Open Access for journal articles

Before you submit: Identify your open access route

There are different routes to make your work open access, depending on the journal you are planning to publish in. You should work out how you will make your work open access before you submit to the journal.

We've made this information available in the Open Access Journals Flowchart (PDF, 161kB), to help you understand how to identify which method to use, or you can read the explanation below.

Use an open access publishing deal

These agreements offer no-cost OA publishing to Bristol corresponding authors for research articles. Review this guidance for more details about our open access publishing agreements. If your proposed publication meets the relevant criteria, your work can be published gold open access (i.e. freely available on the publisher's website).

Arrange payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC)

If your journal is not in one of these deals, it may be a fully open access ('gold') journal which charges an Article Process Charge (APC) for all articles.

Institutional Open Access Block Grants
The library has been granted funds by UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), Wellcome Trust, and BHF (British Heart Foundation) to cover APCs in fully open access journals (where the APC is a requirement).

Other Funder reimbursements
If you are funded by another funding body (eg NIHR, Leverhulme, European Research Council (Horizon)), you should check your funder's open access policy to see if they will cover OA publishing costs.

  • They may reimburse these as part of the project budget or via a separate reimbursement claim. However, if they do not cover these costs, you may need to choose a different journal which will not require an APC.
  • You should secure funds before submitting to a publisher, but if your manuscript has already been accepted and you do not have OA funding support, you may need to ask the journal to waive the fee. 

Use the Scholarly Works Policy to upload to Pure

If you are not using an OA publishing deal or funder support (block grant or project award), and you are publishing in a hybrid journal (ie the APC is optional), you can still make your paper open access via the Bristol Research Portal.

Submission: Include the Scholarly Works Policy statement

When you submit your article to a journal, include the following statement in your cover letter and your acknowledgements section:

For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

See our Scholarly Works Policy guidance for more information. You should always include the statement, even if you are using an OA publishing deal or arranging payment of an Article Processing Charge, for added transparency.

Acceptance: Add a record to Pure

Once you manuscript has been accepted (you have completed the peer-review process and have been told that no further corrections are needed), create a record in Pure describing the article.

  • If the version on the publisher's website will be open access (ie an OA publishing deal or paying an APC), it is recommended but not required to upload the Accepted Manuscript.
  • If the accepted manuscript will be the open access version (ie you are planning on 'green' open access, using the Scholarly Works Policy), you must upload it to the Pure record. You can do this before the publication date - it will only be made available once the article is published.

Publication: Update the Pure record

You are expected to add update the Pure record when your article is published. Add the DOI and the publication date. This will let the open access team know to review the record.

The open access team will also regularly update Pure records for published articles to enhance the metadata, eg adding volume and issue numbers, DOIs, etc., where this information is available from other sources.

Some funders require an additional deposit to PubMed Central.

  • If you are funded by BBSRC, MRC, CRUK, BHF, NIHR or The Wellcome Trust, follow Europe PubMed Central's instructions to add the accepted manuscript to EPMC with no embargo and a CC-BY Licence.