Funding for open access

The University is committed to making the outcomes arising from publicly funded research as widely available as possible. There are several open access options available to GCU staff and students when publishing their research. They are, in order of preference:

  1. Publish gold open access via one of the Library's publisher agreements
  2. Publish green open access by depositing the author accepted manuscript in Pure at the point of acceptance
  3. Apply to GCU's open access fund

Option one: Publisher agreements

Corresponding authors who are staff or students at GCU can benefit from the library’s current agreements with a range of major academic publishers. These agreements allow open access publishing of original research articles and review articles at no cost to authors or with a discount.

By publishing open access using these agreements, articles are immediately available with no access barriers. When completing the open access option, authors should select the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) publishing licence where available. This is the least restrictive open access publishing licence and is compliant with open access funder policies and Plan S.

Please refer to the individual publisher sections below for more information on each agreement and the eligible journal titles. Please note that while we aim to make the lists of journals covered by the agreements on this webpage as accurate as possible, publishers may make changes over the course of the agreement. If you have any questions please contact libraryresearch@gcu.ac.uk.

Option two: Green open access

Green open access (also known as self-archiving) is a way to provide access to your research without cost to the authors or readers.

Authors upload a copy of their work to a repository, which hosts it online where their readers can find and download it. Most publishers have imposed rules on this process and only allow authors to upload the author accepted manuscript (AAM), also known as the post-print. This is the final draft of the work after changes from peer review have been added, but before the publisher has added any typesetting, layout or logos.

GCU's Publications Policy includes a rights retention strategy which enables authors to retain their rights over the AAM and comply with funder and Research Excellence Framework (REF) open access policies. Follow the information in step four of our publication checklist to publish your research green open access.

Option three: GCU open access fund

The Library Research Team administers the University's open access fund which can be used to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) for gold open access publishing. The GCU Open Access Publication Funding Policy sets out the remit, eligibility criteria, and decision process for the allocation of open access funds for APCs. Corresponding authors employed at GCU may be eligible to have APCs paid for via this fund if:

  1. Your journal is not included in one of the publisher open access agreements
  2. The green open access route is not available
  3. Funding for gold open access was not included in the grant from your funder
  4. Colleagues from collaborating institutions do not have access to funds to cover the costs of publication
  5. The output aligns with the REF submission profile of the school or department. This will be assessed by the relevant Associate Dean for Research (ADR).

If points one to four from the above list are applicable to your article, authors can apply to the fund by sending details of their publication, journal and article processing charge to libraryresearch@gcu.ac.uk. Applications to the fund must be made prior to the submission of any article. The Library Research Team will then send your application to the relevant ADR for assessment. Please note any application for funding should be compliant with funder specific requirements and Plan S criteria, namely: