Publishing Open Access

Open Access Benefits

• Good Information Supply
• Fair and transparent use of taxpayer's money
• Free and fast access
• New methods, new knowledge
• High visibility
• Compliance with research funders' and institutions' policies
• Collaboration and networking
• Authors free to license their works as they see fit
• Good findability and long term access
• Efficient research and innovation

Impact

Challenges

• Article Fees
  • Sometimes expensive 
  • Inequalities between subjects and individual academics (e.g., well funded tenured researcher vs early career researcher)
• Funds to publishing vs research
• Conflict of Interest
  • Financial incentive for OA journals to publish more articles
• Double dipping in hybrid journals
  • Publisher benefits twice – article fees and library subscriptions
• Small / not-for-profit / society publishers at risk of being left behind
  • Pay-to-publish model favours large publishers with high volume of articles
• Quality
  • Pre-prints lack peer review
  • Born OA journals take time to establish impact  .
• Sometimes extra work for authors
  • e.g., entering metadata for repositories 
• Number of OA journals varies greatly across disciplines.

Predatory Publishers...

• Accept publication fees from authors with promise of quick turn-around and without meeting publishing standards and performing advertised services:
  • Peer review
  • Quality control
  • Indexing
  • Archiving
• Fake editorial boards
• Fake impact factors
• Rebrand their journals
• Bootleg articles
• Hijack journals

How To Avoid Predatory Publishers

• Look for clues on the website
  • Dead links
  • Poor English grammar
  • Non-transparent editing and peer review practices
  • Editorial board members - Spot check contact information
  • Lack of publisher information
• Lack of listings in organizations such as the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) or the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• Lack of representation in indexes (e.g., Web of Science, Medline, PsycINFO)
• Consult check lists, for example:
  • Think.Check.Submit
  • How to assess a journal (CARL)
• Ask a librarian - library@trentu.ca

Tri-Council Agency Open Access Policy on Publications

• Applies to all recipients of grants from CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC
• Provide broadly accessible, free public access to articles from funded research through OA journal and/or digital repository
• Must be OA within 12 months of initial publication
• For more information please see the policy document here.

Open Science

"Open science is the practice of making scientific inputs, outputs and processes freely available to all with minimal restrictions. Scientific research outputs include (i) peer- reviewed science articles and publications, (ii) scientific and research data and (iii) public contribution to and dialogue about science. Open Science is enabled by people, technology and infrastructure. It is practiced in full respect of privacy, security, ethical considerations and appropriate intellectual property protection."

• Road Map for Open Science (Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada) 
• Departmental Open Science Access Plans (Government of Canad)
• Open Science Publications (Government of Canada)
• Open Data (Government of Canada)

OA Publishing Trends

Paquet, V., van Bellen, S. & Larivière, V. (2022). Measuring the prevalence of open access in Canada: A national comparison. The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 45(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.5206/cjilsrcsib.v45i1.14149

Institutional Repositories

• Digital Collections (Trent University Library & Archives): 
  • Note: v1 currently under content freeze; v2 launching late 2022/early 2023
  • Suitable for a variety of different outputs
• Borealis (formerly Scholars Portal Dataverse): https:
  • Research data repository
  • Best suited to datasets
• Library as Publisher: OJS (Open Journal Systems) Pilot Project (Trent University Library & Archives)
• List of Canadian institutional repositories (Canadian Association of Research Libraries)

Disciplinary Repositories

For example: 

• arXiv
• bioRxiv.org
• Hsscommons
• psyarxiv
• OpenDOAR

For more examples see this list of disciplinary repositories maintained by the Open Access Directory. 

OA Monograph Publishers

• Some commercial vendors:
  • Palgrave Open
  • Brill
  • Springer
  • Not cost friendly; potential if you have grant support!
• ScholarLed
• Fully OA Publishers

'Academic' social networks & DIY Solutions

• Academia.edu, ResearchGate.net
  • For profit!
  • May not be permissible based on your license agreement ("Non-Commercial")
• Author website
  • Likely permissible, but does it meet your needs?
• CreativeCommons.org (https://creativecommons.org/)
  • Fully DIY

Evaluating OA Options

• Know your license agreement!
  • Sherpa/Romeo 
    • Aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.
    • Different pathways & Conditions based on version being shared
• Are they institutionally supported?
  • Who pays / Are you the product?
• Where are they indexed/listed? 
  • DOAJ/ DOAB
  • OAPEN
• Look for signs of predatory publishing.
• Trust your expertise

Media

Webinar: Open Access: Why You Should Care, Trent University Library and Archives (TULA), November 16, 2022.