Open Access publishing

1. Open access gives you greater visibility:
   When research output is published openly and free of charge, it has potential to reach more people than that published behind a paywall. Publications behind a paywall are only available to those at an institution with a budget that allows for subscriptions.
   
2. It’s required in Plan S:
   Plan S was launched in the autumn of 2018, but in Norway, the requirements apply from 2021. The Research Council of Norway (Forskningsrådet) states that research based on grant applications submitted after January 1, 2021, must be made openly available immediately, and with an open license.
   
3. Open Access is economically advantageous:
   Since the 1990s the price of peer reviewed journals has increased by far more than the consumer price index. More and more of the libraries’ budgets goes towards paying for these journals, which affects the rest of their services.
   With Open Access it’s customary to demand payment from the author, instead of the readers through subscriptions. This is known as gold open access. Reputable journals will ask for payment (APC) after the article has been peer reviewed and accepted. It’s not possible to buy space in a quality journal if the article isn’t good enough. For most institutions it will be less expensive to pay APCs than it is now to pay subscription fees, and in any case, for many journals the APC is woven into the Sikt agreement, which means the author doesn’t have to pay.
   Many reputable open access journals never charge APCs, this is known as diamond or platinum open access.
   
4. The author retains the rights to their own work:
   Traditional journals usually require authors to sign over the copyright to the articles they publish, so the author has to give up the rights. Most open access journals let the author(s) keep the copyright.

Over the last few years, we have seen that publishing open access has become increasingly expensive, and in many cases the cost of article processing charges (APC) has become unsustainable. 

Open access to publications is still very much the goal for many excellent reasons, but something needs to change. That’s why The University of Stavanger (UiS) has introduced a new rights retention strategy. 

In short:   

• With the rights retention strategy UiS keeps non-exclusive rights on behalf of its authors to scientific journal publications.  
• The intention is to move the rights to publications from publishers back to researchers.
• "Green" open access, i.e., self-archiving, is encouraged, paying for hybrid journals is discouraged.  
• You should upload a version of your article to the UiS repository straight away, with no embargo (i.e., no delayed access) 
• Apply a Creative Commons license to the article 
• The policy is in line with requirements from Horizon Europe, the Research council of Norway, as well as universities abroad and in Norway. 
• UiS authors can obtain an exception for an article.

When self-archiving, you can either upload the final, published pdf (Version of Record) or the Author accepted manuscript (AAM, or post-print), depending on the journal you have published in. 

If the journal is fully open access, you can choose the final pdf, if it’s a hybrid journal with no publisher’s agreement, you need to choose the author accepted manuscript; see below for an explanation: 

Articles should be uploaded through Cristin, and they will be transferred to the repository from there. (For now – a new national system is coming this year, which will combine the current research information system (CRISTIN) and the Brage repository, into one system.) 

Anyone who wishes to opt out for an article can simply notify the library, and the normal copyright rules will apply. However, if your research is funded by the Research council of Norway or the as part of the Horizon Europe framework program, you need to comply with the requirement to provide “full and immediate access”- In that case, you will need to make your article open access either by publishing in an open access journal or by self-archiving. 

How to self-archive in two easy steps

1. Go to Cristin and find or register the relevant article. Then click on “Submit full-text document”:

On page two, tick the buttons for consent, and choose document type from drop down menu – either VoR or AAM: 

As of 2025, the institutes or faculties will cover the costs of open access publishing directly.

Until now, the university library has administered the open access support, paid the invoices, and then invoiced the faculties three times a year. The new process is much more efficient, since the publisher’s invoice goes directly to the relevant faculty or institute.

There is also a new application form. The application goes into the service portal, where it first goes to the applicant’s manager, for approval of the cost, and then to the library, to ensure that the guidelines are followed.

The guidelines are mostly the same as before, but some faculties have their own internal guidelines, so everyone must check with the head of their institute/faculty before committing to any costs.

Support will normally only be awarded for articles in journals, not books, reports, or any other type of publication. Note that many journals from major scientific publishers are included in publisher agreement (read and publish agreement), which could mean that you don’t have to pay an APC, or that you get a discount on the APC if you publish in a MDPI, SAGE or Frontiers journal.

