Open Access Introduction

It has been a requirement for some time that all publications resulting from research funded by the Wellcome Trust or the Research Councils be made available through Open Access. For Wellcome award holders, when publishing in a subscription-only journal, a copy of the accepted manuscript must be deposited in an Open Access repository such as White Rose Research Online. This is known as Green Open Access.

All peer-reviewed research papers (including review articles) that acknowledge any amount of Research Council funding and that are published in journals or conference proceedings are now subject to the newly revised RCUK Policy on Open Access and Supporting Guidance (PDF). In the policy, RCUK defines Open Access as “immediate, unrestricted, online access to peer-reviewed and published scholarly research papers free of any access charge”.

For articles submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, RCUK stipulates that they must be made available immediately through Open Access at the time of publication. If this is done through Gold Open Access, then the author will be responsible for paying the publisher an Article Processing Charge (APC). If this is done through Green Open Access, then there is no charge to the author, but embargo restrictions may apply.

In the first two years of the transition period, RCUK has supplied a block grant to the University of Sheffield to form part of a University Publication Fund (UPF). This fund is being administered through the University Library, and it will be used to support the payment of APCs for RCUK-funded research. If the UPF is used to pay the APC for an article, then the article must be made Open Access immediately at the time of publication through a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence. If your research has not been funded by RCUK, we invite you to use the Green Open Access for your publications, and we are happy to help you with the process.

From 1 April 2013, research grant applications can no longer include provision for publication charges.

Further information, including frequently asked questions, key concepts, and procedures for University of Sheffield authors, is available through the Quick Links on the right. If you have any questions which are not answered here, please contact OAEnquiries@sheffield.ac.uk.

This decision tree, based on the RCUK guidance, has been customised for University of Sheffield authors.

* If you are unsure of the embargo period of your chosen journal, check SHERPA/RoMEO for details of journals' copyright policies