What is open access?

Open access increases the impact of scholarly research by supporting free and permanent online access to research outputs.

• How can I publish my work in a journal as open access?
• How can I publish my work in a book as open access?

Benefits of open access

• Enable authors to disseminate their work to the widest possible audience
• Make publicly funded work available to the public
• Increase visibility and citations for research outputs
• Ensure the preservation and longevity of materials in institutional repositories
• Open Access Citation Advantage: an annotated bibliography

REF and open access

The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) requires all published articles and proceedings submitted to REF 2021 to be made available as open access.

• More about the policy

Funders and open access

Many funders now require funded published outputs, such as journal articles and proceedings, to be made open access.

• Individual funder requirements

Deposit to Pure

Ensure your research profile remains up to date. Use Pure to self-archive your author accepted manuscript in the University repository (UBIRA). Meet University, funder and REF requirements with self-archiving.

Deposit to Pure

APC Request Form

Apply for central funding to pay publisher article processing charges.

APC request form

More information

• Open Access Resource List
• Open Access Directory: compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community.
• Open Access Movement timeline: charting the history of digital open access from 1990.
• Open Access overview: by Peter Suber
• Three landmark international conferences at Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003), and Berlin (2003) produced agreed statements and declarations outlining open access definitions and recommendations.

Contact us

Email openaccesspublications@contacts.bham.ac.uk