If you are funded by a UKRI Council (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC, STFC) or a COAF charity (including the Wellcome Trust), you can apply for your Open Access charges to be paid out of a block grant. We will not pay for any extra publication charges. Apply at point of article submission. Find out more here.
For help or advice with any Open Access or ePrints Soton query:
email eprints@soton.ac.uk
Unpaywall, OA Button and CORE Discovery (in beta) are all Chrome and Firefox extensions that find legal open access copies of individual articles from both publishers and repositories. You can also paste an article DOI (the unique article identifier) into the OA Button and CORE Discovery search bars. Open Access Helper works the same way for iOS and Safari. Test them out with this article: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-016-0002 (the article DOI is 10.1038/s41559-016-0002)
Kopernio: a Chrome extension that finds articles from our library subscriptions and open access versions.
Google: if you find an article that is behind a paywall, try copy & pasting the article title into a search engine. If there is a copy in a repository it will often display on the first page of search results.
Can’t find what you need?: if you can’t find a legal open access version, use the library interlibrary loan service and we will source a copy, often within 24 hours. Please do not spend your own money, or grant money, on journal articles
Articles can be made open access (OA) on the journal website (gold OA) or via institutional and subject repositories (green OA, often involving an embargo set by the journal publisher). Find out more about how to make your own work open access at http://library.soton.ac.uk/openaccess/options
Both Scopus and Web of Science have a filter to select only Open Access articles. They predominantly display articles that are gold OA, not the many thousands of articles that are green OA via repositories and preprint servers.
See this helpful blog post from the University of Southampton Digital Learning Team for further suggestions for finding copyright-free images.
SPARC ((the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have created a downloadable guide for evaluating the openness of journals.
21-27 October 2019 was International Open Access Week
We launched our activities on Monday with a blog post: A Very Short Introduction to Open Access Using Biscuits
Further blog posts followed during the week on our team blog Research Matters|Southampton:
Forging new routes to Open Scholarship for HE and Cultural Heritage Institutions
We also have a light-hearted Twitter thread using biscuit analogies to explain Open Access
Open Access makes your research available to far more people than a subscription-only journal article does. This increases the potential for people to find, access, use and cite your work. There is evidence that this can lead to an increase in citations of your work.
Open Access increases the potential for the public to engage with research, which is often paid for out of tax payer's money.
Your funding body may have a mandate which requires you to make your research available in an Open Access source.
The University of Southampton has a Open Access Policy which requires you to upload a version of your article into our institutional repository where possible.
