At the University of Essex, we encourage research to be as open as possible, and as closed as necessary. You can read more about the University of Essex's position on open access by downloading our Open Research Position Statement. For REF compliance, there is a requirement that journal articles and conference papers must be made available open access within 3 months of acceptance.
This page provides comprehensive guidance on how to achieve open access for your research outputs. Some quick links are available below:
For journal articles, you can:
For monographs, chapters, and edited collections, you can:
The tabs above provide more information on all of these options for open access publication at Essex.
Whether you're publishing a journal article, monograph, or chapter, publishers are increasingly offering open access publication. When a research output is made open access at the point of publication via the publisher themselves, this is known as gold open access. There are three main variations on gold open access:
| Fully gold | Hybrid | Diamond | |
|---|---|---|---|
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Journal articles
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Payment of an article processing charge (APC) is required to publish. All content within the journal is published open access. Some fully gold open access journals are covered by our read and publish agreements. Our open access fund can be used to cover APCs for journals not covered by agreements. Complete this form to request funding. |
Payment of an article processing charge (APC) is required to publish open access. If you don't pay, you can publish behind a paywall. Some content within the journal is published open access, and some is behind a paywall. Many hybrid journals are covered by our read and publish agreements. |
No payment is required to publish within these journals. All content within the journal is published open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a great place to look for diamond OA journals. |
|
Books / chapters |
Payment of a book or chapter processing charge (BPC or CPC) is required to publish. The entire book, or all chapters within the book, are published open access. Our open access fund can be used to cover the cost of the BPC or CPC. Complete this form to register your interest. |
Usually only applicable to chapters in edited collections. Payment of a chapter processing charge (CPC) is required to make individual chapters available open access. Our open access fund can be used to cover the cost of the CPC. Complete this form to register your interest. |
No payment is required to publish books or chapters open access with diamond OA book publishers. The entire book, or all chapters within the book, are published open access. The Open Access Books Toolkit has many helpful resources on publishing books open access, including how to find open access book publishers. |
If you choose not to make your work open access via the publisher, self-archiving is the alternative. This is also known as the green route to open access, and essentially means depositing your work in a repository upon acceptance for publication. This can be an institutional repository, like the Essex Research Repository, or a subject-based or central repository, like PubMed or arXiv.
The version made available via the repository will usually be the final pre-publication version, otherwise knows as the AAM (author accepted manuscript). To be REF-eligible, for journal articles and conference papers you must upload the AAM to the institutional repository within three months of acceptance if your paper is not otherwise being published open access with the publisher.
Help guides on self-archiving via the Essex Research Repository are available for Essex Researchers.
When making your work open access via the green route, there may be an embargo period. This means that the full text of your work won't be available via the repository for a certain length of time after publication. This time period can vary, usually anything between 3 to 24 months.
To empower authors to avoid embargo periods and retain control over publications, from 1 October 2024 we have implemented an Author Rights Retention Policy. This policy means Essex authors automatically retain rights over the AAMs of their journal articles and conference papers, and openly license this version under a CC BY licence. More information about this policy is available via our Author Rights Retention page.
If you would still like to know your publisher's policy for self-archiving when publishing a journal article, you can use Jisc's Open Policy Finder.
The Author Rights Retention policy does not currently extend to unfunded monographs, book chapters, or edited collections. If you are publishing a monograph, book chapter, or edited collection, you can use Jisc's Open Policy Finder to help you find publisher policies on self-archiving.
Read and publish agreements (also known as "transformative agreements") are blanket agreements with academic publishers that cover both the subscription to the journal (the "read" aspect), and the open access publishing cost (the "publish" aspect). These agreements therefore allow authors from the University of Essex to publish gold open access at no extra cost, regardless of whether their work is funded.
At Essex, we offer a range of agreements with several publishers. Select the publisher tabs above to find out more about these deals, and how to make use of them.
You may also come across transformative journals when looking to publish open access. Transformative journals are subscription/hybrid journals that do not fall under transformative agreements, but which have committed to becoming fully open access. Unlike when publishing under a transformative agreement, authors are not eligible for free open access publishing in transformative journals. However, Plan S funded authors may be able to use their block grants for APC payments in these journals. Plan S funded researchers can use the Journal Checker Tool to check compliant routes for open access publishing. If you are unsure about this, please do get in touch.
The read and publish agreement with ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) enables corresponding authors at the University of Essex to publish research articles in ACM’s magazines, conference proceedings, and journals open access with no added costs. All ACM conferences, journals, and magazines, for which ACM manages production and rights, are eligible for Open Access publishing. Please see ACM's website for those not included.
