Open access publishing

Make the pre-peer-reviewed version open access on a preprint server, free of charge. This type of open access is typically used for journal articles. Pre-printing makes your research findings quickly available, registers your discovery, and increases visibility of your research. If you plan to submit your article 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. 

This type of open access applies to both articles and longform publications. Make your work open access by uploading the accepted manuscript to an institutional or subject repository. Many 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 publisher 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 publisher self-archiving policy use Sherpa Services, for journals you can search by journal title for books you will need to search by publisher. 

Publishing open access on the publisher website means your final full text will be open access upon online publication with a licence such as one of the Creative Commons licences. There are a number of ways to do this: 

• Via a 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 our institutional open access agreements

• Under the "diamond" open access model, there are no open access publishing fees charged to authors or readers, for example Open Library of the Humanities and journals on University publishing sites such as our LJMU Open Journals Service. These types of publishing models are funding in a different way to APC or BPCs.

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. Some of these journals are free to publish in but others will charge a fee.

You can also check the Directory of Open Access Books for more information about open access book publishers.  

The OAPEN OA Books toolkit aims to help authors to better understand open access book publishing including sections on the landscape business models for open book publishing.

Some open book publishing models involve paying a Book Publishing Charge (BPC) but there others which do not include a BPC, an example of this would be Open Book Publishers.

Please contact the Researcher Engagement Team to explore your options for publishing books and other longform outputs like book chapters open access.

It is good practice when publishing your work to include a data access statement and is sometimes a requirements of funders or journals. A data access statement is used to promote data visibility, even if the data is not openly available. The statement should outline how your data can be accessed and any restrictions on use.

Example statements: 

• All data created during this research is openly available via LJMU Data Repository, at [DOI]
• Supporting data will be available from LJMU Data Repository, at [DOI] after a 12-month embargo period from the date of data collection to allow for the publication of research findings.
• Owing to ethical concerns/the sensitive nature of this research, the data underlying this publication cannot be made openly available. Further information, including conditions for access, can be found at LJMU Data Repository, at [DOI]
• No new data was created throughout this project.
• This study was a re-analysis of existing data that is publicly available from [REPOSITORY NAME] at [DOI]