Gold means immediate, unrestricted access to the version of record (i.e. the journal article as published). Gold open access content is typically published with a Creative Commons licence, which allows the final publication to be accessed, downloaded, and shared for free, immediately upon publication, subject to any restrictions (e.g. attribution) specified by the licence.  

The advantage to gold open access is that it makes the published work available immediately. The author can share it, and anyone with an internet connection can access it for free. Most academic journal publishers (Wiley, Elsevier, Sag, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and BioMed Central, among others) give authors the option to pay a fee for this premium brand of open access.

The disadvantage is that it is usually expensive to publish in this way. For research outputs that result from RCUK grants, there is block funding available via the research office for paying the necessary APC for gold open access. These funds are supplied via the Research Council and are therefore only available for publications that are the direct result of RCUK funding. For more information, please contact the publications team in the library.

Green open access is achieved through deposit of the Accepted Manuscript (the final, peer reviewed edit of your paper, without the publisher's formatting/typeset/etc.) in the RVC's institutional repository (http://researchonline.rvc.ac.uk) at the time of acceptance. Most publishers, including the ones mentioned above, allow for this version of the paper to be made available following an embargo period - typically 12 months after the article is published in an issue of a journal, for no extra charge. 

The research office and the research support team at the library can help take care of making the document openly available on our site according to the rules of the publisher. It is the author's responsibility to send the peer-reviewed Accepted Manuscript to the research office upon receiving notice of acceptance.