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Articles and Conference Papers

Open Access Publishing Home

If you are planning to write an article for a journal or submit a conference paper, it is worth considering how you will make this openly available at an early stage.

Before you submit your paper

When you submit your paper

  • Always use your UWTSD email address and your ORCID, and clearly state University of Wales Trinity Saint David as your institution
  • Choose an Open Access option if you are eligible under one of our publisher agreements. Do not choose Open Access if you are not eligible as this may result in an Article Processing Charge: contact openaccess@uwtsd.ac.uk if you are unsure.

After your paper has been accepted for publication

  • Act on acceptance!  Deposit your final Author’s Accepted Manuscript in the Research Repository 
  • Forward the publishers email confirming acceptance to openaccess@uwtsd.ac.uk along with the date of publication, if known, as evidence of the acceptance date for the University’s REF submission.
  • If you are unsure of the publication date at the time of acceptance, please don’t delay your deposit – make a note to contact openaccess@uwtsd.ac.uk with the publication date as soon as this is confirmed
  • If your article is subject to an embargo period, please don’t delay your deposit – our Open Access team will apply the embargo on your behalf to ensure compliance with your chosen journal’s policies. 
  • Please allow at least 14 days for the Open Access team to process your deposit.

Gold or Green?

There are two main routes to open access: 

The published version of your article will be free to access on the journal’s website and made available under an Open Access licence, such as Creative Commons, which allows you to retain more of your rights as an author and others to share and build upon your work.  There is usually an Article Processing Charge (APC) for gold open access publishing. 

The published version of your article will be accessible only to journal subscribers.  You deposit a copy of your final peer-reviewed Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in our Research Repository which will be free and openly available to access.   There is no cost for green open access publishing, but the publisher may set an embargo period – a delay before the openly available copy on our Repository can be made available to read.

Which route you choose will depend on several factors:

  1. Is your research funded? 
    Research funders may apply additional restrictions on embargo periods which can impact green open access.  Before choosing a journal, make sure that you are aware of your funder’s open access policy.  Details of policies for the most common funding bodies are available here.

  2. Does the journal meet REF open access requirements? 
    Even if your research is unfunded, you will need to ensure that the journal you publish in meets REF open access requirements for your work to be eligible for the next Research Excellence Framework.  Details of current REF policy can be found here.

  3. Does UWTSD have an agreement with the publisher to cover Open Access charges? 
    Library and Learning Resources hold agreements with several major publishers to cover Article Processing Charges (APCs) in eligible journals, allowing gold open access publishing at no direct cost to you.  Check if your publisher is covered here.   
    If the publisher is not covered under an agreement, the Library does not currently have funding to cover individual APCs and we recommend depositing in our Research Repository using the green open access route.

  4. Are you collaborating with other researchers at other universities? 
    Open Access APCs and publisher agreement eligibility usually apply to the corresponding author – i.e. the author who submits the article for publication and corresponds with the journal publisher. If the corresponding author is based outside of UWTSD we recommend depositing in our Research Repository using the green open access route.


Even if you publish through the gold open access route, we ask all authors to deposit their article in our Research Repository for the University to maintain a complete archive of all research output.

Learn how to deposit an article in our Research Repository

Open Access: Deposit your Work (PDF)