Celebrate Open Access Week by retaining your copyright

It’s Open Access Week and here in ILS we’ve been discussing the merits of licensing your research when you upload it to an institutional or subject repository, such as RaY.

Creative Commons licences are a straightforward way of making your work available for others to utilise,. There are six licences with different conditions attached. The most permissive licence, CC BY, allows anybody to copy and use your work, including for commercial purposes, so long as they credit you as the owner. The most restrictive licence is CC BY-NC-ND, which only allows others to download and share your work, so long as they credit you.

Copyright is a crucial factor when it comes to making your work open access. Uploading your work to a repository is an act of copying. If you haven’t retained the copyright in the work, for example when you signed a publishing agreement, then you will need permission to do this. Permission can be in the form of written agreement from the copyright owner, or a licence which allows you to make that work available.

In ILS we encourage all researchers to retain the copyright in their work whenever possible to do so – do not be afraid to negotiate your publishing terms!

If you don’t own the copyright to your work and you would like to make it available under licence, then again you will require permission to do this.

Different funding bodies have different requirements regarding licences. For more information about these requirements, and using a licence for your work, see our Guide to RaY and Open Access. For more information about copyright, see our copyright webpages.

RaY and the HEFCE policy for open access in the post-2014 REF

The HEFCE policy for open access in the post-2014 REF  requires that certain research outputs must be made open access in an institutional repository to be eligible for the next REF. Open access means free to read and download and refers only to journal articles and conference proceedings with an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN).

The author accepted manuscript (post-print) must be uploaded within 3 months of the date of acceptance for publication.

This policy has been implemented since April 2016, so as soon as you have an article accepted for publication you should upload the post-print to RaY. If you need any help with this please email RaY

Choose the right journal: Think > Check > Submit

Think. Check. Submit is a campaign set up by a coalition of partners from the scholarly communications field to help researchers to identify creditable journals in which to publish. It also helps them to assess open access publishers who may have approached them.


Researchers work through a check list to assess the journal they are investigating. If they can answer yes to the majority of questions then it is likely that it's worth submitting research to.


This article by Jonathan Manely gives an insight unto the problem of opaque open access journals and how to avoid them.


For further advice contact your Academic Liaison Librarian or RaY