Open Access & Institutional Repository: Introduction

Open Access (OA) means freely available to read (and reuse) by anyone with internet access​. Making your journal articles 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:

• Publisher open access: the article is openly available on the journal webpage, with no paywalls or subscription barriers.
• Repository open access: a version of the article is self-archived in an institutional repository, or a subject repository (eg Europe PMC).

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 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 hold open access block grants for research acknowledging UKRI, Wellcome Trust or Cancer Research UK. 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

Update 03/01/23: our current publishing agreements with Springer and SAGE ended 31/12/22 and new agreements covering 2023 are being nationally negotiated and evaluated. We will add updates to our Springer and SAGE pages, but to ensure you can make your paper open access without incurring a fee, we recommend that you use rights retention to enable open access via self-archiving in a repository during this period in case an agreement is not renewed.

Please contact eprints@soton.ac.uk with any questions.