Open Access (OA) provides free, immediate, online access to publicly funded scholarly research. Readers are permitted to read, download, copy and redistribute research outputs. Open Access ensures that your research reaches a wide audience.
Glossary of OA
There are lots of options when it comes to Open Access with Gold and Green being the most common, but what do they mean?
If you want to browse papers, book chapters, conference papers, and e-theses produced by Swansea's research community this is the place to go!
Further information about the Research Information System (RIS) and the repository (Cronfa).
What are they?
Pre-prints are versions of your paper before it has been submitted to peer-review. The use of pre-print servers varies significantly between disciplines, being a well known practice in areas like Physical Sciences, and unheard of in others.
Why should I bother?
Posting a pre-print on a specific pre-print server or repository means your work has the potential to reach other researchers in your discipline and citations can accumulate, earlier. It is also useful to gather early feedback on the paper from your peers, before the official peer-review process of the journal you submit to.
Will my paper be scooped?
Pre-prints can actually help protect your work from being ‘scooped’. Most servers register papers on receipt enabling you to establish provenance should another similar paper be published after yours. Many pre-print servers enable you to add a DOI allowing you to keep track of your paper and its citations.
Swansea Specifics
Swansea University researchers are not restricted from using preprint servers by the institution. Individual researchers considering submitting a paper do need to check the funder and journal to see if any restrictions apply. This can be done using SHERPA services and searching the journal you are considering submitting to. The benefits of submitting preprints in terms of citations, engagement and impact will not materialise unless the author/college publicise the paper themselves especially in disciplines which are only just starting to use pre-print servers.
Pre-print servers include;
Additional repositories are listed on the Using Open Resources tab on this guide.
Publish With Us
We are an institutional online publisher of Open Access electronic journals and scholarly digital editions. Our catalogue of titles allow readers to access and use the content free of charge under a Creative Commons licence. We are growing this service and welcome enquiries from Swansea University researchers considering starting an academic journal.
Contact: digitalhumanities@swansea.ac.uk for further information.
Swansea University is a member of OASPA: the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which represents the interests of OA journal and book publishers globally in scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines.
COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) "is committed to educating and supporting editors, publishers and those involved in publication ethics with the aim of moving the culture of publishing towards one where ethical practices become a normal part of the publishing culture".
Discover how the DOAJ Open Access Journals Toolkit can provide guidance for new and established open access journals in the scholarly publishing landscape. The toolkit is also available to download as a PDF from DOI 10.5281/zenodo.8017032
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