Our Open Research Statement
The greatest benefits of knowledge come when it is shared as widely as possible. Open research involves not only making your research outputs open access but also the underlying research data, methodology and any software or code that you have produced in the process of carrying out your research.
Open access means that your research outputs and data are freely available to be viewed and downloaded by anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, without barriers or requiring payment. There are many benefits to making your research open access including improving the integrity and quality of the data and broadening the reach of the research - offering more opportunities for collaboration and increasing impact.
The University of Aberdeen is committed to open research and will support our researchers in making their research open. The Open Research Team are here to provide advice, support and guidance.
- REF2029 Open Access Policy
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New REF Open Access Policy
The REF2029 open access policy has been published.
The new requirements will be effective from 1 January 2026. Outputs published between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025 which meet the REF2021 open access requirements will be eligible for submission to REF 2029.
- What you can do to help champion open research at Aberdeen
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- Deposit all of your recently accepted research publications in Pure /AURA . When you have a paper accepted for publication email paperaccepted@abdn.ac.uk with a copy of the confirmation of acceptance and a copy of the accepted manuscript. Library staff will upload your paper to Pure in compliance with the publisher self-archiving, funder and REF policies. You may also add publications to Pure yourself - please see the toolkit for guidance.
- Discuss open research with your colleagues and consider teaching it to your students.
- Consider pre-registering your research e.g. on the Open Science Framework or using registered reports.
- Consider open peer-review.
- Use a preprint repository - use Jisc Open Policy Finder to check the preprint policy of the journal you intend to submit your article to.
- Archive web resources in a way that ensures they will be available long term.
- Release your code or software under an open access licence.
- Make your data open access in a suitable repository for your subject area wherever possible. Use the repository finder and follow the FAIR data principles.
- Deposit in Pure/AURA is not restricted to articles. If you have a book or chapter accepted for publication contact us at paperaccepted@abdn.ac.uk and we will check whether the publisher offers a green open access route. You may be permitted to make a portion of the monograph available in the institutional repository
Open research at Aberdeen
Research content downloaded through the University of Aberdeen repository.