Special timely note: Please come by and chat about OA with Scholarly Communications staff at the IU Libraries Graduate Student Reception, Wednesday August 20!
In your scholarly journey thus far, you’ve undoubtedly clicked on an article only to find a paywall that even your IU affiliation couldn’t unlock. You can imagine how common this experience has become as journal subscription costs outpace library budgets and with the rising number of industry and independent researchers. Consequently many scholars are rethinking the barriers that come between our work and its potential audience.
Enter open access (OA). The above concerns and trends are part of a centuries-long history of scholars questioning how to make their work publicly accessible. With the rapid adoption of the internet in the 1990s, the modern open access movement began to develop tools, language, and licenses that make information public without the loss of ownership or standing that come from scholarly publication. Yet it can prove an intimidating process for the first time author.
This post will address a few common misunderstandings about open access, present a case for early career researchers to seek out OA options, and list a few resources available through IU Libraries. If you’re already convinced that you should publish open access, skip to the final section for IU-specific resources. If not, I encourage you to keep reading to learn how open access benefits you.
A Few Common Misunderstandings
The most common misconception about open access, perhaps leading to the most hesitancy, is that OA articles are not peer-reviewed. While the importance of preprint sites like arXiv.org cannot be understated in some fields, every scholar understands the significance of journal publication. This misunderstanding likely arose while for-profit publishers (and their high-impact journals) were slower to adopt OA options, leading to the sharing of pre-publication formats from various phases in the editing process. The truth is that OA describes the availability of a work—not its content.
Another common myth is that OA journals are of lower quality or impact, but many OA articles are published in highly impactful journals. This article from Nature, for example, was chosen at random from its front page the day this paragraph was drafted, and it was only one of many that were published OA that month. OA models were first pioneered in the 1990s by medical journals like the BMJ, and current OA infrastructure was built primarily around the needs of these fast-moving fields. Today OA is an option in many subjects as far apart as mathematics and history, but you don’t have to take my word for it: in another tab, I invite you to review the top journals of your field to see how common OA is among your peers. It’s true that publishing OA often requires an upfront fee (more on how IU Libraries can help with that later), but this doesn’t make every OA journal a pay-to-publish mill.
Another common misunderstanding about OA is that it requires foregoing copyright or ownership of an article. Copyright can be a complicated topic in academic publishing, where agreements often favor publishers, but OA publication is frequently paired with the use of open licenses, such as Creative Commons, which enables both author and reader rights to be spelled out with specific and standardized detail. Two common addendums to CC licenses in academia are NC (no commercial uses) and ND (no derivative works).
Benefits of Open Access for Early Career Scholars
OA is especially important for early career scholars because the primary metrics by which we’re judged in large depend upon our work being visible and readily accessible. Multiple studies have shown that OA articles are downloaded and cited more frequently than those behind paywalls and, as a result of wider availability, receive more diverse citations.
When you publish your data OA as well, it encourages collaboration. Whether from those seeking to refine your methods or from scholars who visualize novel uses of the same set, by making your work open, you invite these self-selecting collaborators. They may appear among audiences or readers you might never have thought to ask. The inverse is true as well: if you’re not looking into other’s OA data, you may be missing out on inspiration, collaborators, and opportunities for publication.
Another reason to publish OA is the ethical consideration of public impact. Though a standard metric has yet to be devised, the social ills caused by disinformation have led to many academic institutions wondering how they might someday evaluate engagement and communication outside the field. OA is likely to play a significant role in whatever shape these ideas eventually take.
Open Access at IU
If there’s one stand-out negative to publishing OA, it’s that to do so with a reputable journal often requires up-front funding. Publishers incur costs that they must recoup, and to make an article freely accessible, they transfer the cost from the reader to the author. IU can help with this in several ways.
- As an IU affiliate, you may already benefit from IU Libraries’ transformative agreements with various publishers. You can find some details on the IU LibGuide on Open Access Publishing Support.
- IU Libraries also maintains IUScholarWorks, our institutional repository which contains the OA works of IU scholars, including preprints and author accepted manuscripts. These OA options allow a work to be shared without a publication fee but can be subject to various limitations such as embargoes and license statements. Tools like Open Policy Finder exist to help you make sense of these journal policies.
- IU DataCore is another repository for IU affiliates that can help you make your data publicly accessible. While IU Libraries provides a LibGuide on our own and others’ open data repositories.
It’s also important to educate yourself about what to look for. Learning the language of Open Access will help you understanding the terminology in licenses and funding requirements. We’d also encourage you to plan ahead by considering journal options before submission: know where the journal stands on OA at publication, what agreements exist, and what the self-archiving policies are. When submitting, it’s also best to use your IU affiliate email in order to make full use of IU’s transformative agreements.
About the author: Elizabeth-Marie Helms is a graduate student in Library Science and the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. A former middle school history teacher, she now studies the public understanding of science and works as an assistant in Scholarly Communications for IU Libraries.
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