Open Access overview

Open Access (OA) refers to the process of making the full text of published research content freely available online to read or download.

Research funders (e.g. UKRI) mandate OA for research publications that are supported by funding and acknowledge grants, and where the type of publication is in scope of the funder's OA policy.  For the REF, OA compliance is a requirement for articles and papers published in journals and conference proceedings. In recent years, Open Access in the UK has been influenced by Plan S.  

Academic publishers provide routes to making your work OA, and the two main routes are Green OA and Gold OA.

  • Green OA involves depositing a copy of the accepted manuscript into Pure, the University's research repository. 
  • Gold OA involves payment of a publisher's fee to make their version of record OA.

OA involves compliance with both funder mandates and publisher copyright.  In order to comply with the REF OA Policy, for any scholarly articles, please deposit the accepted manuscript into Pure within the deadline of 3 months from the date of acceptance, and save the Pure entry for validation by the Library.  

Please contact the Library's Research Outputs Team for OA support: openaccess@port.ac.uk