To make use of the deal, ensure that you use your University of Essex email address on submission to your chosen ACM publication.
ACM has this useful list of FAQs and a direct contact email, but if you have any questions you can also get in touch with the OA team here.
An open access publishing agreement with APA includes a total of 86 APA hybrid journals, and 15 Hogrefe hybrid titles. The agreement also gives us a 25% discount on APCs in 3 fully gold OA Hogrefe journals: European Journal of Psychology Open, Psychological Test Adaptation and Development (PTAD), Sports Psychiatry - Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychiatry.
A UK-wide cap of 531 articles has been set for the sector, and this cap will run on a first come, first served basis. If this cap is reached, green open access (self-archiving) with a zero-month embargo period will still allow immediate open access on publication. See APA's website for their specific policy.
If you have any further questions about the process for using this agreement, please get in touch.
A publish and read agreement with BMJ allows funded* corresponding authors affiliated with the University of Essex to publish original articles reporting primary research (not reviews, commentaries or rapid communications) open access in BMJ’s hybrid journals.
For a list of all 34 eligible hybrid titles, and more information about this deal, please go to BMJ’s website. At the bottom of this page, please select the University of Essex beneath “select your institution”, and then view the drop-down list beneath “how you can publish with fees covered by your institution” for a list of all included titles.
Their website includes this helpful guide for authors submitting articles to Read and Publish journals, but if you have any questions please get in touch with BMJ, or with the team here at the University.
*Funders: UK Research and Innovation (Medical Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Innovate UK, Research England), British Heart Foundation, Blood Cancer UK, Cancer Research UK, Parkinsons UK, Versus Arthritis or the Wellcome Trust.
Corresponding authors affiliated with the University of Essex can publish articles open access (OA) in all of Brill's journals with no extra cost. The titles covered by this agreement are listed here.
To indicate that you wish to publish your article OA, opt for Open Access when submitting your article in Editorial Manager or get in touch with your Brill contact. Always be sure to indicate that you are an author affiliated with the University of Essex.
More information on the open access publishing process with Brill is available here.
Brill's step-by-step guide for authors is here.
Any queries? Contact Brill at openaccess@brill.com, or get in contact with us.
Our read and publish deal with Cambridge University Press allows you to make your publication open access in gold and hybrid CUP journals at no extra cost to you. To be eligible, you must be a corresponding author, and must be accepted for publication in one of the eligible CUP journals: use their online checker (select United Kingdom and then University of Essex) to browse the full list of eligible titles and to access each journal's homepage. You must also have been accepted for publication from 1 January 2024.
In order to use this deal, you must use your institutional affiliation when you submit your research. For more information about the submission process, head to CUP’s read and publish agreement page or view this brief overview.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.
Our read and publish deal with De Gruyter allows University of Essex researchers to publish open access for no added fees in De Gruyter hybrid journals, and fully gold open access journals. Under this deal, the University has unlimited access to publishing in De Gruyter hybrid and fully gold open access journals. A list of De Gruyter journals is available on their website.
If you are a corresponding author publishing in a De Gruyter hybrid or fully gold open access journal, we would encourage you publish open access. Using your affiliated institutional email address on submission with De Gruyter means they will automatically check on acceptance if the publishing fee is covered by the deal.
Head to De Gruyter's website for more information on their submission process. If you have any further questions, please contact us.
The ongoing agreement with Elsevier provides unlimited open access publishing for Essex researchers in eligible Elsevier hybrid journals, including the Lancet and Cell Press titles. You will need to be the corresponding author of the publication to make use of this deal, and your article must have an acceptance date between 1/1/2022 and 31/12/2025. Head to Elsevier's website to find the journals that are participating in this deal.
Once your article has been accepted for publication you will receive an email containing a link to the “post-acceptance author journey”. Upon selecting your publishing options, your affiliation will be validated by your institution, and you will be informed if the APC will be covered by the agreement.
Elsevier has a five-step guide to the process on their website, but if you have any questions about using this deal, please contact our team.
Our read and publish deal with John Benjamins covers all of their journals. All University of Essex affiliated corresponding authors can publish Open Access in included journals without any extra cost to themselves. There is no limit on the number of papers that can be published under this deal.
Authors must use their University of Essex email address and enter University of Essex as their organisation on submission. Articles which have been submitted to any John Benjamins journal between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2025 will then be published open access. More information about this deal is available via John Benjamins' website.
