Green and Gold Open Access at Cambridge

So you’ve decided that you want to make your work Open... how do you do that? Well, there are two main options: Gold and Green OA.

Gold Open Access

In the Gold Open Access model, a publisher charges the authors an article processing charge, usually a few hundred to a few thousand pounds, but then makes the article free for anyone to read directly on their website.

Some journals are entirely Open Access, others use a hybrid model, where authors can choose to make their work open (paying the APC) or keep it behind a paywall.

Green Open Access

In the green model, an author publishes their article using a traditional subscription model, so the publisher keeps the article behind a paywall. However, most journals allow authors to make a copy of the article publicly available in a repository.

The publishers impose some conditions on this to protect their revenues. You can only share the accepted manuscript version, so the final version of the text before typesetting. Often there is an embago period (a few months or years) before your Green OA version can be made available

Some disciplines have subject repositories, such as PubMed for medicine, but while you are at Cambridge you also have access to Apollo, our institutional repository. Here’s what you have to do. As soon as an article is accepted, go to openaccess.cam.ac.uk, click on ‘accepted for publication’ and enter the information about your article, and provide us with the accepted manuscript. Our team at the Office of Scholarly Communication will create a record on Apollo and let you know when it is ready. We will check the publisher’s policies and apply the right embargo. If you declare any funding in the form, we will also help you to make sure you comply with the funder’s requirements. Get in touch if you would like more information!