Open Access at Warwick and Beyond

What is Open Access?

In this context open access means research literature that has been made freely accessible, publicly for anyone interested in the literature. It can be reused without licensing restrictions for research, teaching or other purposes.

Open access is compatible with all forms of quality control and all the major open access initiatives insist on rigorous peer-review processes. Decisions on what to make open access are controlled by the copyright holders and use of open access material must be properly acknowledged.

What are the benefits of Open Access?

Open Access benefits both the author of the research and the audience.

  • Visibility - there is growing evidence that open access material is more likely to be found, read and cited than work solely published in traditional journals. This visibility can also help to attract prospective collaborators and research students.
  • Discoverability - open access repositories (such as the Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP)) are optimised to allow for better indexing and visibility in popular search engines, such as Google and Google Scholar.
  • Access - open access benefits researchers working in small companies, independently and in developing countries where the cost of subscription previously prevented access.
  • Compliance - most research funders now mandate open access to outputs from their funded research.

How is work made open access?

Today open access is chiefly achieved through two main routes; Green OA and Gold OA.

  • Green OA works alongside traditional publishing models and allows authors to take advantage of both traditional journal publishing and open access availability. Here at Warwick this is supported by WRAP, a service that makes available permitted versions of research outputs while the final version remains with the publisher. There are no charges to the author or Funders and the WRAP team check the publishers' permissions to ensure compliance with the agreements our researchers have made with their publisher. For more information see our FAQs.
  • Gold OA refers to the Open Access Publishing model. This can be alongside articles in a traditional subscription journal (often known as hybrid OA) or in a journal that only publishes open access articles. These open access articles are peer reviewed in the normal way and made freely available to the world immediately upon publication. These journals cover their costs either through a subsidy from an institution or professional society or through charging an article processing charge or APC to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer, funding agency).

How can I make my work open access?

There are many ways in which you can get involved in the open access movement, here are a few ways for you to start:

  • Contribute your articles to WRAP.
  • Consider using an open access journal for your next publication. The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists 8372 open access journals and more are being added all the time.
  • Take advantage of the funds/deals available to University researchers:
    • RCUK provides the institution with a fund to cover APCs on its funded research.
    • The Wellcome Trust has granted the University a fund to cover APCs for Wellcome funded research.
    • The Library's subscriptions to BioMed Central and to the Royal Society entitles University researchers to a discount on the article processing charges.