OUP's read and publish agreement means that research articles, review articles, brief reports and case reports can all be published open access at no extra cost in eligible hybrid and fully gold open access OUP journals (link will download an Excel list, 2025 collection column applies).
Authors must provide Jisc institutional affiliation as their first affiliation at submission. Eligible authors will then be routed on a bespoke workflow which will show the OA licensing options with no charges associated with them. Authors will then be guided to refer the paper to the agreement – they will not need to select it or in any way opt in in order to make use of it. Following this, on acceptance authors will receive an email containing a link to the Online Licensing and Payments System, SciPris.
View OUP's author guidance for further details on what to do from there. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.
Our Flat Fee deal with PLOS allows unlimited publishing in seven of their journals: PLOS ONE, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Pathogens, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLOS Digital Health, and PLOS Complex Systems.
In order to qualify, please ensure that you are listed as the corresponding author and that your affiliation is given as the University of Essex, as all eligible authors are identified through PLOS’s submission system. As the agreement is for uncapped publishing no approval check is required. More information can be found on PLOS' website, and please contact our team if you have any questions.
PLOS is a purely open access publisher, meaning this deal does not include a 'read' element as all PLOS content is freely available online.
The agreement with Portland Press enables corresponding authors at Essex to publish open access within all seven of Portland Press' titles. These are:
Research journals: Biochemical Journal, Clinical Science, Neuronal Signaling*, Bioscience Reports*
*These are fully OA journals where every paper is published via the Gold OA route. There is, therefore, no option for authors to opt out of OA publishing; however, the papers will be published OA without requirement for payment of any APCs if the article is eligible for OA under a Read & Publish deal.
Review journals: Biochemical Society Transactions, Essays in Biochemistry, Emerging Topics in Life Sciences
Under the agreement, there are no limits on the number of papers Essex authors can publish open access. The workflow for publishing under this agreement is available in this document.
If you have any questions please get in touch with us.
A deal with Sage allows corresponding authors to publish eligible articles open access with no added cost in more than 1,000 hybrid journals (link will download an Excel list) in the current Sage Premier package. Those publishing an eligible article in the IMechE Journal Collection or the Royal Society of Medicine Collection which offer hybrid open access publishing (Sage Choice) can also be published open access with no added costs as part of this agreement.
Authors publishing in hybrid journals do not need to take any action to benefit from this offer. Sage will contact all eligible authors to inform them of the Open Access agreement with Jisc and to invite them to the Sage Open Access Portal to take up the offer as soon as their accepted article has been received into Sage’s Production department.
Sage has prepared useful step-by-step guides for authors publishing in their hybrid journals.
Following extensive sector-wide negotiations, the 2023-2025 Springer Nature read and publish agreement brings together Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, and Nature Research journals. There are currently two parts to the publish side of the agreement:
If you are unsure whether the journal you are looking to submit to is covered by the agreement after following the above links, please contact us.
Our read and publish agreement with Taylor and Francis allows Essex researchers who are corresponding authors to make their work open access at no extra cost to themselves. This deal covers publication in these T&F journals, which includes Open Select titles and fully open access journals, as well as F1000 Research and Routledge Open Research*.
To access this deal, corresponding authors should use their affiliated institutional email address on submission. Once you have received your Author Publishing Agreement and confirmed your personal details, you simply need to select that you would like to be funded through your open access agreement, which you will see as you move through the process. Once you have signed the agreement, we will be notified of your request. If your request is approved you will receive an email asking you to select the Creative Commons licence of your choice. Please note that most research funders require authors to choose Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).
Visit the Taylor and Francis website for more information on publishing open access and their read and publish FAQs for authors. If you have any further questions, please email our team.
*For F1000 Research and Routledge Open Research the following are covered: including but not limited to Research Articles, Method Articles, Antibody Validation Articles, Reviews, Systematic Reviews, Clinical Practice Articles, Case Reports, Opinion Articles.
There is currently an opportunity to publish open access with the publisher Wiley, due to a read and publish deal between JISC and Wiley. This means that there is a national pot of money available to researchers from across institutions to fund APCs for open access publishing, and we are able to use this money. The deal covers:
To be eligible to use this deal, you must be the corresponding author, and your paper must be primary research or a review article. If publishing in a hybrid (subscription) journal, you must order open access at the point of acceptance.
Wiley provides these step-by-step guides for both hybrid journals and fully gold journals.
