Open access

Open access (OA) refers to unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly outlets. Types of open access publications available online include articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, theses, working papers, data, images and open educational resources including textbooks, video content and lecture notes.

Benefits of OA

• Increases the visibility and exposure of your research
• Helps researchers to meet the mandate of major funding bodies like Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
• Helps enable the University of Queensland's key research objectives, such as achieving international recognition through high-quality research, encouraging and supporting research collaboration, fostering excellence from young researchers, and enhancing UQ's research environment
• Provides free online access to research, not restricted to what your organisation can afford to purchase.

Different versions of OA

Green open access

For Green OA, you self-archive an author accepted version of the article:

1. Publish in the journal of your choice
2. Archive or link to an author accepted (post-print) version of the manuscript in your institution's repository (UQ eSpace), or in a national repository (e.g. PubMed Central).
3. Exercise your Rights Retention Strategy (RSS) to achieve immediate OA by depositing a copy of the author accepted manuscript in UQ eSpace. This intent must be clearly communicated to the publisher before or at submission of the manuscript. NHMRC recommends including the following statement at submission, to ensure licensing arrangements are set up before a publishing agreement is in place:

This research was funded in whole or part by the National Health and Medical Research Council [Grant number]. For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. (NRMRC Open Access Policy 2022, p. 12)

A large percentage of publishers permit the archiving of a post-peer review author's version of the article in an institutional repository. An embargo period may apply. In UQ eSpace, the deposited manuscript will be set to automatically become openly available at the end of the embargo period. Article versions and embargoes are explained further at the end of this section.

Benefits of Green OA

• No fees for authors
• Complies with the UQ Open Access for Research Outputs Policy and Guideline and the requirements of ARC grant mandates for open access (if the embargo period for the journal is 12 months or less).

Gold open access

For Gold OA, you:

1. Publish in a fully open access journal 
2. Pay an article processing charge (APC) to the publisher who makes the article immediately open, findable and accessible.
3. Deposit the article details (including the DOI link to the published article) in UQ eSpace. 

Hybrid model of Gold open access

For the hybrid model of OA, an APC is paid to make an individual article immediately open access in a subscription-based journal. The article will be made available via the journal's website but other articles in the journal may NOT be available via open access.

This model gives the publisher the opportunity to "double dip" into the [limited] pool of research funds by charging:

1. The Library a subscription for the journal, on behalf of the UQ community, to access other articles in the journal that are not open access and,
2. The author an APC for a particular article in the journal. 

Before you commit to paying an APC you must be aware of why the journal is charging for you to publish your research article. There may be no requirement at all for you to pay an APC. Find out more in the Article processing charges (APC) section.