As part of the ERA 2018 submission process, institutions were required to state whether a research output was openly accessible. For the purpose of ERA 2018, 'openly accessible' was defined according to the ARC Open Access Policy.
In summary, open access or openly accessible is defined as the availability of research outputs via the internet, such that any user can find, freely access, read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link, crawl, mine and otherwise use and reuse the research outputs both manually and using automated tools. Any use or reuse is subject to full and proper attribution, and usually will have an appropriate licence, such as any of the options available through the Creative Commons suite of licences, and should not infringe any copyrights to third-party material included in the research output.
The open access data collection for ERA 2018 is aimed at providing the ARC with some insight into open access publishing trends in eligible institutions. However, open access data did not form part of the evaluation process and were not made available to peer reviewers or Research Evaluation Committees (RECs).
Note: The ARC Open Access Policy took effect from 1 January 2013. According to the policy, any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a 12 month period from the date of publication. The ARC Open Access Policy incorporated all ARC Funding Rules and Agreements released after 1 January 2013. The policy does not apply retrospectively to pre-existing Funding Rules and Agreements.