Opening your research – how to make your publications open access
In the lead up to this year’s International Open Access Week (20–26 October), Deakin Library is publishing a series of articles that explore this year’s OA Week theme: ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’. In this post, our guest author Caitlin Savage, Research Librarian, Publishing and Open Access, shares how your research articles can be made open access.
Deakin Library will also be hosting an online event at 10:00am on Thursday 23 October where we will be further discussing the OA Week theme with a selection of panellists from the open publishing community. Registrations are now open.
Opening your research – how to ensure your publications are as open as possible
“Research is a global public good, and barriers to the dissemination of research should be removed wherever possible.”
Deakin’s Open Research Position Statement
What do we mean by ‘open access’?
When research is fully open access, it is free for the public to access, read, download, copy, share, or use for any other lawful purpose.
This approach to open access was established in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and Berlin Declaration (2003). More recently, international frameworks like the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) and the Toluca–Cape Town Declaration on Research Assessment (2024) recognise knowledge as a public good and call for research to be openly shared, inclusive, and collaborative.
These global commitments, much like Deakin’s own Open Research Position Statement echo the theme of this year’s Open Access Week: ‘Who owns our knowledge?’. They highlight that ownership should not rest with a handful of publishers, but with the communities who create, use, and are impacted by research.
Image: Why open access?
How can I make my articles OA?
Open access can take many different forms, but when it comes to journal articles there are two main pathways:
- Publish in an open access journal, or
- Make your accepted manuscript openly available in a repository like Deakin Research Online (DRO).
Publishing in open access journals
Community-controlled (diamond) journals are fully open access journals that don’t charge fees to readers or authors. Diamond journals focus on serving the needs of their research community rather than generating profit from the publishing business model. They are usually funded by universities, governments, societies or associations in order to be made freely available online.
- Check the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to find diamond open access journals in your field – there are over 13,000 journals without fees indexed in DOAJ.
- Visit Open Journals at Deakin to discover our Deakin-hosted diamond open access journals.
Gold open access journals make all their articles free for anyone to read, but charge authors an article processing charge (APC) to cover the costs of publication. Hybrid journals publish closed access articles and give authors the option to pay an APC to make their individual article open access. They’ve been criticised for ‘double dipping’ because readers or libraries still pay for subscriptions, while authors also pay to make their work freely available.
- Deakin Library’s Read & Publish agreements cover the open access APC in some gold journals and a large selection of hybrid journals.
Using repository (green) open access
Even if you don’t publish in an open access journal – you can still make your article open with Repository (green) open access. Most publishers allow authors to make the accepted manuscript (AM) or author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) version of an article open access in an institutional repository, sometimes after an embargo period. The AM is the version that has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication but not yet typeset or formatted by the publisher. This is an easy and free way to make subscription access articles openly available after publication.
Image: Article versions for open access
- Check out the Uploading author accepted manuscripts to Elements page on the Managing your research outputs at Deakin guide for further information and instructions on making your research open access in DRO.
How can I make sure my publications are already OA or able to be made OA?
The easiest ways to check if an article is open access are:
- Check for open access PDFs on the “My Research Outputs” page of your Find an expert profile.
- Check your open access stats in the Research Metrics Dashboard.
- Look for an ‘open access’ label on the article webpage – most publishers display an ‘Open Access’ badge (often orange, with an unlocked padlock symbol) if the article is free to read.
- Check if you can read the full text without logging in or paying – if the PDF or HTML version is freely available to anyone, it’s open access.
- Check the licence – Open access articles will usually state a Creative Commons licence (e.g. CC BY) or other open licence on the first page.
Who can I ask for help?
Your Scholarly Services Librarians are ready to help you with any questions about open access. You can contact your librarian or request a librarian research consultation.