This agreement cannot be used to cover additional charges (e.g. cover, colour, and page charges), which several journals administer separately. If you have any questions, please email our team.
As the publishing landscape shifts towards open access, different business models for open access are developing. The following are deals we have with publishers that allow open access publishing in a different way to read and publish deals.
Annual Reviews
Annual Reviews operates under a Subscribe to Open business model. Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a business model that uses subscription payments to convert gated access journals to full open access. Under S2O, libraries continue to subscribe to the journals they wish to. If support for these journals is sufficient, new volumes are published OA under a Creative Commons license; if support is insufficient, the paywall is retained.
If the support threshold is met, S2O provides Diamond OA, meaning that the article is immediately available with no access barrier and no author fee. S2O is endorsed by cOAlition S.
If your research acknowledges funding from UKRI or any of its constituent councils, or is funded by another cOAlition S funder, you should follow the process detailed below. This applies to all titles published by Annual Reviews, including S2O titles, to ensure funder compliance in case S2O titles do not meet their annual threshold.
Process:
If you have any queries, you can contact Annual Reviews directly via jjongsma@annualreviews.org or get in touch with our team here.
We have pre-paid for a package of discounted article processing charges (APCs) for IEEE's fully gold open access journals. This means you can publish in these journals with no added cost to yourself. If you're submitting to one of these journals, please complete this short form. Further information is also available via IEEE's webpage.
If you are publishing in an IEEE hybrid journal, where you can choose between open access or not, we cannot pay these APCs. Instead, the author's accepted version of your paper can be made available open access immediately on publication via the Essex Research Repository. See details on Author Rights Retention for more information on this.
Under the terms of our current Read deal with IEEE, Essex staff and students enjoy full read access to the IEEE Xplore digital library of journals and magazines.
Our institutional open access fund has been designed to enable Essex authors to publish as much research as possible open access. The fund can be used for:
To apply to use the open access fund to publish a book or chapter, please use this form to start the conversation.
To request to use the open access fund to publish an article, please complete this form.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), like many research funders, have an open access policy that requires funded research outputs be made available open access. This policy applies to:
*If a monograph, book chapter, or edited collection is published seven or more years after the formal end of a UKRI-funded project, it will no longer be eligible for financial support. Therefore, UKRI does not expect the publication to be made open access.
If your research outputs acknowledge UKRI funding, you will need to follow the terms of the UKRI's open access policy. UKRI brings together the seven Research Councils, Innovate UK, and Research England.
The subsequent tabs above explain UKRI's open access policy for articles and conference papers, and monographs, chapters, and edited collections.
Peer reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers, that are accepted for final publication in either a journal, conference proceeding with an ISSN, or a publishing platform are in scope for the UKRI's open access policy.
There are two compliant routes for the publication of these outputs:
| Routes to comply | What does this mean in practice? |
|---|---|
| Route 1: publish the research article open access in a journal or publishing platform which makes the Version of Record immediately open access via its website. It must have a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence, or an Open Government Licence. (CC BY-ND is also permitted on a case-by-case basis by exception). |
1. Publish in a diamond open access journal. 2. Publish in a journal covered by one of our read and publish agreements* (you must be the corresponding author). *Open Access publication in hybrid titles outside these agreements will no longer be financially supported by UKRI (unless the title is designated a Jisc-approved Transformative Journal). 3. Contact oapublish@essex.ac.uk to make use of the UKRI block grant when publishing in a fully gold open access journal. |
| Route 2: publish the research article in a subscription journal and deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (or Version of Record, where the publisher permits) in an institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication. There must be no embargo period, and it must have a CC BY licence. |
Publish in a subscription journal, and deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in our institutional repository with a CC-BY licence at the time of publication. The following statement is recommended to be included on submission to the journal: “This research was funded in whole or in part by [Funder] [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.” If included, this statement can be added to the acknowledgement section (or if this isn’t available upon submission, in the footer of the article), as well as in the covering letter. |
Monographs, book chapters, and edited collections that acknowledge UKRI funding and are published after 1 January 2024 must be made available open access.
The following criteria must be met:
UKRI have dedicated an annual fund in support of this policy. Authors will need to contact oapublish@essex.ac.uk to apply on their behalf.
There is a two stage process to apply for funding. The first stage requires your work to be registered with UKRI to confirm its eligibility for funding (via the Open Access Team); this should be in advance of acceptance for publication. The second stage is after publication, and it is at this point that funding is provided by UKRI. Please note: authors should not apply to UKRI directly.
