Open access policy and strategy

With our open access (OA) policy, we aim to achieve 100% open access for academic publications while keeping costs manageable. On this page you will find a summary of our open access policy (2022-2025).

Our policy for open access fits within our ambitions on Open Science. Both topics are part of Utrecht University's strategic plan 2025.

Central to the open access policy

UU reseachers publish under an open licence

For all their scientific publications (articles, book chapters and books), researchers at Utrecht University are expected to:

• publish under an open licence when possible;
• make them openly available for computational analysis, for algorithmic and machine learning applications;
• and to retain copyright as much as possible in the process.  

UU supports open access publishing

Our Publishing Support team helps researchers with open access publishing. For example, with the UU Journal Browser. Here, UU researchers can find in which journals they can publish open access for free or at a discount.

Main points of our open access strategy

We invest in gold open access

UU invests in contracts with full open access publishers. This ensures that academic publications are open access from the date of publication.  

We view green open access as the minimum standard

The university makes the full text of articles and book chapters, registered in Pure since 2015, open access available. We do this six months after publication, unless the researcher objects (via opt-out). Publications become available in the Utrecht University Repository. The Taverne arrangement (Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act) makes this possible. We want to further expand the use of this scheme so that we can also publish books open access through the green route. 

In addition, Utrecht University supports rights retention. This allows authors to retain the right to share their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) directly open access via the Utrecht University Repository. Even if the publisher has placed restrictions on this. 

We try to become less dependent on hybrid contracts  

We encourage UU authors to use publication routes other than hybrid open access where possible.   

We contribute financially to diamond open access  

UU contributes to the non-profit infrastructure of diamond open access. We see these non-profit initiatives, which are not based on Article Processing Charges (APC's), as attractive alternatives of other routes. And essential for the intended transition to full open access.

We encourage researchers to also publish books open access  

To this end, UU's Publishing Support offers advice on finding suitable publishers and financial support.