This infographic from Open Access Australasia highlights the many benefits of open access publishing.
In the journal-based open access publishing model:
See Where to publish an OA article below for more information on journal-based OA.
In the repository-based open access publishing model:
See Where to publish an OA article below for more information on repository-based OA.
In the hybrid open access publishing model:
It's not necessary to pay for open access unless you want to make you research findings available immediately in a specific journal, in which case you may need to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). This page outlines the options for publishing your article OA, including those that are free of charge.
Your University Library team can assist you with any of these options. UWA staff can contact us at staffsupport-lib@uwa.edu.au and research students at hdrsupport-lib@uwa.edu.au
Transformative agreements, also known as "Read and Publish" agreements, are a key strategy adopted by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) in moving Australian research towards open access. They bring the research community, academic libraries and scholarly publishers together to work towards an open access publishing model.
Read and Publish agreements provide authors with the opportunity to publish open access in subscription journals immediately on acceptance, and free of any transactional Article Processing Charges (APCs). These agreements work by taking the library’s existing expenditure on journal subscriptions and repurposing it to cover both reading and publishing in that publisher’s journals. This means that only subscription journals are included in these agreements - publishing in fully open access journals (also known as Gold open access journals) is not covered.
Under these agreements, authors can often choose which Creative Commons licence they wish to apply to their work. For more information on Creative Commons licensing, see the Author rights tab of this guide.
UWA also has agreements and memberships with some publishers to reduce or remove the article processing charges for publishing open access.
Publisher | Title list | Conditions | Additional information |
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Biochemical Society (Portland Press) | Title list |
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Cambridge University Press | Title list |
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Cogitatio Press | Title list |
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CSIRO | Title list |
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Karger | Title list |
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Microbiology Society | Title list |
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Oxford University Press | Title list |
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The Royal Society | Title list |
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Springer Nature | Title list |
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Wiley | Title list |
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Information above has been adapted from the University of South Australia (with permission) and the Council of Australian Universities (CAUL) Read & Publish Agreements Negotiated by CAUL guide, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence.
UWA researchers can publish Open Access with these services at a reduced rate:
How to obtain the APC discount with these publishers
Upon submission of an article, UWA corresponding authors are recognised by their institutional email address or by specifying their University of Western Australia affiliation. Ensure you always use your UWA email address (ending in "@uwa.edu.au", "@research.uwa.edu.au" or "@student.uwa.edu.au") to ensure you're eligible for these discounts.
Use these directories to find open access journals.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAG)
An independent, community curated directory that indexes and makes accessible high quality, open access peer reviewed journals. Use it to find open access journals in which to publish or search for journals and articles you wish to read. It includes search functionality that allows you to find journals that do not charge article processing fees.
Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory
An easy to search source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types. Conduct an initial keyword search and then use the narrow results feature to limit to open access publications.
UWA Open Access Journals
Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Australasian journal of medieval and early modern studies.
Showcases the research of first year students at The University of Western Australia (UWA) enrolled in a biology unit.
Education research and perspectives
A multi-disciplinary open access journal, published continuously by the Faculty of Education since December 1950. All contents from 2000 are now available as OA articles. (Host: Faculty of Education)
Limina: a journal of historical and cultural studies
A refereed academic journal of historical and cultural studies based in the Discipline of History at UWA. (Host: Faculty of Arts)
Outskirts: feminisms along the edge
A peer-reviewed feminist cultural studies journal published in May and November. (Host: School of Humanities)
Tenderfoot (formerly Trove)
An online interactive creative arts journal created for, by and with students. (Host: UWA Cultural Precinct)
Westerly (issues become Open Access after three years)
Since 1956, Westerly has been publishing lively fiction and poetry as well as intelligent articles. It covers literature and culture throughout the world, but maintains a special emphasis on Australia, particularly Western Australia, and the Asian region.
Institutional Repositories
Institutional repositories are digital collections of the research outputs created within a research institution. UWA's institutional repository is the UWA Profiles and Research Repository, an open platform facilitating the discoverability of UWA staff profiles, their research outputs, teaching, grants and activities. Authors usually add the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM), also known as the post-print version of an article to the repository and this is allowed by most journals.
Publications in the UWA Profiles and Research Repository are freely available to anyone with an internet connection and are discoverable through Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and Trove. Repository based open access satisfies the open access mandates of funding bodies including the ARC, NHMRC, NIH and Wellcome Trust. Find out how to contribute your research publications to the Repository.
Although most institutional repositories aim to make research outputs openly available, they usually contain a combination of OA full text, embargoes full text, and metadata only records which contain bibliographic information about the research outputs, with links to published versions. As a result, research publications included in institutional repositories may or may not be peer-reviewed. Publishers' policies on versions of outputs permitted in institutional repositories may include pre-prints, post-prints and published versions. See the "Making your publications Open Access in the UWA Profiles and Research Repository" section in the UWA Research Repository FAQs.
Subject Repositories
Subject repositories (also known as centralised or discipline repositories) are digital collections of the research outputs within particular subject areas or disciplines, developed specifically to meet the needs of these communities. Like Institutional Repositories, research publications included in subject repositories may or may not be peer-reviewed and may contain a mix of pre-prints, post-prints and published versions.
Where to find institutional and subject repositories
Over the last decade many new publishers and journals have appeared hoping to attract authors who wish to publish open access. This trend was described in this article - Beall, Jeffrey, 2012, 'Predatory publishers are corrupting open access', Nature News, vol. 489, no. 179.
If you decide to publish in an OA journal, it is important to carefully evaluate the scholarly credibility of both the publisher and the journal.
Assessing OA publishers and their journals:
A useful summary of this process is provided by the Think - Check - Submit site.
Check the publisher’s website against these guidelines for publishers:
Except for logos, Canva designs or where otherwise indicated, content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.