Making your research available open access ensures that your work reaches the widest possible audience, and that it can be used and shared easily.
You can visit our Finding Open Access Materials pages for help accessing resources from other institutions
We have an Open Access Jargon Buster to help with some of the terms.
You can make your work Open Access without paying a charge. The University of Southampton supports self-archiving, also known as repository (or green) open access. Your funder may have an open access policy with specific requirements.
You publish your research in a subscription journal or paid access publication and self-archive the Accepted Manuscript version of your content in Pure. The Accepted Manuscript is the version incorporating changes from peer review but without the final publisher layout). Publishers may require an embargo meaning that your content is not immediately open access from our institutional repository, ePrints Soton (this does not apply if you have retained the rights to your Accepted Manuscript).
Please create a Pure record for your content even if you have published open access via the publisher. The Pure record feeds your University publications page and our institutional repository.
Your research is made open access on the publisher website as soon as it is published with a Creative Commons licence..
Some journals and books are fully open access, some journals contain a mix of open access and subscription articles - these are known as 'hybrid' journals. There is frequently a cost for publisher open access known as an Article Processing Charge (APC) or Book Processing Charge (BPC). Some fully open access journals do not charge a fee to publish – these are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Creative Commons provides a suite of six open licences that provide a simple, standardised way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic work, ensuring proper attribution and making it clear how others may copy, distribute, and make use of those works.
Your funder may require a CC BY licence if the article is open access in the journal.
The CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution licence) license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. Attribution is given for a journal article by citing it as you normally would. Find out more in our Creative Commons guide.
There are other licences available such as Publishers' own licences, the Open Government Licence or the University's Licences.
The University of Southampton has two licences, one for Thesis publication and the other for Accepted Manuscripts. The Accepted Manuscript licence is applied to articles that are not publisher open access or subject to a funder mandate.
You may see the words Free Access or Free to view when visiting a publisher page. This is not the same as Open Access. Free Access etc. means that the research has been put temporarily in front of a paywall, but it could be removed at any time. Free access does not allow readers to rework or redistribute the article
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.
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 open access and 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.
Preprints
A preprint is a full draft of a research paper that is shared publicly before it has been peer-reviewed. This sharing can take place before or after submitting to a journal or other publication.
There are dedicated repositories for preprints in specific disciplines e.g. www.arXiv.org (physics/computing/maths), www.biorxiv.org (biology), and www.medrxiv.org (medicine). These can be good places to deposit as they specialise in this kind of content, and your paper may get read more frequently. You can also add your preprint to ePrints Soton via Pure - linking to the record in any preprint server you have used and/or adding the PDF.
Many publishers accept works previously published as a preprint. You can check journal policies and any specific conditions at https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/about.html (note Sherpa refers to the Submitted Version - another name for a preprint).
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 University of Southampton corresponding authors (visitors are not included)
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.
For help or advice with any Open Access or institutional repository (ePrints Soton) query:
email eprints@soton.ac.uk