Pathways to open access

Open access refers to research outputs that have been made freely available online to read, share and reuse without barriers, such as paywalls or subscriptions.  

Sharing and reuse is enabled via an open licensing (usually a Creative Commons licence) applied to the research output.

Benefits of making your outputs open access

Open access:

• helps broaden access to valuable information, reaching a wider audience.
• fosters public trust in scholarly research.
• allows funded research to be publicly available, as required by funders.

When it comes to making your research open access, the possible pathways include:

• publisher open access
• repository open access
• preprint server or archive.

Publisher open access

Fully open access journals and publishers

By publishing in a fully open access journal, you can make your research outputs available immediately for reading, sharing and reuse at no cost for the reader. Often referred to as gold open access, this pathway may require payment of a publishing fee, such as an article processing fee (APC) or book processing charge (BPC).

There are also fully open access journals that are free of charges for the author and reader. These journals may be referred to as diamond open access journals and are often supported by universities or societies rather than commercial publishers.  

Hybrid journals and publishers

Hybrid journals contain content that is available by subscription and also give authors the option to make individual articles open access by paying an APC.

UQ does not recommend paying an APC to one of these journals outside of an institutional agreement. It also may not be allowed by your funder.

If you wish to publish in one of these titles and there is no institutional open access publishing agreement with UQ or one of your collaborator’s institutions, you can make your work open via the repository open access pathway.

Repository open access

You can make your work open access via a repository (often referred to as green open access) if the journal you wish to publish in is a subscription or hybrid journal that does not have an agreement with any of the authors’ institutions to cover the APCs.

This pathway involves depositing the author accepted manuscript in an institutional repository (such as UQ eSpace), or in a national repository (e.g. PubMed Central).  

An author accepted manuscript (AAM or post-print) is the version of an article that has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication but before the publisher has applied formatting, typesetting and branding.

Repository open access may involve an embargo period which can be checked via Journal Search or Open Policy Finder.

Make research open access in UQ eSpace has more information about article versions and embargoes.

Preprint server or archive

Preprints are an early version of the research output, before peer review or publication.

Some funders, such as the NHMRC and MRFF, encourage preprints be made openly accessible with an open licence (e.g. CC BY licence) in a recognised preprint server, and consider this a valid way of making research open access (meeting open access policy requirements).

Check Finding preprints for a list of possible archives or servers to submit preprints.

Note that even if research outputs have been made openly accessibly via a preprint server or archive, you are encouraged to pursue peer-reviewed publication of the research output. Funders are likely to still require the research have a peer-reviewed version in addition to the preprint version.

When undertaking peer-reviewed publication:

1. check to see that the journal’s policy allows prior submission of the research as a preprint. You can find this information on the journal’s website or by viewing the journal’s record in Open Policy Finder (see the Submitted section)
2. make sure that the preprint’s DOI is linked to the published version’s record. You can do this by correcting the published version’s record in UQ eSpace, once the research is published.