Open Access Publishing

About Open Access

The Open Access movement

NUI Galway Library's position

Routes to Open Access publishing

Open Access in Ireland: funders mandates

Open Access business models

Open Access: some common myths

Who benefits from Open Access to research?

Copyright

About Open Access

Open Access (OA) facilitates free, immediate, permanent online access to full text research literature for all. Open access literature can include peer-reviewed (post prints), non-peer reviewed  journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, working papers, thesis, research data and multi-media files.  Harnessing the benefits of the internet to facilitate the dissemination of research, Open Access research is free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, with the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

See Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview

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The Open Access movement

The Open Access movement is a global initiative to promote and provide free online access to scientific and scholarly research literature, especially peer-reviewed journal articles and/or their preprints.

The origin of the Open Access movement can be traced to a number of crucial international statements or declarations issued since 2002:

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NUI Galway Library's position

NUI Galway Library supports the Open Access movement directly by membership in SPARC Europe and through the development of ARAN: Access to Research at National University of Ireland, Galway.  This is the University’s Institutional Repository.

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Routes to Open Access Publishing

There are two complimentary roads to Open Access (OA) publishing:

1. Open access journal publishing

This is considered the "golden road", where scholarly journals are published electronically and freely available online. Open access journals undergo the same publication process and peer-review screening as traditional published journals. The underlying difference is the supporting business models used: Open Access publishing is funded up-front at the beginning of the publication process rather than at the point of access via an institution’s Library subscription (see below).  
Key link:
Directory of Open Access Journals

2.  Open access self-archiving

Authors provide OA to their own published articles, by depositing copies of their research free to all into an Open Access Repository. 


Open Access repositories

Open Access repositories are digital collections of research material that has been deposited by authors.   This is also known as Open Access self-archiving. A repository enables the central storage, dissemination and long-term preservation of digital research output.  The repository may belong to an institution, such as a university, or a discipline (see list of subject-based repositories) and can contain a range of content types and formats, for example scholarly articles, preprints, reports, theses, audio, video, images and other material.  Repositories facilitate the assignment of metadata to each piece of research maximizing the potential dissemination and retrieval by Google, Google Scholar or other search engines such as OAIster.

The University’s Institutional Repository is ARAN Access to Research at NUI Galway 
Key links: International Directory of Open Access Repositories

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Open Access in Ireland: funders mandates

All Irish funding councils, including the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, the Higher Education Authority, the Health Research Board and Science Foundation Ireland (the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences are now in discussion) have issued open access mandates over the past 6 months for the open access deposit of research publications and data resulting from projects funded either in-part of wholly by them.


Irish research funders Open Access principles

The mandate position statements all capture a number of common key recommendations and requirements for researchers on how to become open access compliant.  These are summarised below:

The mandates generally specify details as to when a research paper should be archived, what should be archived (version of paper) and where to archive. Examples of mandate requirements may include the following:

Key links:

How to become Open Access compliant

The ARAN Institutional Repository is a recognised Open Access repository for depositing your papers. Please see the following links for more information on:
What can be deposited in ARAN?
How to deposit your research into ARAN

Compliance with Irish funder mandates on Open Access deposit - workflow made easy!

Open Access business models

Open Access (OA) means free online access to scholarly comunication. This shifts  the financial burden from the end-users of OA information, such as readers and libraries, to the authors, libraries and research organisations who make the information available. The business models supported by OA journal publishers may accommodate these up-front costs in a number of ways including:

Publication fee models

  1. Author pays: In this business model, financing takes place at the beginning of the publishing process by charging the author a publication fee (also known as an article-processing charge (APC)).   This may be met by the author or more typically by the author’s sponsor (employer, funding agency/research grant).  OA journals that charge processing fees usually weave them in cases of economic hardship.
  2. Research funder subsidies: Many research funders subsidise authors' publication fees. For example, scientists and scholars participating in projects funded by the Wellcome Trust can apply for a reimbursement of OA publishing costs.
  3. Institutional membership: Some OA publishers (e.g. BioMed Central and Public Library of Science) waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership.
  4. Publishing support funds: In this model universities or research institutions reimburse the fees charged to authors by OA journals from a fund established especially for this purpose. Authors who do not have access to other funds such as publication allowances from research funders may be able to apply for access to these funds.  This is especially important for junior scholars who are less likely to have funding of their own.    Support funds have been in existence in the USA, the Netherlands and the UK for some years now.


Hybrid business model
Hybrid business models are based partly on subscriptions and partly on publication fees. Publications are made available Open Access electronically along with their traditional printed edition. An increasing number of publishers (for example
Springer, Blackwell are adopting this model and are introducing open access options within their traditional journal system. This means that an article is processed and sold as normal. In addition, however, the author can pay the publisher a supplementary fee to make the article available Open Access. Such fees are generally around €2,000. In some cases this fee is reimbursed by the funding body in order to allow compliance with the funding body's deposit mandate (e.g. Wellcome Trust funded authors publishing in Elsevier journals).

Key link:  Economic and Social Impacts of Open Access (Easi-OA) for an economic study of costs and benefits of various scholarly communication models as well as measuring the impact of open access.

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Open Access: some common myths

The following section outlines some common misconceptions of both Open Access Publishing and Open Access Self-Archiving:
Open Access Publishing - (Mis)Leading Open Access Myths

Open Access self-archiving is not:

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Who benefits from Open Access to research?

The research community
 “The visibility, usage and impact of researchers' own findings increases with OA, as does their power to find, access and use the findings of others. Universities co-benefit from their researchers' increased impact, which also increases the return on the investment of the funders of the research, such as governments, charitable foundations, and the tax-paying public.” (Source: Harnard, S, 2009).

Lecturers & teachers
Open Access allows authors to retain more rights to their own work i.e. to distribute, re-use, etc.   This means no restrictions on providing articles for teaching purposes. Only the URL need be provided.

Society
Society as a whole benefits from an expanded and accelerated research cycle in which research can advance more effectively because researchers have immediate access to the findings.

Publishers
Publishers benefit from the wider dissemination, greater visibility and higher journal citation impact factor of their articles.

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