Research Services
The Library is committed to helping research students and staff develop their research skills and knowledge. We aim to support you along your journey whether you are a postgraduate research student, early career researcher or an experienced researcher who has developed your skills over many years.
The Library supports the Open Access agenda and provides guidance on how to publish your work Open Access. We also help you to deposit your research outputs in Hope's Institutional Research Archive, HIRA.
The Library also provides support in several areas of the university's Postgraduate Researcher (PGR) skills framework, including Information Seeking, Information Literacy and Management, Intellectual Property Rights & Copyright, and Research Methods.
What is Open Access?
Open Access gives those outside of academia greater access to research including practitioners, policymakers, charities, small businesses and independent researchers. Smaller institutions and researchers in developing countries can also access research that they otherwise may not have been able to afford.
The University is committed to the principles of Open Access and recognises the benefits it brings in disseminating research more broadly and providing access to research for all. The library provides guidance on your options for publishing Open Access and different funder policies.
Open Access is a requirement for many research funders and is a requirement for REF. The University's research outputs are available under Green Open Access via our institutional repository, HIRA.
Green Open Access
We encourage researchers to make articles open access via the 'green' route. To do this, make sure you deposit your peer reviewed, author-accepted manuscript (AAM) in HIRA after it has been accepted. You do not have to pay any APC (Article Processing Charge). The article may be subject to an embargo period stipulated by the publisher before it is freely available open access.
Gold Open Access
In addition to the Green open access route via our institutional repository, the other option available to authors is
Gold Open Access. This is where:
- Published work is freely available via the publisher’s website immediately on publication
- You can choose to publish in a fully open access journal, or a subscription journal with an open access option (often referred to as a hybrid journal).
- Published work is normally published under a Creative Commons licence.
- Publisher may apply an Article Processing Charge (APC) or this may be covered as part of Read and Publish/Transitional Agreements, as outlined below.
Publisher Agreements
Transformative Agreements (also known as Transitional or Read & Publish Agreements) facilitate the move towards open access by removing barriers to publishing open access for authors. They represent a shift away from a subscription-only model to one which covers both subscription payments (the ‘read’ element of the agreement) and article processing charges (the ‘publish’ element).
The University has signed up to such agreements with a number of academic publishers. These agreements allow Liverpool Hope authors to publish their research open access without charge. Articles submitted for publication in journals that are part of one of these agreements are not subject to an article processing charge (APC).
This Transitional Agreement Lookup Guide demonstrates how researchers can check whether or not a particular journal is part of these agreements.
Springer Nature
The University has joined a new transformative agreement with Springer Nature, which allows corresponding authors from Liverpool Hope to have their research articles published open access, without charge. The agreement includes publishing in more than 2,500 journals across the Springer Nature portfolio, including Nature, Nature Research journals and Palgrave journals.
When submitting your article for publication, please ensure that you enter your university email address and select Liverpool Hope University as your institutional affiliation.
Full details of this agreement are on the Springer website including a list of eligible journals. Springer has also provided a guide for authors
Springer Nature Author Instructions takes you through the process of confirming your eligibility and choosing open access for your publication, step by step.
Sage
Corresponding authors from Liverpool Hope can publish open access in any of Sage's Hybrid journals. There will be no article processing charge for these publications. SAGE will contact all eligible authors and invite them to the SAGE Open Access Portal to take up the offer as soon as their accepted article has been received into SAGE’s Production department. Further information is available from Sage.
Cambridge University Press
Liverpool Hope University authors may publish open access in CUP's hybrid or fully open access journals at no cost. You must be the corresponding author and use your university email address during the submission process. Article types eligible under this agreement are: research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports, case reports. Upon acceptance, choose the Gold Open Access option in your author publishing agreement form and select a creative commons licence. For further information, please read the publisher's CUP-Jisc Read and Publish Agreement page.
Wiley
Liverpool Hope University corresponding authors may publish primary research and review articles in any of Wiley’s fully open access (Gold) journals and OnlineOpen (hybrid) journals. See Wiley’s Open access agreement for Jisc institutions for more information. Please be aware that this fund is limited nationally so the terms of eligibility may change during the course of the calendar year.
Elsevier
Corresponding Authors from Liverpool Hope University are able to publish their work open access in Elsevier subscription journals. See the Open access agreement for Jisc institutions for further information including full details of how the process works and a list of eligible journals.
Taylor and Francis
This agreement enables Liverpool Hope affiliated authors to publish review and original research articles open access, at no cost to the author. The agreement applies to Taylor & Francis's Open Select journals. You must be listed as the corresponding author and use your Hope email address during the submission process, in order to be identified as eligible for this deal.
Association for Computer Machinery (ACM)
Research articles and conference proceedings can be published immediately Open Access at no cost to the author. The agreement applies to all ACM journals, both Open Access and subscription-based. It applies to both funded and unfunded papers. The corresponding author must be affiliated with Liverpool Hope University. To qualify, during the submission process, you should state that you are affiliated with Liverpool Hope University and ensure that you use your university email address. Further information is available here including a full list of eligible journals and conference proceedings.
