Skip to Main Content
QUL logo

Making Your Publications Open Access

Open and sustainable publishing models enable the sharing of scholarship at reasonable costs. By making your publications Open Access you increase their impact and ensure they are available to a wider audience.

Green Open Access - Self-Archive for Free

Deposit your peer-reviewed Accepted Author Manuscript into QSpace.

Open access can be immediate or restricted: if your publisher of choice stipulates a fixed period of time (an embargo) before the full-text of your article can be viewed freely online, the library will only make available the descriptive metadata about your work (e.g. title, author(s), and abstract) until after the embargo period has elapsed. 

You may also wish to deposit your works into a subject-based open access repository related to your discipline.

The Green Route - what this means for you

  • It’s free – there are no open access Article Processing Charges (APC) 
  • Enables you to meet the open access requirements of the Tri-Agency. See: Meeting Tri-Agency OA Requirements
  • Increased visibility and discoverability of your work through web search engines
  • Your work in QSpace will be professionally indexed and described, including careful linking to the latest and any other important versions, ensuring correct attribution and citation
  • You can track the exposure of your work such as usage statistics by city, country and other metrics
  • Ensures secure and perpetual access to your digital assets as web links, technologies or formats change.

For these reasons the Library recommends the self-archiving route.

How to Deposit to QSpace

Simply email a PDF of your Accepted Author Manuscript or Completed/Published version of record to qspace@queensu.ca. The Library's Mediated Deposit Service will take care of the rest!

Mediated Deposit to QSpace by the Library

Once the Library receives your publication for deposit to QSpace we will:

  • Check and adhere to the open access and copyright policy of your publisher (SHERPA/RoMEO provides an overview of publishers’ copyright and open access policies). We will only make the full text of your work available as per the terms of that policy, including implementing any required embargo on online access.
  • Deposit your work in to QSpace: home to Queen's University's open access research.
  • Provide guidance from QSpace to any final published version of your work (only accessible to readers with an institutional or personal subscription), ensuring correct attribution and citation.
  • Provide usage statistics on your publications.

Useful Links

Does my funder require me to make my publication Open Access? SHERPA: Juliet

Does my publisher policy enable Green Open Access and/or Gold Open Access? SHERPA: Romeo

Gold Open Access and the Pay-to-Publish model

Publish your final, peer-reviewed Accepted Author Manuscript in an Open Access Journal. Access is free to the final published versions of articles, immediately on publication.

The publisher may require payment of Article Processing Charges. 

The Gold Route - what this means for you

Find an Open Access Journal

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): a comprehensive index of high quality open access journal. 

DOAJ & Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

The Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and the World Association of Medical Editors have collaborated in an effort to identify 'Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing' that set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones. These principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications to the DOAJ will be evaluated.

DOAJ Seal for Open Access Journals

To highlight journals that adhere to best practices in open access publishing the DOAJ have created the 'DOAJ Seal for Open Access Journals'.  

The Seal is awarded based on the information provided in the application submitted by the publisher to have their journal indexed in the DOAJ. The qualifiers for the Seal highlight features related to accessibility, openness, discoverability, reuse and author rights and have nothing to do with the scholarly quality of the papers published. This is addressed via the journal's peer-review processes.   

Identifying and Avoiding Predatory Publishers

Predatory publishers claim to publish high quality academic research but do not follow scholarly publishing best practices. Similarly, predatory conferences use deceptive websites to lead authors to believe they are submitting their work to a legitimate conference. 

The ultimate goal of predatory publishers and conferences is to profit, not publish quality research.

Being associated with a deceptive publisher or conference can lead to financial loss as a result of inappropriate fees and be harmful to your reputation and that of the university.