BU has been ranked 13th out of over 1,500 major universities worldwide for the proportion of research outputs which are published open access.
The CWTS Leiden Ranking provides information about the scientific performance of over 1,500 major universities worldwide – including their scientific impact, collaboration and open access publishing.
In the 2024 rankings, BU is placed 13th for the proportion of research outputs that are published open access – with 91.5% of the university's publications being freely available.
Around half of all BU publications were green open access publications, which means they were published on a free-to-access repository, such as our institutional repository BURO (Bournemouth University Research Online).
Around 22 per cent were published gold open access, where a charge is paid to the publisher to make the article available free of charge to readers immediately on publication. BU has a number of transformative deals with major publishers, which means that authors can publish gold open access for free, or at a discounted rate, in thousands of journal titles.
The university also has Open Access Publication Fund, for support to cover all, or part, of the costs of open access publishing in journals not covered by our transformative deals.
This week marks International Open Access Week, which aims to showcase the benefits of publishing open access – defined as providing free, immediate online access to the results of scholarly research and the right to use and re-use those results as needed.
Open access publishing allows research to be disseminated quickly and widely, the research process to operate more efficiently, and increases the use and understanding of research by business, government, charities and the wider public.
Professor Sarah Bate, Interim Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange, said: “Open science is immensely valued by the BU research community, not only underpinning the integrity and transparency of the research that we do, but allowing this work to be freely accessed by readers from within academia and beyond.
“Our high position in the Leiden ranking is a testament to our researchers and those promoting research excellence in professional services, highlighting the strength of our commitment to open science.”