Submit your application.

Criteria for receiving funding support:

1. The fund covers article processing charges in OA journals which provide immediate access to the full text of the article (without embargoes).
2. Extra expenses are not covered (e.g. colour, illustrations etc.)
3. Articles in journals that charge a subscription fee are not eligible, or articles in journals offer an “open choice” option (i.e., no hybrid).
4. Articles reporting on research that was supported by external funders are not covered.
5. The journals must be accepted at level 1 or 2 in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, and registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
6. The article must be accepted by, but not yet published in, the journal before the application can be approved.
7. The full text of the article should also be uploaded in Cristin, and eligible to be posted in UiS Brage.
8. The corresponding author should be associated with the University of Stavanger, and this must be stated on the article.
9. The amount should be approved by the head of department in advance.
10. There is no deadline for applications, we review applications as they come in.

The guidelines:

1. The guidelines are determined by the Open Science group.
2. The decisions of the University library are final and cannot be appealed against.

University of Stavanger (UiS)

UiS introduced a new open access policy in October 2023. In essentials, it is the same as before; UiS staff must make their scientific articles openly available. What we have done is introduce a new rights retention strategy to make it easier for employees to achieve open access. You can now publish in any journal; whether it is open access or not; and when it is not, you self-archive the articles to make them openly available through the repository. 

When the journal is fully open access but requires an article processing charge (APC), you can apply for funding from UiS, read more about that here. 

The Research Council of Norway (RCN) 

The Research Council has for many years required that articles arising from projects they have funded wholly or in part, should be made openly available. Following the most recent update to their policies, they now state that publications should be made openly available without delay (without embargo), and with a creative commons license (CC license) which permits reuse.  

As of 2024, about 80 % of Norwegian scientific publications are openly available. In order to reach the goal of complete open access to all publications, the research council, Universities Norway, Abelia (a trade and employers association associated with The Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise), Sikt and the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills have teamed up to work on a new strategy (article available in Norwegian only) on behalf of Norwegian research institutions to achieve the goal of full open access to all research output.  

Where it is necessary to pay article processing charges to publish with open access, the research council states that the APC should be paid by the institutions, not the individual researchers. For now, this will in most cases be resolved at UiS with the researcher applying for publishing support as long as the terms and conditions are met.   

Self-archiving is done through Cristin.   

EU/Horizon Europe  

For projects funded by the EU through Horizon Europe all scientific papers should be published with open access at the time of publishing. This means that as a minimum, the publication should be open to read online, to be downloaded and printed, all for free. This can be achieved by:  

• Self-archiving a copy of the article in the repository as soon as the paper is published. Upload either the published version, or, if you haven’t published with open access, the author accepted manuscript (post-print). If you upload the author accepted manuscript, a Creative Commons license should be applied.  

Under Horizon Europe, publications must be licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license, commonly abbreviated as CC-BY, or equivalent.  

• Publishing your research in a fully open access (“gold”) journal or on an open platform, e.g. Open Research Europe.    

For books, see information about open access book publishing. 

The Sikt consortium has negotiated with many of the major journal publishers, also known as transformative agreements. These represent a transition from earlier subscription agreements with publishers. UiS now only pays one sum, which covers the right to read and publish without any further article processing charges, or with a discount.

These are currently the valid agreements. There are in most cases no more quotas, so no limits on the number of articles published under the agreements, but a few titles will be excluded.

These are the relevant deals for UiS:

• Elsevier: Unlimited free publishing in hybrid journals, 15% off APCs in gold journals 2025-2027
• Springer: Unlimited free publishing in hybrid journals, 10% off APCs in gold journals 2025-2027
• Sage: Unlimited free publishing in hybrid journals, 20 % off APCs in gold journals, 2025-2026.
• American Chemical Society. Unlimited free publishing in gold and hybrid journals, 2025-2028.
• Cambridge University Press. Unlimited free publishing in gold and hybrid journals, 2025-2027.
• MDPI & Frontiers: These are OA publishers, and they provide a discount on APCs. Frontiers 10% and MDPI 20%. Approval from head of institute/department is required in advance. See “UiS Publishing support” and submit application.

