Open Access

1. Submit your work to an Open Access journal or publisher.

Check out the Directory of Open Access Journals to look for established Open Access Journals, look at the Journal section of this research guide, or ask your librarian.

Our Publishing Opportunities guide has options in all formats as well as a tool to help you evaluate possible quality publishing venues.

2. Deposit your pre-prints or accepted manuscript to an Open Access repository

Many disciplines have well-established repositories for archiving research, such as arXiv (for physics and mathematics), socArXiv (for Social Sciences) and PubMed or bioArXiv (for biomedical and life sciences).

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. You can use this database to find trusted repositories in your subject area.

3. Deposit your post-prints/authors accepted manuscript in an online repository

You should deposit your final accepted manuscript to eScholarship, the University of California's Open Access repository of UC authored scholarship and research. You are covered by the UC OA Policies.

Note that publishing in non-Open Access journals does not foreclose the possibility of providing Open Access to your work - far from it!

For works published at another institution or before the year 2013, and if you have already transferred copyright, archiving a post-print version of your work requires permission from the journal publisher. However, most journals already allow post-print archiving.

Use Sherpa/Romeo to search for the copyright and archiving policies of academic journals.

4. Maintain your author rights

When you enter into an agreement with a publisher and sign a copyright transfer form, you can decide which rights you want to keep and which you want to give away.

For more information about authors' rights check out this pamphlet from SPARC

The Copyright Addendum Tool from Creative Commons allows authors to generate a PDF that can be attached to a publishers copyright agreement to ensure authors retain certain rights over their work.

Talk to a librarian who can offer guidance in this area.

5. Referee an Open Access Paper

Accept invitations to referee papers or serve on the editorial board of Open Acess journals. Ask journals where you have some influence (as editor, reviewer, author etc) to do more to support Open Access.

Check out our Journal Evaluation Tool to help inform your decisions.

6. Advocate for Open Access

Volunteer to serve on your university's committee to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is using criteria that, at the very least, do not penalize faculty for publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals. At best, adjust the criteria to give faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peer-reviewed research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA archives. Work with your administration to adopt university-wide policies that promote OA.

Leiden Manifesto - 10 principles to guide research evaluation

Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) - researchers, funders, and organizations improving how research is assessed based on the Leiden Manifesto.

7. Educate Student Researchers

Make sure that your students understand their self-interest in OA. Make sure they understand that OA increases the impact of research articles. Or, at a minimum, don't let myths about OA circulate without challenge. When you meet students, colleagues, or administrators who are curious and want to know more, or who misunderstand and need some facts, direct them to this guide.

The Right To Research Coalition is a student-led organization promoting open scholarly publishing to ensure all students have access to research regardless of their institutions financial means.