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Scholarly Communication: Open Access

The Scholarly Communications committee provides Bucknell’s faculty scholars with customized information, education, and guidance as well as the technical resources and support services needed throughout all steps of the scholarly communications process.

Introduction

The benefits to Open Access are: more exposure for your work, practitioners can apply your findings, higher citation rates, your research can influence policy, the public can access your findings, compliant with grant rules, taxpayers get value for money, and researchers in developing companies can see your work.

Open access (OA) is an interconnected set of ideals, a goal, and a set of practices and models. The hope is that if research is made freely accessible and widely available, with minimal barriers to access, we can support discovery, creation, community, and equity. Open Access is a beautiful and powerful idea that all researchers can support, but it is important to remember that there are some bad actors, including predatory publishers and those who adopt the language and some of the ideas of OA in seeking to maintain a status quo.

 

Types of Open Access:

Green OA means that the accepted, peer-reviewed, not yet fully formatted version of the publication is uploaded to an institutional, disciplinary, or personal repository. The ability of the author to do this is dependent on the contract they have with their publisher. Often this OA is at no additional cost, but there may be an embargo period. In negotiations with publishers, authors are often able to retain the right to pursue green OA immediately. The resource is able to be found via open-web searches, like Google. This is also called “self-archiving” Gold and Diamond OA means that the article is published in a fully open access or hybrid journal, and the article is free to access for readers. Gold OA requires the author or sponsoring institution to pay a publication fee. Diamond OA is free for the author. The resource is openly available on the publisher’s website and databases.

 

Open Access comes in many forms and formats, and it’s important to remember that OA doesn’t just mean one thing or one publication type. The above image illustrates three of the most common forms of OA for articles. This toolkit will hopefully help you navigate multiple forms of Open Access to find an approach that works for you, if you choose to be a part of this movement.

Links

(Many of these links are discussed in greater detail on topic subpages)