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Research Support: Open Access and Publishing

Advice and support for scholarly communications.

Why Publish Open Access?

Orange open padlock surrounded by icons with reasons to make your work open access. More exposure for your work. Practitioners can apply your findings. Higher citation rates. Your research can influence policy. The public can access your findings. Compliant with grant rules. Taxpayers get value for money. Researchers in developing countries can see your work. CC-BY Danny Kingsley & Sarah Brown.
  • Open access removes barriers to access and broadens the audience for your research, increasing its impact
  • Open access makes your research equally available to independent researchers and those in institutions who would not be able to pay the price tag
  • Open access encourages public engagement with research, which is often publicly funded
  • Many funding bodies now have mandates which require researchers to make their research available in an open access source. QMU policy requires you to deposit a version of your work in eResearch - QMU's publications repository
  • To comply with funders' open access requirements and/or the REF open access policy.

Where can I find out more about open access?

CORE

The mission of CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public.

Journal Checker Tool

Check to see if the journal you're thinking about submitting your research to is compliant with Plan S or your funder's requirements.

SHERPA/RoMEO

This website provides summaries of the permissions for publisher and journal copyright policies relating to self-archiving of papers.

SHERPA/JULIET

A website with information on research funders' open access policies.

SHERPA/FACT

SHERPA/FACT is a tool to help researchers check if the journals in which they wish to publish their results comply with their funder's requirements for open access to research.

SHERPA Services

Links and information for all SHERPA services.

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. It is a white list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material.

eResearch latest additions

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ALCS - Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society

If you’ve published work (books, journal articles, scripts, magazine content) it might be a good idea for you to sign up to the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). You enter the information about your publications and the ALCS works out whether you’re owed royalties. In many cases they already have a record of money owed to you.

More information on what the money is:

https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from

Lifetime membership costs £36 as a one-off deductible payment from your first statement and the not for profit organisation charges 9.5% commission to keep themselves going.

 

Think. Check. Submit.

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

 

Octopus.ac

Octopus.ac is a new, open access publishing platform in collaboration with UKRN and Jisc and funded by UKRI. 

Researchers can publish all iterations of their work there for free, enabling peer review and quality assessment, gaining credit for what they have done and allowing the research community to further build upon it.