Routes to Open Access publishing
Open Access in Ireland: funders mandates
Open Access: some common myths
Who benefits from Open Access to research?
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
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:
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.
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 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
Open Access repositories
Key links: International Directory of Open Access Repositories
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 (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
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).
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:
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.