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 Flowchart (PDF, 91kB), to help you understand how to identify which method to use, or you can read the explanation below.

Use an open access deal

If the corresponding author is from the University of Bristol, you should first check to see if your article is covered by one of the library's open access deals. If so, your work will automatically be made 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, you should check if it is fully gold open access and therefore require an Article Process Charge (APC) for all of its articles. You can check this by searching the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to see if your journal appears.

The library has been granted funds by UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), Wellcome Trust, CRUK (Cancer Research UK) and BHF (British Heart Foundation) to cover open access charges in journals where all authors must pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). You should apply to the library for access to these funds before committing to pay the journal

If you are funded by a funding body other than UKRI, Wellcome Trust, CRUK, or BHF, you should check your funder's open access policy to see if they will cover the fees. If they will not cover the fees, you should ask your journal if they will waive those fees, or choose a journal that does not require an APC.

Use the Scholarly Works Policy to upload to Pure

If you are not using a deal or a funder block grant, then you can still make your paper open access using the university's Scholarly Works Policy and uploading a copy of your accepted manuscript to Pure (known as green open access).

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 still include the statement, even if you are using a read and publish deal or arranging payment of an Article Processing Charge.

Acceptance: Add a record to Pure

Once you have completed the peer-review process and have been told that no further corrections are needed, add a record to Pure describing the article.

If your article will be green open access (i.e., you are using the Scholarly Works Policy route) then you should also upload your accepted manuscript to the Pure record.

If your article will be gold open access (i.e., you are using a Read and Publish deal, or arranging payment of an APC) then you don't need to upload a file, however you should still add a record to Pure.

Publication: Update the Pure record

The open access team will often update published articles with volume and issue numbers, DOIs etc., but you can also edit the record in Pure yourself.

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