Increase the visibility and impact of your research

The issue

Universities must increase the visibility of their research to demonstrate the contribution they make to the knowledge economy, improve their chances in the competition for government research funding and position themselves well to work with industry or third sector partners.

What you can do

An open access repository or journal is a way for authors to make their research papers freely available online.  Studies have shown that such papers are more frequently cited than those solely available via subscription based journals.

Open access benefits not only researchers and their institutions, but the economy and society at large, as the outputs of publicly-funded research are available for all to use.

Find the right route for you

There are a number of different routes to open access. Our report maps these, while our methodology helps you to assess the institutional costs and benefits of doing so.

You can find out potential open access business models from this Knowledge Exchange briefing paper.

Create a repository

Over the past ten years, we’ve helped more than 70 UK institutions improve or create repositories. Based on this experience, we’ve developed a large body of information, advice and guidance around repositories and open access publishing.

The digital repositories infoKit will take you through the stages needed to build your own institutional repository, while our embedding repositories guide and self-assessment tool will help to ensure researchers use it.

Achieve more with less

Open access can help institutions save money while increasing their impact. Our report demonstrates that if all research were published in open access journals, UK higher education could make around £80 million a year in efficiency savings and increase its contribution to the UK economy by about £120 million.

Looking forward

You can also keep abreast of developments to promote Open Access in the UK through the UK Open Access Implementation Group.