Open Access: What is Open Access?

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.

Different routes to open access publishing are categorised in the following way:

• Gold – publishing your output on a platform which provides immediate e-access for everyone, free of charge, with an open licence. Publishers recoup their costs by imposing an 'article [or book] processing charge', paid by the author, their funder or their employer. Some publishers operate a 'hybrid' model, with open and paywalled articles on the same platform.


• Diamond - similar to the gold route, but without any cost to the author.  Diamond publishers cover their costs through sponsorship by academic institutions, research organisations, charities or commercial bodies. 


• Green – providing open access to the author's accepted 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.

The University of Hull Open Access Policy was last updated in April 2023,  "recognising 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:

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 both carried out analyses in 2021 demonstrating increased readership, social media attention and citation for open access papers published in their journals (although the revenue these publishers derive from article processing charges was not acknowledged).

* For more information about finding and interpreting citation data, see the Library's guide to Making Use of Bibliometrics.

Many universities preserve their research students' theses in an institutional repository, to maximise the audience for this work.  They may also archive the printed and bound volume in the Library.  The British Library's EThOS database aggregates thesis records from all UK university repositories, to help readers find works of interest, regardless of where the author carried out their research.

After the viva examination and any corrections, University of Hull PhD theses are preserved in Repository@Hull.

Guidance about depositing your thesis in the Repository can be found on the Doctoral College Sharepoint site (for Hull students only).

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