Please note that outputs must be published within 7 years of the grant end date to be eligible for funding.
Exemptions to the policy are detailed on the UKRI pages. An exemption may be applied:
There are several tools that can help with complying with funder policies:
If you have any questions, do get in touch.
CC licences can be applied to a publication to grant permissions beyond the default copyright restrictions ("all rights reserved"). In doing so, you allow potential users of your work to do more with it, such as share and adapt it. This can have a significant impact on increasing the visibility of you and your work, and provides a way to ensure you get attribution.
The licences work alongside copyright law and can only be applied with the permission of the copyright holder. If you have signed over the copyright to someone else (e.g. a publisher or employer), you cannot apply a licence without their permission. By default, University of Essex staff are granted permission by the University to apply licences to their research publications (including articles, research papers, conference papers and books). See the University Intellectual Property policy (staff login required) point 2.1.6 for more information.
Once applied, CC licences are permanent and irrevocable, so make sure you choose the right one for your work. Creative Commons have guidance on how to apply a CC licence to your work.
See the tabs for more information about the different CC licences and tools. Get in touch if you have any questions.
This licence lets other distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licences offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licenced materials.
This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
CC0 is a tool that enables creators and owners of copyright to place their work as completely as possible in the public domain. This means that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright law.
Copyright law can be complex, especially since the specifics can vary from country to country. Creative Commons have designed their licences to work internationally, and have a comprehensive list of FAQs to help you use the licences. We've pulled out some key nuances below:
Open publishing platforms provide an alternative model of open access publication to the traditional journal article. Publishing platforms focus not only on the final published paper, but provide researchers with the opportunity to publish, and therefore share and gain credit for, all stages of the research process. The exact format of publishing platform varies, but usually stages of the research process that are included are: the initial research idea, methods and data, open peer review, and a revised article.
Using open publishing platforms is compliant with funders' open access policies, and as such several different publishing platforms have been developed by research funders. These publishing platforms include, but are not limited to the following:
Octopus is a publishing platform where researchers from all disciplines can freely record all of their research outputs. While Octopus is funded by UKRI, any researchers can use Octopus to make their research openly available.
Octopus aims to complement traditional journal publishing, so publishing in Octopus doesn't prevent you from publishing in a journal further down the line should you choose to. Octopus provides a platform to establish your research priorities early in the research process, and document all stages of your work in full detail.
Octopus publications are small units that all link together to reflect different stages of the research process. This means each part of the research process could be carried out by different people at different times. The different aspects can be published individually, without all needing to fit together in the format of a traditional journal article.
The 8 publication types as defined by Octopus are:
You can also publish on Octopus any work you have previously published in a journal, if you retain the copyright or published CC BY. This can help to increase your research visibility.
To learn more about Octopus, head to their website, and read their FAQs. You can also watch the 2-minute introductory video below.
Open Research Europe is an open access publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding across all subject areas. The platform makes it easy for Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and Euratom beneficiaries to comply with the open access terms of their funding, and offers researchers a publishing venue to share their results and insights rapidly and facilitate open, constructive research discussion.
Open Research Europe publishes articles across the Natural Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Medical Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. Please see below for the relevant article guidelines for Social Sciences, Humanities, and Science, Technology and Medicine subjects.
The publishing process within Open Research Europe has four main stages:
| Article submission | Publication and data deposition | Open peer review and article revision | Send to indexers and repositories |
|---|---|---|---|
| Submission is via a single-page submission system. The in-house editorial team carries out a comprehensive set of prepublication checks to ensure that all policies and ethical guidelines are adhered to. | Once the article has passed the prepublication checks, a fully typeset version is published with a DOI, enabling immediate viewing and citation, as well as indexing in Google Scholar. Once the article is published, it cannot be sent to another journal for publication. | Expert reviewers are selected and invited, and their reviews and names are published alongside the article, together with the authors’ responses and comments from registered users. | Authors are encouraged to publish revised versions of their article. All versions of an article are linked and independently citable. Articles that pass peer review are indexed in external databases such as PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar. |
For more detailed information about how the publishing process works, head to the Open Research Europe 'how it works' guide.
If you are interested in publishing your research with Open Research Europe, please follow the guidance in their "how to publish" pages. You can also get in touch with our Open Access Publishing team, or for specific questions about European funding please contact Giovanna Bono, Research Development Manager (EU and International). Open Research Europe also have a range of FAQs that might be helpful.
Except where otherwise noted, this work by University of Essex Library and Cultural Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
