BU Research Blog

It’s Day 2 of International Open Access Week! Today we are focusing on why Open Access is important, and how we support it at BU.

As highlighted in yesterday’s post, open access publishing allows research to be disseminated quickly and widely, the research process to operate more efficiently, and increases the use and understanding of research by business, government, charities and the wider public. Research shows that open access publications are likely to be more highly cited and disseminated than those published behind a paywall.

Open access can increase research and researcher visibility, facilitate collaboration, and accelerate developments and innovation in the research field.

As well as the clear benefits open access brings, many funders, including UKRI (and any of its councils), Wellcome, and the NIHR, have open access policies which require that in-scope outputs produced from their grant-funded research are published open access.

Similarly, to be eligible for submission to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN must be available open access. This means that BU authors should deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript in BRIAN (Bournemouth Research Information and Networking) as soon as it is accepted for publication, so that it can be uploaded to BURO (Bournemouth University Research Online) and comply with REF requirements.

How we support Open Access at BU.

There are two main routes of making research findings open access at BU – Gold or Green.

Gold Open Access

The Gold open access route is where an Article Processing Charge (APC) is paid to the publisher to make the published version of the article available free of charge to readers, immediately on publication. At BU, we support gold open access publishing via:

1. Transformative agreements with publishers

BU is signed up to a number of transformative deals with major publishers including ACM, Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and more. This means that BU authors can publish gold open access for free, or at a discounted rate, in thousands of journal titles which are covered under the deals, subject to eligibility.

More information on these agreements can be found on the Bournemouth University Library and Learning Support guide.

2. A dedicated fund for UKRI grant holders.

BU is in receipt of a UKRI Open Access block grant, which can be used by UKRI-funded authors to cover APCs associated with publishing in fully open access journals and platforms that are not covered by our transformative deals. The cost of open access publishing in subscription or hybrid journals cannot be supported by the award.

3. The BU Open Access Publication fund

Researchers can also apply to the central BU Open Access Fund for support to cover all, or part, of the costs of open access publishing in journals not covered by our transformative deals. Budget is limited and application for funding is extremely competitive, therefore it is important that authors apply to the fund before submitting their article to a journal as funding is not guaranteed.

Green Open Access

Also referred to as self-archiving, BU authors can publish green open access at no cost to them, by depositing the final, full-text, peer-reviewed version of their article (usually known as the author-accepted manuscript) in our institutional repository BURO. The article will be made freely available, either immediately upon publication, or after an embargo period as stipulated by the journal publisher.

Want to know more?

Come to one of our Open Access drop-in sessions:

• TODAY at Lansdowne, on the ground floor of the Bournemouth Gateway Building (BGB), from 12:30pm – 1:30pm.
• On Thursday 22 October at Talbot, in FG20 on the ground floor of the Fusion Building, from 12:30pm – 1:30pm.

No sign-up is required, just come along with any questions you may have about our transformative deals, applying to the Open Access Publication Fund, or anything else open access related! Or you can email openaccess@bournemouth.ac.uk.