Research data is any information that has been collected, observed, generated or created to validate original research findings. It can exist in many different formats, for example documents, spreadsheets, code, images, algorithms, recordings, transcripts and many more.
What is Research Data Management?
Research Data Management (RDM) means the storage, curation, preservation and provision of continuing access to digital research data. It is a commitment to making research, and the data that underpins it, open and accessible.
Research data management occurs throughout the entire research lifecycle and includes
- Planning for how you will manage the data including meeting funder requirements
- Considering ethical and legal issues that affect data use and reuse
- Being aware of issues pertaining to sensitive data and managing it accordingly
- Making provision for your data after your project is finished
Why is this important?
RDM is an integral part of good research practice and properly managed research data is easier for you to work with. Good data management ensures that your research data is more accessible to you and those you are working with
Good data management promotes better data admin – like backing up your data, using open file formats and ensuring the correct treatment of sensitive data. It also encourages data sharing and promotes the practice of making data openly available.
Importantly, research data management (RDM) increases transparency, allows results to be replicated and data to be reused in ways that may have been unimagined by the original user.
Funder policies on Research data
Most research funders and many academic publishers now have mandates requiring research data to be properly managed and, where possible, shared, often via publication.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have agreed Common Principles on Research Data and many UK funders have aligned their data policies to these.
The Digital Curation Centre has a summary of data policies for various funders.
Further information
How to make your data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
What to Keep: A Jisc research data study (2019)
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) website contains help and advice on storing, managing and protecting digital data.
Registry of Research Data Repositories -This is a searchable directory of research data repositories. Users can browse data by subject, content type or country. You can also search for specific types of data or organisations, such as universities, charities or other institutions.
This guide showing Sources of Research Data has information on how to find open access research data.
Hope’s Institutional Research Archive (HIRA) makes the outputs of the University's research activities freely available online. It contains bibliographic information and, where permitted, the full text of research outputs. Providing access to our research publications maximises visibility and accessibility and helps realise the university’s potential to make significant academic, economic, social and cultural impacts.
In addition to complying with REF open access requirements, HIRA raises the research profile of the University and its staff and creates a record of scholarly activity taking place. HIRA supports Liverpool Hope’s research informed teaching by providing your students with easy access to your research outputs.
Symplectic Elements is the university's Current Research Information System (CRIS). It hosts the academic profiles of Liverpool Hope University researchers, as well as displaying their research outputs, interests and areas of expertise.
Academic colleagues should use Symplectic Elements to deposit their research outputs to HIRA, to ensure that open access requirements for the REF and funding bodies are met. Below you will find step by step guides showing how to deposit outputs and how to manually create a record for new publications.
Guides
Symplectic Deposit Guide (Quick version)
The Open Policy Finder platform, developed by Jisc, helps academic authors and institutions navigate open access publishing policies. Users can search for specific academic publications to examine detailed journal guidelines across different manuscript stages like published, accepted, or submitted versions.
The tool provides crucial information regarding embargo periods, licensing requirements, and associated publishing fees. Additionally, the platform allows researchers to check funder compliance to ensure journals meet specific financial sponsor regulations.
Users can also perform a transitional agreement look-up by selecting their home institution to discover existing publishing arrangements.
The above guide demonstrates how researchers can check the embargo periods of specific journals prior to submission, to ensure that their choice of publication will meet open access requirements for the REF. As a reminder, these requirements are as follows (as of 1st January, 2026)
- Main Panels A & B (STEM, Medicine, Science & Engineering): Maximum allowable embargo period of 6 months.
- Main Panels C & D (Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities): Maximum allowable embargo period of 12 months.
The University requires that an electronic copy of all research theses is deposited in Hope’s Institutional Research Archive (HIRA), where it will be publicly available. The version of your thesis placed in HIRA must be the final approved version, incorporating any amendments required by the examiners.
Benefits of making your thesis Open Access
Making research theses open access allows researchers to disseminate their scholarly work to a wider audience. By having a digital version openly accessible online, the visibility of a researcher is greatly enhanced and so is the research reputation of Liverpool Hope University. Using HIRA as an electronic theses repository also aids the long-term preservation of research theses.
Restricting Access to the Final Thesis
Before depositing the thesis, you must complete the Thesis Access Declaration Form and indicate whether you wish for access to your thesis to be restricted in the form of a temporary or permanent embargo. This will need to be agreed with your Supervisor and Director of Studies.
You may wish to consider this if you are planning to publish your thesis, if it contains confidential and/or sensitive information, or if the thesis being made publicly available could potentially put your safety and welfare at risk. Where the thesis has been restricted for any reason besides personal safety, the bibliographic metadata and abstract will normally be made available on HIRA and to genuine enquirers, including third party sources such as the British Library’s Electronic Theses Online Service
Training will be provided on the electronic submission process, along with associated issues such as copyright, licenses, and options to restrict access to your final thesis.
This step by step guide explains the process of using Symplectic Elements to upload your final thesis to HIRA.