Publishing your Research: Hei Tīmata | Getting Started

What is open access

Open Access is making peer-reviewed published scholarly research freely available online to the public and the global scholarly community. It brings research results out from behind the subscription paywall so they can be accessed by all.

Benefits of open access

Authors

As an author, OA means that your research can reach a wider audience and have a greater research impact, both scholarly (increased readership and citations) and non-scholarly (impact on policy, practitioners, society or the environment). OA has a positive effect on citations, with open research output achieving 52% more citations on average and OA publications received 72% more citations than closed ones (Council of New Zealand University Libraries, 2021 and 2022).

To make their journal articles open access, authors can use Open Access Toolkit for Aotearoa New Zealand Researchers which guides them through the process.

Readers

OA gives readers barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research, unconstrained by the budgets of the libraries. Additionally, it enhances discoverability, benefitting the general public and practitioners who might not have library access.  Overall, OA promotes transparency, equity, and innovation in scholarly communication, benefitting readers by providing them with greater access to knowledge and facilitating collaboration and discovery across disciplines and borders.

Funding agencies

OA increases the return on investment in research, making the results of funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful. When funding agencies disburse public funds, OA helps by providing fundamental fairness to taxpayers through public access to the results of publicly-funded research.

Governments

As funders of research, governments benefit from OA in all the ways that funding agencies do (see previous entry). OA also promotes democracy by sharing non-classified government information as widely as possible and providing citizens with information with which to inform decisions. (adapted from http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm)

The Open Access Toolkit is designed to guide you through the process of making journal articles Open Access. It is split into five stages of publishing:  

1. Planning your research  
2. Selecting a journal  
3. Submitting your manuscript  
4. On acceptance  
5. After publication

The toolkit was jointly commissioned by CONZUL & Universities New Zealand. This iteration has been adapted from the original template, specifically for researchers at the University of Waikato.

If you have received funding to undertake your research it is important you read their guidelines on publishing (including research data). Some funders require published research to be made open access within a specific time frame. More information on open access policies for some of the major funders can be found on our Open Access Policies page.

For information on funder requirements for research data, visit our Research Data Management guide.