Open Access

The UK higher education funding bodies believe that the outputs of publicly funded research should be freely and openly accessible.

  • Making research open access benefits researchers, students, institutions, policymakers, professionals, citizen scientists and the wider public.
  • It also increases the efficiency, impact and visibility of research and delivers better value for money to funders.

Open access means making your research outputs freely available online. It is part of a wider effort to ensure academic research is accessible to the broadest possible audience.

The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) is committed to ensuring its research outputs are disseminated as widely as possible, for the benefit of the research community and wider society.  The RVC supports Open Access for all research outputs where appropriate.

The RVC Open Access Publications Policy sets out specific requirements for journal articles and conference proceedings, ensuring our research is freely available and compliant with the REF Open Access Policy.  For guidance on best practice, see the RVC Submissions Checklist.

Authors of chapters, monographs, data, software/code, protocols, and other outputs are encouraged - but not required - to make these openly available where possible.  

There are two major routes to Open Access: gold and green.  

  • Gold open access 
    Provides immediate, permanent, free access to the publisher’s version of record, usually under a licence that allows copying and reuse. This often requires payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC).

    Fully gold OA journals make all articles openly available at publication (see the Directory of Open Access Journals). Hybrid journals contain a mixture of open access and subscription-only articles.

  • Green open access 
    Makes the accepted manuscript (AAM) freely available via an institutional or subject repository, usually after an embargo period. This version includes the final peer-reviewed text but not the publisher’s formatting.

Requirements

  • Any paper authored or co‑authored by RVC staff must be deposited in the RVC's Institutional Repository, either as the version of record (if gold OA) or as the accepted manuscript (green OA).
  • The RVC supports the green route wherever possible, although some funders (e.g. UKRI, COAF) require immediate open access.
  • There are ongoing efforts to ensure that Accepted Manuscripts can be made immediately available - see a Primer on the Rights Retention Strategy here.
Uploading your manuscript
  1. Upload the final author accepted manuscript (AAM) to Worktribe as soon as your article is accepted. This will make your work discoverable on the RVC’s public repository.
  2. Update the publication status as needed. If publishing gold OA, also upload the version of record (published article) to the files tab.
  3. When the open access status is confirmed, click Send to Library to submit the record for review.
  4. If you have any additional information to share, add this in the Comments tab in Worktribe or contact: researchoutputs@rvc.ac.uk

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