Open Access publishing & NHMRC/ARC mandates
Learn about the benefits of open access publishing and NHMRC/ARC open access mandates.
What is open access?
Open access refers to unrestricted, online access to peer reviewed and published scholarly research papers.
The open access movement emerged as an alternative to the traditional publishing model, which works on a subscription basis. That is, full-text access is only granted to those individuals who are affiliated with an institution that has elected to pay the subscription fee.
Publishing your work open access ensures that anyone with access to the internet can retrieve the full-text of your output, at any time. Research impact is measured by citation and the more accessible your work is, the more likely it is to be cited (see e.g. Gargouri et al. 2010).
Researchers are encouraged to make their publications available open access and, both within Australia and internationally, funding bodies are now mandating that research outputs are made available open access.
NHMRC/ARC open access mandates
Both of Australia's largest research funders, the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), now have open access policies in place. These policies are designed to bring publicly-funded Australian research to a worldwide audience. If your research is funded by either of these bodies, these changes will have a significant impact on you and your research.
Meeting your obligations
The VU Research Repository (VURR) team can help you meet your obligations. We are experienced in interpreting publishers' copyright policies and will help determine which version of your work to make available to meet the conditions of your grant.
To seek assistance from the VURR team:
- Email the details of your work to the VURR team as soon as the paper is accepted for publication via .
- Let us know which grant funded the publication
- Submit details of your publication to VURR via VU Elements. For information on this process see submitting a paper.
- When depositing your publication to VURR via Elements upload the accepted manuscript version of your work. The accepted manuscript is the final draft you sent to the publisher after peer review but without the publisher's formatting and logo. The content is essentially the same as the final published version (PDF), but the published version may have typesetting, editorial or formatting changes
The accepted manuscript may be supplied to VURR as a Microsoft Word document (without tracked changes), Postscript, or PDF.
If your publisher does not allow you to deposit any version of your article, you may need to enter into a separate copyright agreement at the time of publication. For more information, contact the Copyright Officer. Please make sure that you also report the publications data to the Office for Research for the purposes of HERDC and ERA.
After submission
Once we have obtained the publication data, we will check both it and the publisher's copyright policies, and make it available on VURR. If the full-text cannot be made available according to the publisher's policies we will contact you.
Open access publishing models
There are two main models of open access publishing, 'Green' and 'Gold'.
Green
After publication, you can make your work green open access by depositing a full-text version in an open repository such as VURR (contact ). Once it is published in an open repository, your full-text paper will be freely available on the internet to read, download, print and cite.
To ensure you can deposit a full-text version in an open repository, make sure this is in the terms of your publishing contract before signing. You may need to negotiate with the publisher.
- If you have signed your contract but don’t know the terms of the contract it may not be too late. Most publishers will allow you to deposit a version of your published paper in an open repository. Check your publisher’s self-archiving policy through SHERPA/RoMEO. Many publishers allow the author accepted version (the version after peer review or the final submitted version) or pre-print (pre-peer reviewing) to be deposited.
- Note that some publishers that allow depositing/archiving in an open repository have embargo periods delaying its open availability.
Gold
An open access journal is one where the full text of the published version is available online for no cost to the reader, i.e. there is no subscription cost.
The submitting author is often required to pay an article processing fee at the time of publication (costs range from $1500-$3000 per paper).
Check the Directory of Open Access Journals for a comprehensive list of Open Access journals. The directory includes many journals that don’t charge an article processing fee.