The agreements with Wiley and Taylor&Francis are still being negotiated.

So what can you do when you need to publish openly in a subscription journal and there is no agreement?

You can either pay the article processing charge (APC) with your own funds (research funds), or achieve open access by self-archiving, i.e., so-called “green” open access. We advocate self-archiving because of the spiraling costs of so-called “hybrid” publishing, and self-archiving is free, but still meets funders’ requirements.

If you choose the latter, you can publish without open access in the journal, behind the paywall, but you must upload the «author accepted manuscript» (“post-print”) in Cristin. When you upload the full text in Cristin, it will be harvested by the institutional repository, UiS Brage.

If you want to self-archive, that only takes a minute to do, but you must choose the accepted manuscript, and they might ask you to wait before we can make it open.

It is still possible to get the APCs covered if you publish in a fully open access (“gold”) journal. See UiS Publishing support for more information.

Open Access is literature that is openly available online, and which can be read and downloaded free of charge.

There are four types of open access:

• Gold: Publishing in a journal which is open but requires an article processing charge (APC) to be paid. These journals are not limited to subscribers, and anyone interested can read them. If the journal you choose is not covered by a Sikt agreement, you can apply to the library for funds to cover the APC. The publishing fund covers costs up to 20 000 NOK per article.
  
• Green: This is the self-archiving approach. You can add articles and other publications to an open access scholarly repository, such as UiS Brage. Upload to Brage via Cristin.
  
• Diamond / platinum:  If the journal is fully open access but doesn’t charge any article processing charges (APC), it’s known as diamond or platinum OA.
  
• Hybrid: This refers to publishing in journals which have subscription fees, but will make articles open access on request, in return for an APC. The UiS publishing fund does not cover the APC in hybrid journals. You should check if the journal you want to publish in is covered by a Sikt agreement which allows you to choose open access without paying the APC.

With traditional publishing, the author transfers the copyright to the publisher. With Open Access, the author normally keeps the copyright.

It’s often possible to upload a copy of an article published in a traditional journal without open access in an institutional archive, such as UiS Brage. Publishers have different rules for the option to make a copy available online. If you want to know what options you have with regards to a particular journal or publisher, you can check the database Sherpa/Romeo.

Not all publishers or journals are found in this database. If you’d like to know what applies in a particular case, you can contact Linda Johnsen or John David Didriksen at the library.

In Directory of Open Access Journals you can search for journals and articles which are freely available online.

Within Open Access a market for disreputable actors has emerged. Those should be avoided. Here is some advice on how to ensure the quality of a journal before submitting your article.

Open Access journals are published openly on the internet, so everyone can access them. This is considered the major benefit of Open Access, but when anyone can publish whatever they want, it can be tempting to attempt fraud. Authors may need to pay an APC (Article Processing Charge) to publish in Open Access journals, so there is an opportunity for fraudulent publishers to make some easy money.

We are aware that scientists at UiS get e-mails with requests to contribute to disreputable journals. Our advice is to be wary of unfamiliar journals marketing themselves via e-mail. They are not always predatory, and it is not unusual to pay an APC for open access, but be highly critical!

Some publishers have in the past been particularly aggressive; they are Lambert Publishing, Omics International and David Publishing. They are no worse than other predatory publishers, but they have been targeting UiS researchers. If you receive an e-mail from any of them, you can safely ignore it.

There are different ways to assess the quality of journals. If the journal can be found in the Norwegian register of approved scientific publication channels, it is a good sign that it is of acceptable quality.

Quality checklist for journals:

• If the journal is in the Directory of Open Access Journals it will most often be serious, but it is advisable to double check against NSD.
  
•  If the publisher is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association that is a good sign. They do not acknowledge unserious publishers.
  
• Make some inquiries: Does the journal look serious? Are the articles relevant? Does the editors have education / Experience within the subject area? Is the e-mail coming from a journal that is valid for your subject area, or far from it? This website can help you.
  
• Is the timeline plausible? If they offer a very fast peer review, ask yourself if it is realistic that the work can be done properly in such a short time.
  
