Make the pre-peer-reviewed version open access on a preprint server, free of charge. Pre-printing makes your research findings quickly available, registers your discovery, and increases visibility of your research. If you plan to submit to a journal, check the publisher policy before posting your preprint, to make sure they allow submissions of work that has already been shared as a preprint. The Wellcome Trust encourage Wellcome funded researchers to share preprints of their work and require this during public health emergencies.
Make your work open access by uploading the accepted manuscript to an institutional or subject repository. Most publishers allow you to share your accepted manuscript in a repository, although they may impose an "embargo" on access and restrict how much you can share e.g. only one chapter of a monograph. The author accepted manuscript is the version of your work that has been refereed and accepted but before the journal has applied their typesetting and branding. LJMU’s preferred route to open access is self-archiving in the institutional repository, LJMU Research Online. Upload upon acceptance, via Symplectic to deposit to LJMU Research Online. To check a journal’s self-archiving policy use Sherpa/Romeo.
When you publish open access on the publisher website, your final full text will be open access immediately upon online publication with a licence such as one of the Creative Commons licences. This may involve payment to the publisher of an open access publishing fee, Article Processing Charge (APC) or Book Processing Charge (BPC). This is referred to as gold open access. LJMU researchers can benefit from discounts or publish open access at no extra cost through publisher agreements. Under the "diamond" or "platinum" open access models, there are no open access publishing fees charged to authors, for example Open Library of the Humanities and journals on University publishing sites such as our LJMU Open Journals Service.
There are a growing number of open access journals in most disciplines. A list of the journals is currently available in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
Open Access publishing is not limited to journal articles, books, chapters and monographs can also be made available on an open access basis. The OAPEN OA Books toolkit aims to help authors to better understand open access book publishing.
You can also check the Directory of Open Access Books for more information about open access book publishers.
