's Hydra repository. Guidance about the process can be found on the Doctoral College Sharepoint site (for Hull students only).

The University of Hull Open Access Policy came into force on 1st April 2015 and was last updated in April 2021.  

The Policy recognises open access publication as a valuable component of dissemination for research outputs.

The author's responsibilities include:

• Retain copyright where this doesn't conflict with any contractual obligations.
• Record all research outputs in the CRIS (currently Worktribe), and deposit the full text.
• Act on any funder or sector-wide policies relating to deposit deadlines and licence terms.
• Consider issues of privacy, security and IP before sharing the output.

The University will provide the relevant systems and guidance to facilitate deposit, and support engagement with this process.  The University will take responsibility for preserving records and outputs deposited, including making the works public in the University Repository with an open licence where funder/publisher terms permit.

The University provides services and resources to support authors at several key stages of the publishing process:

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, updated annually.

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!

Wiley and Springer have both carried out analyses in 2021 demonstrating increased readership, social media attention and citation for open access papers published in their journals.  (Their financial interest in deriving income from article processing charges should be noted here).