• Predatory journals will often choose a title very similar to an existing quality journal to make people think that’s the journal they are dealing with. It’s a good idea to check if the ISSN is for the journal you think it is.

Please contact us if you are unsure about a particular journal. We will check whether the journal keeps an acceptable level.

UiS Brage is currently the institutional repository at UiS. The author retains the rights to anything published here, but agrees that the publication can be freely read, downloaded, printed and cited. Sometime during 2025, a new national repository and research information system will be introduced, and more information will be available later this year. You can read about it here, but only in Norwegian: New national repository. .  

Scientific articles 

Staff shall make their scientific articles and other research output openly available in UiS Brage.  You should always upload the full-text of your articles in Cristin, and from there they will be harvested by the Brage repository.  If the article has not been published with open access, you will need to upload the author accepted manuscript, sometimes known as “post-print”. This is the version of the article that has been peer reviewed and corrected as necessary, but which hasn’t been copyedited by the publisher. This is in line with the UiS rights retention strategy. The library will always check rights before publishing.   

The publishing process 

PhD theses 

UiS wants to have PhD theses (dissertations) in the repository, as this is high level research which otherwise only reaches a small number of people. For PhD candidates it can be useful to be able to link to their thesis in the repository, for job searching purposes, for instance.  

Scientific journal articles make up a large part of many theses. These will not be made available without permission from the publisher. The library will check the publisher’s guidelines and will request permission if necessary. If permission is not granted, the thesis will be published without the relevant and instead we will provide the link to the published articles.  

There is a separate section on student papers in the repository.

Increasingly, demands are also being made for open access to scolarly books. The Research Council of Norway recommends that books resulting from funded research are made openly available at the time of publishing, and no later than 12 months after the first publication date. It is permitted to use project funds to pay for open publication of books. Horizon Europe has similar requirements for releases supported by them.  
 
Publication in UiS Scholarly Publishing Services meets these requirements. Peer review is not required on this platform, but a scientific level is expected. Because of this, USPS is not a research point-giving publication channel.

Would you like your bachelor or master thesis to be available in the online repository?

In this section you can find information about your options and how to manage the visibility of your thesis online.

You don’t need to submit manually to the repository; you indicate what you want when you submit in Inspera. If you are two or more students co-authoring a thesis, you all need to agree on whether or not the it should be available online. We will not make it openly available unless all authors agree to it.

The main rule is that all theses that pass will automatically be transferred to the repository after the deadline for complaints has passed. However, you can control this. You own the copyright to the thesis, and you get to decide what to do with it, although we do recommend that you make it available.

How to do it

When you submit in Inspera, you will first get the following question: Do you allow your thesis to be publicly accessible in Brage? Yes or No.

• If you tick "Yes": Metadata and full text will be visible in the repository. 
• If you tick “No”: Metadata is visible, but the full text (pdf) is not. 

(Metadata = information about the thesis, i.e. title, name of authors etc.) 

You then have to indicate if the thesis should be confidential / closed for a certain amount of time; so if you want it to be available after two years, you put the date at which it can be read in the box below.  

NB! Do NOT put a date here if you have ticked “No” above. The system will not realise there is a date here if you have ticked the “No” button.   

If you want to make sure that neither the full text nor the meta data is visible, you have to tick “Yes” and then put a date far into the future; e.g. 31.12.2222. 

• Take care when filling in the information; the title you enter here will be on your diploma, so try to avoid spelling mistakes. 

• The abstract should be entered as metadata. You choose whether you want to add the English or Norwegian abstract, or both. 
• We don’t limit the theses to certain grades, and it is not possible to find out which grade any theses got. 

What do you do if you change your mind about whether or not your thesis should be openly available?  

If you have said yes, but you want to remove it, this needs to be changed in Inspera, so you will need to contact the exam office. It does require some work, so please only do this if you think it is important. 

If you originally said no, but you would like it to be available, you can contact the library. 

As a general rule, we encourage everyone to make their thesis available. If your thesis contains information that needs to be maintained confidential then it should not be made openly available. 

A notice about copyright 

If you use a figure or an illustration from the internet, it is up to you to check if it’s copyrighted, and if so, to seek permission to use it in your thesis.