Open Access

• Allows greater dissemination of research publications to a wider audience.
• Increase 'impact' by reaching more readers resulting in more citations. There is evidence that, for articles of citeable quality, reaching more readers will result in more citations (Gargouri et.al., 2010). For journals, Open Access makes the journal more visible and any increase in citations will translate into a higher impact factor (making the journal more attractive to readers and authors).
• Accelerates the rate of discovery and the translation into research benefits for the public.
• Removes 'price barriers' to access by making research available to many groups which would otherwise not have access, such as practitioners, school students, industry and the general public.
• Scales the expansion of the literature - library budgets do not. Even if all journal prices were reasonable, the rapid rise in the number of journals in recent years means that no library can offer comprehensive access to all the relevant literature.
• Provides a means for researchers and research institutions to showcase their research.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The UniSC Research Bank is the institutional research repository for the University of the Sunshine Coast. It provides an open access showcase of the University's scholarly research output ensuring that research is made available to the local, national and international communities. The Research Bank supports deposits from current staff and students of many types of outputs, both traditional and non-traditional.

If you would like to make your Author Accepted Manuscript available open access, you can submit this version to the repository. Sherpa is a searchable database of publisher's poicies regarding the self-archiving of journal articles in Open Access repositories. 

Read & Publish agreements are a form of transformative agreement with a publisher that takes the library's existing expenditure on subscriptions and repurposes it to cover both reading and publishing in that publisher's journal.  

If you publish in a journal that is included in one of the CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians) Read & Publish agreements, you will be able to publish direct to open access with no transactional article processing charges (APC).  

UniSC has Read & Publish agreements with the following publishers. Each link provides further detail of each agreement.

• American Psychological Association (APA)
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
• Cambridge University Press
• CSIRO Publishing
• Elsevier 
• MA Healthcare
• Microbiology Society
• Oxford University Press
• SAGE
• Springer Nature
• Taylor & Francis
• Wiley and Hindawi