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Open Access at Aston: OA at Aston

Aston's Open Access Policy and Code of Practice (including Publishing Guidance) is that all journal and conference publications should be made OA. You should also ensure that your Pure profile is regularly updated with all of your current research activities and outputs.  

 

Aston's OA policy is in line with the OA requirement for REF 2021 eligibility. To be eligible for REF 2021, you must deposit the accepted manuscript of journal articles and conference proceedings in our institutional repository within three months of acceptance. There are additional university criteria in place for those wishing to make their journal articles OA via the gold/paid route - please see the Gold/Paid Open Access tab above for more details and/or contact openaccess@aston.ac.uk.

 

To upload your accepted publication to Aston Publications Explorer, click on the Pure logo below. 

 

 

There are also simple instructions (PDF) on how to upload your publication.  If you require further help please contact: openaccess@aston.ac.uk 

Increasing Visibility and Discoverability

To maximise your online prescence, it is recommended that  Aston researchers join and regularly maintain accounts for the following systems: 

Image result for scopus    Image result for ORCID   Image result for web of science

 

Useful links

  • SHERPA-RoMEO presents a summary of permissions normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
  • SHERPA-FACT is a tool to help researchers check if the journals in which they wish to publish their results comply with their funder's requirements for Open Access to research.
  • Think Check Submit  has further information for choosing which journal to publish in
  • SPARC has some further resources for authors.​

Aston Publications Explorer

Aston Publications Explorer is Aston University's repository for our OA publications, including student theses. It makes Aston's research outputs freely and easily available to everyone, benefiting both our researchers and readers worldwide. You may also be interested in Aston Data Explorer for Aston's research data and Aston Research Explorer for broader information about Aston's research work, including research staff profiles, awards, projects and research groups.

Publications in Aston Publications Explorer are indexed by both mainstream search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) and specialised academic search engines such as Google Scholar. 

Finding Open Access Publications

Millions of journals articles are now freely available online because of OA publishing, whether as Gold (immediate OA), or as Green (archived in a repository). Use the following search tools to find OA publications which may not be available via our subscriptions:

  • Aston Publications Explorer (Aston University's repository)
  • Google Scholar (search engine)
  • CORE (open access aggregator)
  • DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
  • BASE (academic resource search engine)
  • EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) is a British Library service to access theses produced in UK Higher Education Institutions.

There are also three extensions that you can install on your browser to help you easily find OA versions of articles: