Open Access and Scholarly Publishing

What are the benefits of publishing my work open access?
Studies have shown that when your work is freely accessible and not behind a paywall, it is more likely to be cited. Your work is more easily discovered and shared, and thus more likely to make an impact. There are also social justice arguments for open access. People beyond the academy -- the public -- can benefit from freely available knowledge. Taypayers who fund research can access its results. Libraries can pay for other resources and services with money saved by cancelling excessively high-cost subscription journals. Fully open access journals mean that authors retain the copyright to their work. Here's an image that helps show the many advantages of open access, created by Danny Kingsley and Sarah Brown:

How can I make my work openly accessible?
There are different avenues to open access.

1. You can publish your work in a fully open access journal.
2. You can publish your work in a hybrid journal and select the open access option by paying an APC.
3. You can deposit a version of the article in an institutional repository (Digital USD) or a disciplinary repository.

To discover open access journals in which to publish, browse the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). You can also consult Ulrichsweb Global Series Directory and Journal Citation Reports, electronic resources available via Copley Library.

How can Copley Library help me publish open access?
Copley Library actively supports open access publishing and provides University of San Diego-affiliated authors with the following ways to offset the costs of publishing open access:

• Institutional agreements with publishers that provide library-subsidized, fully waived or partially waived open access publishing opportunities
• Digital USD, our institutional repository, that provides immediate, free open access publishing

For a full list of institutional agreements with publishers that Copley offers, and the details of each, please visit the Open Access Publishing guide.

If I've already published my work in a journal, can I make it openly accessible in Digital USD, the university's open access institutional repository?
You may be able to deposit a version (such as a pre-print or post-print / final accepted manuscript) of your article in Digital USD, depending on the policies of the publisher. Consult your original publication contract, or check the journal's policies in Open Policy Finder. 

What are the different versions of scholarly articles?
Scholarly articles are often referred to by their "version," or iteration. Some common definitions you may come across are:

• Pre-print (or preprint)
  • Initial version submitted to journal (pre-refereeing/pre-peer review)
  • Also called the "submitted manuscript" or "submitted version"
• Accepted manuscript
  • Author’s final version, post-refereeing/post-peer review, but without publisher’s formatting/layout
  • Also called "post-print" (or "postprint") or "final accepted version"
• Final version
  • Version as it appears in journal
  • Also called the "version of record" or the "publisher's version"

You can see some examples of different versions here, and you can visit Open Policy Finder to look up a specific journal to view its policies. 

Does open access mean that an article hasn't undergone peer review?
No. Open access is independent of peer review. Many open access journals include peer review in their editorial process.

How can I assess the quality of an open access journal?
Boston College University Libraries has assembled an evaluation checklist of useful criteria, and Think Check Submit helps you identify trustworthy journals by guiding you through a checklist of considerations. COPE (Committee on Publishing Ethics) also provides guidance and tools that promote ethical practices and high standards in scholarly publications. 

How can editors and publishers transition a traditional journal to an open access model?
Transitioning Journals to OA: This page contains an expanding number of resources created by the University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication to support journal editors and publishers and the organizations or libraries that work with them. The resources can be used as a toolkit to facilitate the OA transitioning process.

Where can I find open access articles, journals, and other materials?
Open access publications are increasingly easy to find, as more and more scholarly research is published OA from the start and therefore widely available online. There are also many specific sites where you can find and use open access resources. This is just a small sample:

• arXiv.org provides open access to over a million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics 
• The Digital Commons Network provides open access to institutional repository content across hundreds of institutions, including our own Digital USD.
• The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) connects people to the riches held within America's libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA -- photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more -- are free and immediately available in digital format.
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes open access articles and journals. To date, there are nearly 10,000 journals and well over 2 million articles.
• Discover open access theses and dissertations through the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). NDLTD supports electronic publishing and open access to scholarship in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide.
• OAD: Open Access Directory curates comprehensive lists of all things open access.
• OpenDOAR is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. 
• The Open Library of the Humanities supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines -- from classics, modern languages and cultures, philosophy, theology and history, to political theory, sociology, anthropology, film and new media studies, and digital humanities. All academic articles are subject to rigorous peer review.
• The Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes peer reviewed, open access journals across all areas of science and medicine.
• PubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
• The Open Access Books Toolkit covers specific topics related to open access books. Each article offers a quick and brief introduction to a particular aspect of open access book publishing.