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University Library

Open Access Toolkit: Publishing an article OA

Why make your article open access?

  • Open access makes research results freely available to anyone with an internet connection rather than keeping those results hidden behind a subscription paywall. 
  • Open access takes your research to a wider audience and makes it easier for other researchers and the general community to find, read, engage with and cite your work.
  • Many authors need to meet open access requirements set by their funding body; for example, the NHMRC and ARC policies on open access.

This infographic from Open Access Australasia highlights the many benefits of open access publishing.

How to publish an article open access

In the journal-based open access publishing model:

  • Author publishes an article in an open access journal
  • Author may have to pay an article processing charge
  • The publication is immediately available for all readers to access freely
  • Preferred option for some funders (e.g. Wellcome Trust)
  • Free or $

See Where to publish an OA article below for more information on journal-based OA.

In the repository-based open access publishing model:

  • Author publishes an article in a subscription journal and shares a manuscript version via a repository (e.g. the UWA Profiles and Research Repository)
  • An embargo period may be imposed by the journal publisher as outlined in the author/publisher agreement
  • NHMRC and ARC preferred option
  • FREE

See Where to publish an OA article below for more information on repository-based OA.

In the hybrid open access publishing model:

  • Author publishes an article in a subscription journal but the publisher will make the article OA immediately if you pay an APC
  • If the author chooses not to pay the APC, the article is only available to readers with access to an institutional subscription or who have purchased access
  • No funders prefer this option - however, there are several "read and publish" agreements that enable you to publish OA without paying an APC. 

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

How to fund an OA article

Library-funded open access publishing for UWA authors - "Read and Publish" agreements

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.

The below table lists the Read and Publish agreements available to UWA authors in 2022. Note that UWA corresponding authors must use their UWA institutional email address in order to be deemed eligible for OA publishing under these agreements. This includes "@uwa.edu.au", "@student.uwa.edu.au" and "@research.uwa.edu.au" email domains.

Each agreement has different conditions; refer to the "Further details and information for authors" links for the specific details of each agreement. 
Publisher Title list Conditions Additional information
Biochemical Society (Portland Press) Title list
  • No limits on number of articles published by an institution
Cambridge University Press Title list
  • Applies to over 380 CUP titles
  • No limits on number of articles published by an institution
  • Eligible article types are research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports, and case reports
  • Articles with a 2022 acceptance date are eligible to be published open access under the terms of this agreement
Cogitatio Press Title list
  • Go to the publisher's website, choose the relevant journal title and follow the submission instructions
  • Articles will be published under a CC BY licence
  • You will be recognised as being eligible for the APC waiver by your UWA email address and UWA institutional affiliation
  • All 4 Cogitatio Press journals are covered by this agreement: Media and Communication, Politics and Governance, Social Inclusion, and Urban Planning
  • Information for authors
CSIRO Title list
  • All CSIRO titles plus 2 society journals included from 2022
  • No limits on number of articles published by an institution
Karger Title list
  • No limits on number of articles published by an institution
  • Articles will be published under a CC BY-NC licence
  • Articles with a 2022 acceptance date are eligible to be published open access under the terms of this agreement
Microbiology Society Title list
  • No limits on number of articles published by an institution
Oxford University Press Title list
  • Applies to over 350 OUP titles
  • Shared allowance of 1,007 articles by authors from participating institutions. The number of articles approved under the cap can be found here.  
  • Eligible article types are research articles, review articles, case reports, brief reports
  • Articles with a 2022 acceptance date are eligible to be published open access under the terms of this agreement
The Royal Society Title list
  • No limits on number of articles published by an institution
  • Articles will be published under a CC BY licence
  • Articles with a 2022 acceptance date are eligible to be published open access under the terms of this agreement
Springer Nature Title list
  • Applies to 1,976 titles, from Springer Nature imprints including Springer, Palgrave, ADIS and Academic Journals on Nature.com. Nature titles are not included.
  • Shared allowance of 3,221 articles by authors from participating institutions. The number of articles approved under the cap can be found here.  
  • Eligible article types are original papers, review papers, brief communication, continuing education
  • Articles with a 2022 acceptance date are eligible to be published open access under the terms of this agreement
Wiley Title list
  • Applies to approximately 1,400 titles
  • Shared allowance of 6,388 articles by authors from participating institutions. The number of articles approved under the cap can be found here.  
  • Eligible article types are primary research and review articles, case studies, reviews, and short communications
  • Articles with a 2022 acceptance date are eligible to be published open access under the terms of this agreement
  • Wiley require the responsible corresponding author to be a member of a participating institution in order to be eligible for OA publishing under this agreement. 
  • Each article may have more than one corresponding author, but only a single designated 'responsible corresponding author' who will be in charge of the administrative details for the article.
  • Further details and information for authors
  • Step by step guide for authors

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. 

Article Processing Charge discounts

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. 

Where to publish your article Open Access

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.

CygnusUWA

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:

  • Is the journal in Cabell's Scholarly Analytics? The Predatory Reports (previously known as the Blacklist) contain entries for journals that do not meet the Cabell's criteria for scholarly publishing, which may be minor, moderate or severe. More information on using Cabell's can be found in the Publish and Disseminate Research guide. 
  • Is the journal listed in Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory? Ulrichsweb is a comprehensive listing of 300,000 periodical titles.
  • Are articles from the journal indexed in journal databases relevant to your field, or in citation databases such as Scopus or Web of Science?
  • Who is on the editorial board? You may decide to contact a member to check that their affiliation is legitimate.
  • Are the articles of a scholarly standard? Are they written in a scholarly style typical of the relevant field? 
  • Does the publisher have a clear peer review process and provide details about their peer review panel?
  • Are the publisher’s rejection rates comparable with other publisher’s rates?
  • Do web searches involving the publisher name and keywords, like complaint, scam, or fraud, retrieve results?

A useful summary of this process is provided by the Think - Check - Submit site.

 

Check the publisher’s website against these guidelines for publishers:

Support for OA article publishing

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 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.