Publish an open access article

Open access publishing makes academic research freely, immediately and permanently available online for anyone to read. It encourages timely sharing of knowledge, prevents duplication and waste in research, and ultimately accelerates research progression and the use of research findings.

Most research funders in the UK have their own open access policies which you will need to comply with when publishing articles arising from that funding.

Health and Care Research Wales is committed to ensuring that the findings from the research we fund are freely available to as many people as possible. If you are a researcher funded by Health and Care Research Wales, peer-reviewed articles submitted after 1 September 2022 need to be open access. Please refer to our Open Access Policy to find out more about what we expect and how you can use the EuropePMC platform to share the outputs from your award with the wider research community.

Journals that publish open access articles

Publishers that offer an open access option include all the open access publishers (such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science) as well as an increasing number of traditional publishers to whom you can pay a fee (Article Processing Charge or APC) to make the article freely accessible online. You can use the SHERPA RoMEO service, hosted by the University of Nottingham, to check the open access policies of different journal titles.

Paying open access Article Processing Charges (APCs)

Open access APCs tend to range from £600 to £3,000, with the average being about £2,000.

Most researchers funded by Health and Care Research Wales can use their project grants or personal awards to pay for APCs - see the Advice on costs section of our Open Access Policy.

Other UK funding bodies have their own rules about how the costs of open access publication can be met.

If you are publishing an article from unfunded research and are wondering how to pay for the APC, then you should contact your host organisation. Some universities have agreements with publishers in place for open access publishing – contact your University library. NHS researchers should contact their NHS research & development (R&D) office or NHS library service.

Beware of predatory journals

Please be aware that there are so-called “predatory journals” who send spam emails to academics to get them to publish an article, and then charge large publication / open access fees even though these articles are not properly peer-reviewed or indexed in a reputable bibliographic database. You can use the SHERPA RoMEO service to check for legitimate journals with open access policies.