What is Open Access publishing?
The aim of OA publishing is to make primary, peer-reviewed literature available, free of charge at the point of use.
There are two main routes to making research material available through open access. The first is to deposit a copy of a research article into an OA repository such as BURA.
The second route is to publish the article in an OA journal or in a traditional journal that provides an OA option (referred to as a hybrid journal). OA journals work in the same way as traditional models, i.e. they are peer-reviewed, but the costs of publishing are paid for by the author (via author fees) rather than the reader (via individual or library subscriptions). The Brunel OA Publishing Fund is intended to facilitate Brunel authors' access to this second route by paying the relevant publication fees.
Lists of OA journals are available via the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Open J-Gate which can also be used to search for articles in the OA journal literature. Hybrid OA journals are now offered by a number of publishers including Oxford University Press, the Royal Society, Springer and others.
Brunel University is an institutional member of BioMed Central entitling Brunel staff to discounts on the publication charges for BMC journals.
