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Open Access for Postgraduate Researchers

What is open access?

Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research publications, coupled with rights to reuse them fully in the digital environment. Publications that are open access can be read and downloaded by anybody with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. They have a licence applied such as a Creative Commons licence e.g. CC BY, which grants maximum opportunities for reuse, subject to proper credit being given to the author. By increasing readership, open access can increase visibility, impact and citations of your work and can help to raise your research profile.

Open access policies

All University of Exeter postgraduate research (PGR) students must make their thesis/dissertation, research papers and research data available as open access in the institutional repository Open Research Exeter (ORE). Read the open access and research data management policy for PGR students for more information.

If you receive external funding, you should also be aware of your funder’s open access requirements. Check funder policies using SHERPA/JULIET.

How to make your work open access

There are two main routes to making your work open access:

  1. Deposit your accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject repository. Also referred to as "green" open access, or self-archiving. Upload via Symplectic to the institutional repository ORE. There are no charges associated with this.
  2. Publish the final full text as open access on the publisher website. Also referred to as "gold" open access. There may be a fee to pay.

The University's preferred route to open access is self-archiving in the institutional repository ORE.

Contact Open Research for support to make your publications open access, including uploading to ORE and paying for open access (funds are available). Contact the PG Admin team with questions about open access and your thesis.

Data

All PGR students are expected (where possible) to deposit data that has been selected for retention into an appropriate University, national, or international data service or domain repository.

Any type of file can be deposited into the University's institutional repository, ORE. If your work includes images, sound, or movie files which are separate from the text of your thesis/dissertation, you are encouraged to deposit these as supplementary files.

Published research papers should include a short data access statement describing how, and on what terms, any supporting research data may be accessed. All data deposited to ORE will be allocated a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and this DOI should be included in the data access statement.

To ensure that the DOI for the data can be included in the associated research paper, the data should be deposited to ORE upon acceptance of the research paper.

For information on how to create, organise, and preserve your research data please see the Research Data Management pages. If you have any queries, please contact rdm@exeter.ac.uk.