To be eligible for submission to REF 2021, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings must be deposited in a repository within three months of acceptance. These outputs must also meet minimum requirements for deposit, discoverability and accessibility. The full policy document for submissions can be found on the REF 2021 website.
If you have questions about the REF Open Access policy, please refer to the REF Frequently Asked Questions or email us at openaccess@aston.ac.uk.
The REF publication period is 1 January 2014 through 31 December 2020. However, the Open Access Policy only applies to the included outputs described below:
What is included:
What is not included:
To comply with the REF Open Access Policy, please deposit your accepted manuscript (AAM) within three months of acceptance via either of these two methods:
We then check your publication's metadata, copyright, document type and if any REF exceptions apply.
If your article has been published in a fully open access journal or an Article Processing Charge has been paid to make it gold open access, you can also deposit the published pdf.
If you have a publication that is not compliant and you want to submit it to REF, please get in touch with us to discuss possible options. REF do allow exceptions to cover a number of circumstances and scenarios. These are applied by the Open Access and Research Repository Specialists. If an exception is applied to an output, it can be submitted to REF as a compliant output.
Deposit
Access
Technical
Other