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By making your work available through open access sources, such as open access journals or disciplinary or institutional repositories, your work may be seen by more researchers because they will no longer need a subscription to see your research. This expands the potential impact of your work, and may lead to broader recognition and citation of your scholarship.
Open access makes your research more visible and you could see 30% more citations!
You probably do know people that have published in open access modes. Many UMSL and UMsystem researchers have participated in open access publishing through the National Institutes of Health mandate and PubMedCentral, the arXiv preprint archive, and SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network), among others. Our graduate students publish their theses and dissertations in the Institutional Repository Library, IRL@UMSL where their Electronic Thesis & Dissertation are available in an open access archive.
There are several options for making your research available through open access.
Join millions of researchers sharing their papers freely with colleagues and the public.
You may be able to make your past papers Open Access, for free. It's legal and takes just minutes.
Find out if a journal you are publishing in uses a “hybrid” model, where the author has the option to pay for an individual article to be open access.
Include your work in one of the Discipline-based repositories.
No, the questions of peer review, format of publication, and subscription are separate. Just as a subscription-based journal may be peer reviewed or not, and may be available online, in print, or both, so too with open access publications. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists thousands of peer-reviewed open access journals, and their criteria for inclusion requires some form of quality control such as a peer-review process or editorial board.
Are you sure? Many open access articles are peer reviewed just like subscription-based journal articles. Additionally, some traditional publishers have a 'hybrid' model that allows authors to publish individual articles in a open access format. Additionally, some grant funding agencies, like the National Institute of Health, require all grant-funded research to be published in an open access repository. See also the question above regarding peer review.
Journal impact factors are a measure of average citations to papers in that journal over a set period of time. In all disciplines, there are journals with a wide range of impact factors, and open access journals can rank in the top tier of their category (e.g. PLoS Medicine, BMC Biology, etc.). Journal Impact Factors are a measurement of publication and citation patterns in a journal, not for individual articles or authors. There are many other citation measurements that quantify author impacts. Also, many repositories provide for a range of other measurements of use and impact (such as views and downloads), not just citations.
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists many open access journals, and many journal publishers have programs that allow individual articles to be published as open access, even if the whole journal is not open access (a so-called 'hybrid' model).
retaining the necessary rights to publish your papers in an institutional repository, even after an embargo period, is another way to make your article open access without publishing in an entirely open access journal.
No, not necssarily... you have likely signed copyright over to your journal publisher as part of the copyright transfer agreement. Unless you negotiated the retention of these rights, or licensed only specific rights to the publisher, you may be limited in what you can post on your website, share with colleagues, or even reuse in subsequent publications, such as reusing figures or photographs.
Again, not necessarily. Certain exceptions to U.S. copyright policy are given regarding Fair Use, including educational uses, but remember that you may no longer be the copyright holder. See the question above about posting papers on your website for more resources.
This also depends on what rights you have retained when publishing your work through another publisher. Some publishers make specific exceptions for work placed in disciplinary or instititutional archives and repositories (especially if there is an institutional or funder open access mandate requiring depositing the file), and other publishers will allow posting of certain pre-print or pre-editorial versions of your article to be placed in a repository.
Actually, open access publication may make it easier to detect plagiarism, and easier to prove because works aren’t hidden behind paywalls and reviewers/editors can find uncited sources easier.
True, Open access to research and scholarship is not free—there are costs involved in making research available. The economic models to support unrestricted access to research are still being developed; the common thread among the models is that open access research is available at no charge to all readers. Here are a few of many funding models:
Open access journals do not remove quality filters, see peer review above. And despite being called ‘author fees’ or ‘author pays’ models, it is often paid for through other means, such as a university open access fund, through a funding agency or written into a grant budget, or covered by a waiver for economic hardship.
Many of those articles are ‘free’ to you because of the university’s subscription to a commercial or society publisher. The University Libraries try to make access to our paid subscription content seamless, so you may not know it is something we have already paid for, especially if you are access it from an on-campus computer.
