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Open Access & Institutional Repository: Introduction

Open Access (OA) means research findings are permanently available to read (redistribute and reuse) by anyone with internet access at no cost to the reader​. Making your research outputs available open access ensures that your work reaches the widest possible audience, and that it can be used and shared easily.

There are 2 routes to open access:

  • Repository open access (Green): a version of the article is self-archived in an institutional repository, or a subject repository (eg Europe PMC). There should be no charge to self-archive your accepted manuscript
  • Publisher open access (Gold or Diamond): the article is openly available on the publisher webpage, with no paywalls or subscription barriers. You need to apply an appropriate license, such as the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, to make this happen. Often, you or your institution pays to apply an OA license (Gold), but sometimes the publication is sponsored and there is no fee to pay (Diamond). 

We do not have a central institutional fund for open access payments; the University of Southampton supports open access via self-archiving your Accepted Manuscript of journal articles in Pure (click on the 'upload manuscript' button) and no-cost-to-the-author publisher memberships and agreements.​ You will fulfil the University of Southampton Open Access Policy by uploading the final, refereed, corrected, Accepted Manuscripts of all peer-reviewed journal articles and peer-reviewed conference articles to Pure at the point of acceptance for publication.

We do not have a central open access fund for monographs, book chapters or other longform outputs. If your monograph, book chapter or edited collection acknowledges UKRI funding, please see https://library.soton.ac.uk/openaccess/ukri_longform. If you would like guidance on self-archiving your longform output in our institutional repository, JISC have launched an open access book tool providing an overview of publishers' book policies: https://beta.sherpa.ac.uk/oa-books and we are very happy to offer additional guidance. 

We do hold open access block grants for journal articles acknowledging UKRI and Cancer Research UK funding. These can be used for articles submitted to fully open access journals.​ Find out more, including how to apply, at https://library.soton.ac.uk/openaccess/howto

Upload your Accepted Manuscript to Pure

 

Check your journal

Use our journal search tool to check if you can publish open access in your chosen journal without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). https://search.scifree.se/soton

These publisher open access agreements are open to eligible University of Southampton corresponding authors (visitors, honorary and former members of staff are not eligible)

  • Your University of Southampton affiliation must be stated in the published article
  • Use your soton.ac.uk email address
  • Search will find word match in title, publisher, or subject area (if provided by publisher)
  • Truncation/Wildcard symbol (*) can be used to search, for example, chem* will find over 200 included journals while chem on its own will only find 5 included journals
  • Please contact us if you have any questions: eprints@soton.ac.uk

 

We are proud to be the first UK institution to partner with SciFree, enabling you to check if a specific journal is included in a publisher agreement that offers open access publishing at no cost to the author.

Contact Us

For help or advice with any Open Access or institutional repository (ePrints Soton) query:

email eprints@soton.ac.uk