The theme this year of “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” challenges us “to reflect on not only who has access to education and research but on how knowledge is created and shared”.
Choosing to publish open access (OA) means you can reassert control over your work and how it’s shared and reused. There are a few different ways of achieving this, not all of which require payment, but all of which meet the OA requirements for REF2029[1]
While you may have already heard of the green and gold routes to publish OA, you may be less familiar with a third, diamond, which is a more community driven publishing model.
The green route: When publishing in a subscription journal, signing a copyright transfer agreement gives the journal publisher ownership of your work. It’s often the case that the publisher will allow authors to deposit the accepted manuscript version of their article in a repository (like SORA or CRO) without having to pay a fee to the publisher. Publishers often require an embargo period (usually six to twelve months) before this version is freely accessible, but there is also the option of including a Rights Retention Statement in your manuscript and cover letter on submission. This asserts your right to make your accepted manuscript available immediately on publication under a Creative Commons license.
To make your manuscript available in one of our repositories, you can upload it via Elements (Clerkenwell and Moorgate) or the CRIS (Tooting).
The gold route: your article will be published open access immediately on the journal’s website usually under a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to read and reuse it. There’s a fee to be paid for this route, but we have a number of publisher agreements which might cover some or all of the costs. Our webpages have full eligibility details: information for Tooting staff and students is here, and information for Clerkenwell and Moorgate staff and students is here.
The diamond route is similar to the gold route, except that no fees need to be paid by the author, and there are no subscription fees: operating costs are covered by funds from other sources such as scholarly societies, universities, or by volunteer work. Historically, it’s been an especially prevalent model in Latin American countries[2]. Worldwide support is evolving[3], with support for example from UNESCO[4], Jisc[5] and with the creation of a dedicated Diamond Discovery Hub which will “only list Diamond journals that are registered in it by trusted sources”[6].
Even before you submit to a journal, you may want to consider posting a preprint (and some public funders require that you do).
Exploring preprint servers
Preprint servers allow researchers to share their findings ahead of formal peer review and it’s a good way to increase the visibility of their research. Some preprint repositories used by our researchers are:
- arXiv: a platform for physics, mathematics, computer science, and related fields.
- bioRxiv: focusing on life sciences.
- engrXiv: for engineering research across all disciplines.
- medRxiv: dedicated to health sciences.
- PsyArXiv: for psychology and cognitive science research.
- RePEc: a database of economics research.
For an overview of available repositories, please see the Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories.
Some preprint platforms may have charges associated with posting, and if you are planning on publishing an article from the preprint, remember to check the journal’s policies.
So to conclude, you can consider the options to open up your research at every stage of the publishing process.
Reflecting on “how knowledge is created and shared”, we can see how the theme of International Open Access week chimes with the City St George’s university mission[7] to ‘undertake research at the frontier of practice’ and be ‘the opposite of an ivory tower’, and with the Government[8] and funder[9] aims to “reduce inequalities through research inclusion towards a fairer Britain”.
You can … explore your options for publishing open access via our agreements
Our webpages have full eligibility details: information for Tooting staff and students is here, and information for Clerkenwell and Moorgate staff and students is here.
Questions?
Clerkenwell and Moorgate authors should contact:
publications@citystgeorges.ac.uk.
Tooting authors should contact:
openaccess@sgul.ac.uk about publishing open access
sora@sgul.ac.uk about our publications system and SORA
For questions about research data management:
Library guides
City Research Online and open access (Clerkenwell and Moorgate)
Library Services for Researchers (Tooting)
[1] For the green route the article would need to be deposited within three months of the date of acceptance, and there are also requirements around embargo length. Embargo length won’t be a concern for green articles that include the Rights Retention Statement, however, as the accepted manuscript can be made available with no embargo (though they will still need to be deposited before the deadline).
More information about the open access policy for REF2029 is available on our webpages for Clerkenwell and Moorgate authors here, and for Tooting authors here.
[2] Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.-C., & Proudman, V. (2021). OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558704 (accessed 20/10/2025)
[3]Flaig, S., Stork, K.(2025) International Insights into Diamond Open Access (accessed 24/10/2025)
[4] Diamond Open Access: Advancing Knowledge as a Public Good | UNESCO (accessed 24/10/2025)
[5] Our role in open access – Jisc (accessed 24/10/2025)
[6] DOAJ and the Diamond Discovery Hub: Working with the community to support open access – DOAJ Blog (2025) (accessed 24/10/2025)
[7] Vision and Strategy 2030 • City St George’s, University of London
[8] Transforming the UK clinical research system: August 2025 update – GOV.UK