Why I Published Open Access

FULcrum Article by Andrea Wright, Science & Outreach Librarian

After completing a speaker series on scholarly communication issues here at Furman, I knew that I wanted to share the process with other librarians. A major shift in scholarly communication over the past 15 years has been the Open Access (OA) movement. OA advocates call for removing price and license barriers to literature. So when it came time to write about my experience with a program to increase awareness of issues like OA, it only made sense to publish my work in a OA title.

There are actually several excellent reasons to publish any work OA. The graphic below illustrates many benefits to OA publishing. It’s logical that removing barriers would increase exposure to your work. Because your work is available to anyone at no charge, it can be read by researchers in developing countries and faculty at institutions with limited library resources and researchers that are not affiliated with a large company or university and even the general public. Wider exposure means the possibility for more application of your findings. And research continues to bear out that this increased exposure also correlates to increased citations (see http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html for details). This mix of professional benefits for the author and larger benefits to research and society make OA publishing a strong choice.

Discovering an OA journal that would fit my article was a similar process to comparing traditional toll-journals. As with any publication, I wanted to ensure that the scope and audience for the journal would fit my content. Having exhausted my grant money with the program, I also wanted to find an OA journal that did not have an article-processing charge. The Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) allows you to browse OA journals by subject, language, publication charges, and even licensing options. I also wanted to publish in a peer-review journal that was indexed in places where my audience would look. UlrichsWeb includes OA titles along with toll-journals, so I was able to further refine my journal search.

In the end, I decided to submit to the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. This peer-review journal is published by Pacific University Library. It has a strong editorial board of librarians in the scholarly communication field, matched the nature of my article, allowed me to license my article with a creative commons license, and did not charge an APC. It even offered the additional benefits of being indexed directly by Google Scholar and providing monthly readership and download reports. If you were to investigate OA journals in your own discipline, you would probably find a mix of journals supported by scholarly associations, non-profit groups, and traditional publishers that could offer your work similar benefits.

Even if you decide that an OA journal is not the best venue for your work, you can still reap many of the benefits of OA through green archiving. The vast majority of publishers allow authors to deposit some form of their manuscript into a personal website or institutional repository. Just this month, the Libraries launched the Furman University Scholar Exchange (FUSE), our own institutional repository. Based on the copyright and self-archiving policies of your publisher, you can most likely post a specific version of your manuscript to FUSE. This will enable anyone to access a version of your article, even if they cannot afford to purchase the final version of record from your publisher. SHERPA/RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/) provides a large database of publisher policies to help you determine what rights you have for green archiving in FUSE. You can even use it to determine past work that you can post to FUSE. In addition to the OA benefits from the graphic, FUSE will also provide you with readership and download statistics for your work to help track the impact of your research.