Open Access

USC supports researchers participating in Open Access offering either a Green Road or Gold Road option.

Green Road Open Access:

Deposit a version of your research accepted for publication into the USC Research Repository, USC Research Bank, which provides a showcase of USC scholarly research. The repository complements traditional academic publishing processes - it is not a replacement. Once a research article has been accepted for publication in a scholarly journal (subject to normal scholarly peer review processes), USC researchers can self-archive a full text version of the article in the USC Research Bank. Library staff are trained to work through related copyright permissions for this to take place.

Contact research-repository@usc.edu.au if you would like to have your research made available Open Access in the USC Research Repository.

Gold Road Open Access:

Currently USC doesn't have centralised support for Gold Open Access funding.

The USC 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. USC Research Bank is harvested by search engines, and is also indexed by the National Library of Australia’s TROVE. By making research easily accessible, it also facilitates collaboration between researchers.

USC Research Bank is complementary to traditional academic publishing processes – not a replacement. USC researchers continue to submit their research peer-review scholarly journals for publication, however where possible also deposit a copy of their published research in USC Research Bank.

All staff and students, including adjunct staff, are encouraged to deposit the post print or published version of their work into the repository, depending on which version is permitted by the copyright holder. Information on how to submit publications to the USC Research Bank can be found here.

How to make your publications open access in USC Research Bank

• Sign and return a USC Research Bank Author Deposit Agreement
• Contact Research Repository staff, who will then provide a report on which publications are allowed to be made open access
• Provide Research Repository staff with the appropriate version of your publications.

It's as easy as that!

There are a number of publishers that allow the deposit of the published PDF version of your work into an institutional repository.

See the SHERPA RoMEO list here.

Publishers have different policies on which version you may archive in a repository.

• Pre-print version (submitted manuscript): your paper before peer review.
• Post-print version (author accepted manuscript): your paper after peer review but before typesetting and formatting by the publisher. About 80% of journals will allow authors post print to be archived.
• Published version: the final PDF version as supplied by the publisher with final typesetting and formatting.

USC Research Bank will accept either post-print or published versions of your work subject to copyright holder permissions.