Open Access: Open Access Books

What is a BPC/CPC and how to pay it?

Many academic publishers offer to publish books under an open access licence. This allows the readers to access your work instantaneously on the publisher's website without having to pay any fees. However, a payment of a book or book chapter processing charge (BPC/CPC) is required from the author or the author's institution.

UKRI-funded authors are eligible to apply for funding to cover such charges. You can find the application forms and further guidance on our page. Note that the maximum expenditure allowed per output is capped at £10,000 for a book published with a commercial publisher, £6,000 for a book published with a diamond (non-profit) publisher, and £1,000 for a book chapter.

What if I have no funding?

If your research has not been funded by UKRI and you are not eligible to apply for UKRI open access funding for long-form publications, consider publishing your book with a diamond open access publisher. Most diamond OA book publishers require the author's institution to be a contributing member, but there are a few who are open to submissions from authors without any funding available, e.g. punctum books or Open Book Publishers.

Ulster University does not have a dedicated open access fund for long-form publications, but your faculty or department might be willing to cover the open access fees for your publication through a one-off request.

You can try to engage with potential readers via a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or Unglue.it to raise funds towards an open access publication.

UKRI open access requirements

Research outputs resulting from UKRI funding must comply with the UKRI Open Access Policy. This includes (but is not limited to) monographs, book chapters, and edited collections.

If your book or book chapter publication results from a UKRI research grant, you must make it available in open access.

If your book is based on a PhD thesis which was supported by a UKRI doctoral training grant, you are under no obligation to publish it open access, but you are eligible to apply for further UKRI funding towards open access publishing fees. Book chapter publications resulting from a UKRI training grant are subject to the same rules as book chapters resulting from a UKRI research grant, i.e. they must be made open access.

Click here for more information on the UKRI Open Access Policy for long-form publications and how to apply for funding towards open access publication fees.

What is bibliometrics?

Bibliometrics is based on data about publications and citation frequency. Analysing such data helps to measure the impact of a research output, an individual author, an institution, or a publisher. When trying to decide where to publish, you may want to consider using bibliometrics to support your decision.

You can find more information on our Bibliometrics & Citation Analysis guide.

Limitations of bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is an imperfect tool and must be used with caution. Highly cited publications are not necessarily the best quality publications as there is no way to differentiate negative or self citations. High quality specialist academic publishers with robust peer review may be out-cited by more popular commercial publishers. Bibliometrics should not be relied upon as the main indicator in any impact assessment or research evaluation process.

Ulster University signed the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) and is committed to the principles of fair and responsible use of metrics.

Persistent identifiers

To enable efficient citation tracking, research databases rely on persistent identifiers (PIDs) which are machine-readable, unique references for research outputs, authors, and institutions.

The most commonly used persistent identifier for publications is DOI (digital object identifier). Most academic publishers generate DOIs for articles, books, and book chapters. You can also have DOIs generated for your preprints or datasets stored in subject or institutional repositories.

ORCID (open researcher and contributor ID) is used for individual authors. It serves to distinguish yourself from other authors who may have the same or similar name, and to share data between your publications, grants, repositories and other platforms featuring your work.

 If you have not done it yet, create your own ORCID to ensure that your citation data is as accurate as possible.

When choosing a publisher for your book, check if it offers a route to make your article available in open access.

See below a list of selected academic publishers along with information on their open access policies. If the publisher of your choice is not listed, or if you are unsure about any policy details, get in touch with our team for further guidance.

If your publications is resulting from a UKRI grant, it must be made available in open access under one of the Creative Commons licences.

Copyright basics

• As an author, you own the copyright to any scholarly work resulting from your research, and it is up to you to decide how to manage your rights.
• Copyright ownership falls into two categories: moral rights and economic rights.
• Your right to attribution is a moral right. It is non-transferable: it cannot be sold or assigned to anybody else.
• Economic rights can be sold or transferred. They allow the owner to authorise or prohibit reproduction, distribution, lending, and adaptation of the work.

⇒ Explore the topic on the Intellectual Property Office website.

Publishing contracts and copyright

In traditional book publishing, you are required to assign the copyright to the publisher. Under such arrangement, you retain the moral rights, but the economic rights are owned by the publisher of your work.

In open access publishing, you retain all rights to your work and you authorise the public to exercise some of your economic rights under the terms of an open access licence.

⇒ Read more about open access licensing.

Third-party copyright

If your book contains images, maps, tables, musical scores, extensive quotations, etc., from works that are under someone else's copyright, you may need to obtain permissions from the copyright owners to include them in your publication. This includes your own works for which you assigned the copyright to the publisher.

Limited reuse of third-party copyright material is allowed under the so-called 'fair dealing' exception to the copyright law. However, in some cases you may want to include material that cannot be used without the copyright holder's permission.

If you need help in managing third-party copyright material or requesting permissions, get in touch with the Open Research Librarian.

⇒ Check the UKRI guidance on managing third-party copyright in open access books.

• After community consultations, the inclusion of books and book chapters in the REF open access mandate has been postponed. Long-form publications are accepted as outputs for REF 2029 submissions, but there are no open access requirements for these.
• Open access requirement for long-form outputs will be in place for the next assessment exercise, with implementation from 1 January 2029.
• If your book or book chapter is resulting from UKRI funding, it is subject to the UKRI Open Access Policy.

Want to know more about open access in REF 2029?

Check out our REF guide!