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Making your published papers and books Open Access

General advice

Make sure you follow the Open Access policies of your funders and the University. Visit the UWL Open Access policy page for more information.

Ensure you have copyright permission to use your outputs in the way you intend, including uploading them into repositories or servers. Get advice from the Open Research team if you’re not sure, although your publisher should make this clear to you when you sign the contract. This permission will vary in relation to the form of the output: preprint, author-accepted manuscript, and final copy of the record.

The discussion of the UWL repository in this section describes the kind of output it requires and how the author-accepted manuscript differs from the version of the record.

Jump to each section of the page on:

Open access policy

Policy guidelines around outputs published in the UWL Repository

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What funders require and the REF

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Funders, whether the public funding agencies grouped together under UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) or independent funders such as the Wellcome Trust, increasingly insist that researchers use open methods and make the output of their research available to all, including the public at large.

UKRI requires you to ‘make your research publications open access; make your research data as open as possible.’ Any research paper submitted for publication after April 2022 must follow their revised Open Access Policy. You have a choice of two routes for making your paper open access: 

  • Route one

    You can publish the article as open access in a journal or publishing platform. This makes the version of the record immediately open access via its website with a creative commons attribution (CC BY) licence or other permitted licence. (Gold Open Access).

  • Route two

    You can publish the article in a subscription journal. You can deposit your author’s accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject repository such as UWL's at the time of final publication with a CC BY or other permitted licence (Green Open Access). A publisher embargo period, (preventing the manuscript being made open access through the repository for a defined time period) is not permitted by UKRI, but REF 2029 may still allow a limited embargo (final REF regulations in Summer/Autumn 2024). Please upload all of your outputs within 3 months of acceptance for publication.

Your 'author accepted manuscript' through the Repository

The most commonly applied method of Open Access is the making available of what is known as the ‘Author Accepted Manuscript’ through an institutional repository. This is the completed paper, which has gone through peer review and the edits made in response to it but has yet to be handed over to the journal for application of the journal’s own formatting and final tweaks.

UWL Repository is our open-access digital showcase of research and scholarship. Indexed by Google Scholar and other web services, the repository is searchable by anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Here is a short video on the UWL Repository and how to use it.

  • What can be uploaded to the repository?

    All kinds of research, scholarly and enterprise outputs can be uploaded to the repository including:

    • journal articles
    • books and book chapters
    • conference proceedings
    • theses
    • presentations
    • images
    • videos
    • sound recordings
    • compositions
    • slides.

    Items submitted for publication and still under review should not be deposited – please wait until the item has been accepted for publication.

    You can get help from the Open Research team to deposit your outputs.

  • Instructions for uploading to the Repository

    You may wish to begin the process yourself, in which case follow these instructions:

    • Log in to the UWL Repository using your student details.
    • After you have logged in, you will be taken to your ‘Manage Deposits’ user area, which will display any items you have already deposited, and will allow you to add new material.

    • Click ‘New Item’. Follow each of the sections, beginning with ‘Type’ of output. Have the 'author accepted manuscript' (see above for what this is) and the date of acceptance for publication to hand.

    • Depositing is a simple process. You will be asked for bibliographic details about the item being deposited, provide the item where permitted, and agree to the deposit license.
    • After depositing, your item record will go into a holding area and the Open Research Team will check for any errors and be in touch if necessary. Email the Open Access team if you have any queries or problems.

The published paper through the journal’s website

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Another form of Open Access is making the final published version of the paper (the ‘version of record’) openly accessible from the journal’s online platform where content is usually only available to subscribers. The advantage of this is that it is more likely to be noticed by those researchers and policy makers who may not frequently search for papers via Google Scholar (and so find the repository copy) but do keep a close eye on what is published in key journals in their discipline. The disadvantage is that journals that do provide this as an option charge substantial amounts of money for doing so (an Article Processing Charge), even those who make all their content open in this way. We can address this through what are called Transitional or Transformative agreements with publishers. UWL currently has four of these with the publishers ACM, Elsevier, Sage and Wiley.

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If you wish to publish in a journal in which the only option is to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) but the journal isn't published as part of one of the agreements below, we may still be able to help you. We have a small APC fund for which you may be eligible.

Making your books and book chapters Open Access

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If you are funded by UKRI and its Research Councils, any books or book chapters you produce from that research and for which you have signed a publication contract after 1 January 2024, must be made Open Access.

Either the Version of Record (the published version) or the Author Accepted Manuscript (the final author version through the UWL Repository) are acceptable for this purpose but must be made available within 12 months of publication. A CC-BY license should be applied where possible, but other CC licenses are acceptable. 

Open licenses and copyright

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It's vital that you make use of your published outputs only in the ways you agreed to when you signed your copyright agreement with your publisher. Upload to repositories and servers using formats and methods that are allowed under the agreement, or you may be guilty of breaking copyright which can have significant consequences. If in doubt, get advice from the Open Research team.

