Getting published in academic journals and other scholarly publications is essential for academic staff to contribute to their field and advance their careers.
Sometimes referred to as ‘Read and Publish’, this is the means by which publishers are moving their subscription journals to an open access model. Most European publishers are now operating via transformative agreements instead of traditional subscriptions. Most journals in these agreements with be pure OA or hybrid*, moving towards being fully OA. For publishing researchers, this means that for most journals there is an option to publish Open Access, this requires the payment of an Article Processing Charge (this is known as Gold OA).
*Hybrid journals are subscription journals that include some OA articles.
JISC provides an explanation:
Since 2013 most subscription publishers have received two forms of payments from UK institutions: subscription fees and OA article processing charges (APCs). Efforts to constrain these costs have only partially succeeded and the transition to OA has not been as rapid as anticipated, with publishers unwilling to shift away from the subscription-based business model. In 2018 UK academic institutions and sector agencies, working alongside Jisc Collections, established a set of requirements for transformative agreements which set out the measures required to accelerate OA in the UK.
Plan S, announced in September 2018 by a group of research funding organisations (cOAlition S), aims to expedite the transition to full and immediate OA to research publications and challenges publishers to move away from the hybrid (subscription) business model. Under Plan S, publishing in hybrid (subscription) journals is only permissible if journals are part of a ‘transformative arrangement’.
The University of Bolton has a transformative agreement with the following major publishers below. When you submit an article to any of these publishers, you will be guided through an author workflow. You will be given the option to select OA. Make sure you select CC BY as the licence – transformative agreements allow you to keep the copyright for your paper.
Links to publisher information
Only certain journals from these publishers will be included in the agreements. Title lists are available from each publisher website, alternatively you can use Jisc's Transitional Agreement Look-Up tool to check if a specific journal title is covered by any of our agreements.
We also have an agreement with IEEE which allows the application of Creative Commons licenses and self-archiving within the institutional repository.
The publishers all have slightly different rules and criteria. However, the basic idea is that each publisher sets aside a central pot from the money libraries continue to pay in ‘subscriptions’. The cost of the APC is deducted from this pot of money.
To qualify:
If your article does not qualify for any of the above reasons, you must find alternative funds for the APC or publish your article as a subscription article in a hybrid or subscription journal (the Green OA route).
Yes. The University still requires you to deposit your paper in UBIR. Send your Author Accepted Manuscript (post-print) to ubir@bolton.ac.uk a soon as your paper is accepted or follow the self-deposit workflow.
The REF rules require you to make your paper OA within three months of acceptance for publication. Depositing to UBIR avoids any problems of ineligibility. For example, if publication by the journal is delayed or the article ends up being published in a subscription journal instead of OA, you will still be eligible for the REF if you have deposited in UBIR.
Yes, but the green route (publish free in a subscription journal and deposit a post-print in UBIR) will become less available as the number of journals flip to being fully OA. If you are being funded by a funding body such as Welcome or UKRI, you cannot publish via the green route if it means your paper will be under embargo in UBIR, you must publish without embargo.
Read and publish deals generally run for a number of years, after which they undergo negotiation with JISC. Any expired deals without a new confirmed agreement should be under a grace period so that current access and publishing capabilities are retained. Any important updates will be posted to this page about our read and publish deals. For any journals that do not show up in the checking tool as having an agreement, but you think they should have from the list above, please get in touch with library@bolton.ac.uk for advice.
Outside of our transformative agreements, the Library does not have funding to pay APCs on behalf of UoB researchers and staff.
If we do not have access to the a transformative agreement with the publisher of your choosing please speak to your Head of Department or Research Coordinator.
The Library cannot provide advice on where to publish, although the following resources may provide helpful guidance depending on your discipline and your needs.
The following publisher specific tools are also available.
You should always review a journal’s aims and scope before deciding where to submit. You should also consider funding and if the Library has a transformative agreement with the publisher of your choosing or if there would be other means of funding the APC via your department.
The Library's Scopus database can be a helpful tool for finding high-impact journals. Scopus features a range of features for exploring article and journal level metrics.
Find out more about getting published in these Researcher Academy modules:
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