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Most journals support open access in one way or another. Depending on circumstances, it is sometimes necessary to pay an open access fee to make your article REF-compliant. 

This page is meant to aid researchers in selecting a journal for publishing their research. Most of the information used to create the list of journals below can be found using  and  - both -maintained resources for finding information about journal and publisher policies for open access.  It is the author's responsibility to ensure that they submit to journals are compliant. 

OA- and REF-compliant journals typically fall into one of the following categories:

1. Open Access journals publish only gold open access articles that are free at the point of access. Most license their articles with , which allows reproduction and distribution in any medium or format. Any open access charge will simply be included as part of the publication fee. Articles published in this way can be made available on the RVC repository immediately on publication. If you are publishing in a fully open access journal, just let the research office know once you receive notice of publication, and send us the article. As long as you do this within three months of the article's acceptance, your article will be REF compliant. P

2. Hybrid Open Access journals allow the accepted manuscript of a published article to be deposited on an institutional repository and made openly available after an embargo period of no greater than 12 months, for no additional fee. This type of support for green open access makes these journals compliant with the RVC Open Access policy, as well as the HEFCE/REF policies. 

Many green-compliant journals also offer a paid gold open access option. If you have access to the necessary funds, or if your grant or funder requires immediate open access, you can pay for the right to make the version of record freely available at the point of access. If you are not able to pay an additional OA charge, you can still achieve open access compliance via the green route: you just need to send the Accepted Manuscript of the article to the OA publications team on acceptance. 

Please note that there are are journals that do not support any type of institutional archiving whatsoever. These can be classified as non-compliant, and they should be avoided wherever possible, as any article they publish will not be eligible for submission to the REF.  

Non-compliant journals do not support any type of open access archiving. 'Non-compliance' on the part of these journals might come as the result of a policy that expressly forbids institutional archiving, or, more likely, from the absence of any archiving/green open access policy whatsoever. 

Please see below for a non-exhaustive list of journals to which RVC staff commonly submit, organised according to their level of compliance. The library and research office staff will do their best to keep this list accurate and up to date, but if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact Anna Gillis, research support librarian, at agillis@rvc.ac.uk or publicationsrepos@rvc.ac.uk.