To establish copyright over your intellectual property (having checked you are able to do so) while allowing others to make use of it in the spirit of Open Research, a ‘Creative Commons’ license is used with Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) being the most liberal and often preferred license, especially by public funding bodies of the kind coordinated under UKRI.

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There are six open Creative Commons licenses. They were created by a not-for-profit organisation whose aim is to help those who create work and want to share it. It’s important to make sure your outputs have the correct creative commons license that your funders require and that you abide by the rules contained in the license attached to outputs form others: some require ‘non-commercial’ (CC-BY-NC) use or ‘no derivatives allowed’ (CC.BY.ND) or both (CC.BY.NC.ND) but all require you to recognise the original author of the output (‘attribution’).

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Managing Third Party Copyright

UKRI has produced guidance on how to deal with copyright issues that may arise if you are using third party images and other copyrighted materials in your research outputs. It has been developed for researchers funded by the UKRI councils but gives good general advice.

UKRI’s Open Access licence requirements do not apply to third-party content included in your publication. If you are permitted to reuse a piece of content, you can include it under a different licence to that applied to the main work or on an ‘all rights reserved’ basis.

Predatory publishers

Predatory publishers exist to make money from academics trying to disseminate their works without providing any kind of quality checks or editorial services. The publication fee is often exorbitant, despite a total lack of input on the publisher’s end.

Jeffrey Beal, Librarian at the University of Colorado in the US, coined the term ‘predatory publishers.’ He was unequivocal in his criticism of how predatory publishing has harmed the Open Access movement, writing in 2012 that: 

When e-mail first became available, it was a great innovation that made communication fast and cheap. Then came spam — and suddenly, the innovation wasn’t so great. It meant having to filter out irrelevant, deceptive and sometimes offensive messages. It still does. The same corruption of a great idea is now occurring with scholarly open-access publishing"

- Jeffrey Beal, Nature.

The email analogy is a good one, especially as this is primarily how predatory publishers target academics. Watch out for emails from publishers that are overly effusive and promise speedy publication.

  • Publishing in predatory journals could have several negative consequences for authors and their research:

    • Works publisher in low-quality predatory journals can be harder to find and cite. Your hard work and important findings may be disregarded by the wider scientific community. A lot of citation databases also do not index low-quality journals, so it may be difficult for others to discover at all. 
    • Loss of work. Predatory publishers have no interest in the author’s actual output and so will have no scruples about taking papers offline without warning or never actually publishing works in the first place. Bear in mind also that most legitimate publishers will not allow you to submit a work that has been published before so you could waste a huge opportunity. 
    • Diminishing scholarly integrity in the scientific community. Many predatory journals promise that works will be peer reviewed, but of course, this is not the case. As a result, works of low-quality or misinformation are brought into the scientific conversation, distracting from legitimate sources.

    To avoid predatory publishers, check for basic spelling and grammar errors in their communications and website as an obvious giveaway. Look at their archives to see if there’s consistency in terms of research area. Also, look out for clearly outlined Article Processing Charges and review processes. Note how communicable the publisher is, if you can easily contact them, and if they keep normal working hours for the country they state they are based in.

    These are some red flags to be mindful of, but you can use Think. Check. Submit. to check out a step-by-step guide to evaluating journal quality. You can also quickly check if a journal is featured on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or a member of The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) by having a look at their respective websites.

UWL as an Open Access publisher

New Vistas and Engineering Future Sustainability

UWL publish two ‘diamond’ open access journals; journals with no charges for publishing a paper or reading it.

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New Vistas

New Vistas, provides a forum to disseminate research, commentary, and scholarly work that engages with the complex agenda of higher education in its local, national and global context.

New Vistas, provides a forum to disseminate research, commentary, and scholarly work that engages with the complex agenda of higher education in its local, national and global context.

Find out more about New Vistas
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Engineering Future Sustainability

The journal appears twice a year (a spring and an autumn issue) with occasional special issues and publishes for a broad academic, international and professional readership.

Engineering Future Sustainability (EFS) is a pioneering journal at the intersection of engineering and sustainable development. Recognising the critical role that natural resources play in human commerce, daily life, and existence, the editors are dedicated to the cause of ensuring their longevity through sustainable engineering practices. Any neglect of sustainability could risk the depletion of these resources, posing grave consequences for our world.

EFS emphasises the design and execution of projects that protect and conserve natural resources. 

Find out more about Engineering Future Sustainability

Get in touch

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Open Research team

Get in touch with Dr Marc Forster and Eilish Purton from the Open Research team for help and advice at open.research@uwl.ac.uk.

Library team

In-person: Visit the Help Zone, ground floor at our Ealing & Reading sites. Find out the library opening hours.

Email us: library@uwl.ac.uk

Telephone:  Ealing: 020 8231 2405  /  Reading: 020 8209 4434  (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm)

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