Open access frequently asked questions

A Fully Open Access journal is an online journal in which all content is permanently free to readers without the need to pay a subscription.

Some Fully Open Access journals may charge authors an Article Processing Charge (APC). Other publishers, such as 'Diamond OA' publishers, may offer both free access and free publication. The latter is typically funded by societies or institutions, or may significantly reduce publishing costs as academic-led titles. 

A hybrid journal is a journal which contains some Open Access content and some that requires payment or a subscription, to access.

Authors have the option to pay a fee to make their article open access via the publisher, or they can choose not to pay open access fees and instead self-archive the accepted manuscript for permanent free access, with the final copyedited version remaining accessible only to journal subscribers.

Most funders no longer cover open access fees for hybrid journals.

Transformative Agreements were originally intended as a temporary solution to redirect funds from paying publishers for access to paywalled content towards Open Access services. These differ from arrangements such as the Springer Nature (BMC) Fully Open Access Agreement or our prepaid account with Frontiers Media, which are balances for approved open access funding requests. 

Some Transformative Agreements may allow all university-affiliated authors to publish open access without fees, while others are limited to manuscripts that acknowledge specific funders. Many agreements do not cover every journal in a publisher's portfolio, while others, such as the Elsevier deal, cover only certain article types within hybrid journals and offer a discounted fee for manuscripts accepted in fully open access journals. There may also be a cap on the number of manuscripts a publisher will cover.

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a publishing model that relies on subscription fees to fund open access publishing. As long as enough institutions maintain their subscriptions with these publishers, all articles in their journals, or a selected subset, will remain freely accessible to everyone, and authors will not have to pay additional open access publication fees.

A manuscript typically goes through four stages before publication.

1. Pre-print: the version originally submitted to the journal by the authors before any peer review.
2. Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM): the peer-reviewed version with the authors' final edits, accepted for publication. It does not include the publisher's copyediting or typesetting.
3. Proof: the peer-reviewed version used to identify errors during the publisher's copyediting. This is not the same as the AAM.
4. Version of Record (VoR): the final published version that has been typeset and formatted according to the journal's standards. Many publishers release an ‘early online’ version, then update it with correct pagination after the journal issue is published.

'All rights reserved' means the rights holder, which could be the publisher, retains ownership and controls how your work is accessed and used. When your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to accept a publishing agreement. This agreement may include a clause that either transfers your copyright to the publisher or grants them an exclusive licence for your work. Either arrangement may require you to seek the publisher's permission for any other use of the work you have created, while allowing the publisher to profit from selling access to companies that train large language models.

Creative Commons licences do not replace copyright. Instead, they allow you to grant additional permissions to others, enabling reuse under conditions that suit your needs, while reserving some rights for yourself. Any use beyond the licence terms still requires permission from the copyright holder.

A version of a journal article or conference paper, whether in its final published form or as a self-archived accepted manuscript, must be openly accessible under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. In the UK, the Open Government Licence (OGL) provides equivalent reuse rights to a CC BY licence.

If your article acknowledges funding, make sure your selected licence aligns with their open access policy. Typically, a more restrictive licence (like CC BY-NC) needs prior approval.

If you aim to reach a global audience, note that a licence with the Non-Derivative (ND) restriction blocks unauthorised translations.

Rights Retention is a contractual arrangement between the university and staff authors, granting the university a non-exclusive licence to publicly share the Authors' Accepted Manuscript of emerging research publications under a specified Creative Commons licence.

Publishers are notified of this prior contractual relationship and licence. Under UK law, this overrides any subsequent terms a publisher might seek to impose on an author. It allows these outputs to be reused for teaching, research, and other uses without requiring publisher approval.