Currently viewing the tag: "open access"

 OAweek16

 

You’ve probably heard the term open access – maybe it’s the reason you were able to get the full text of that article you needed?  Maybe it’s the reason so many people read your latest article?

Open access (OA) is about making research literature freely available on the Internet with few copyright or license restrictions.  In honor of Open Access Week (happening right now!), here are the top 10 reasons to publish OA…

10ImproveDiscoverability

10. Improve discoverability

Open articles commonly show up more places than just the publisher’s website, for example, in subject repositories or ResearchGate or the Tufts Digital Library, and therefore can more readily be found by search engines and through web surfing, not just through traditional articles databases, like PubMed or Web of Science. In addition, search engines can more readily crawl the entire full text of open articles, beyond just the citation information and abstract.

9EnlargeReadership

9. Enlarge readership

Since open access materials can be easier to find and the full text is available to all, more people are likely to read them.  You didn’t spend all that time on research and writing to lock away your findings, did you?

8DiversifyReadership

8. Diversify readership 

Those who have access to paid journal subscriptions represent a limited demographic that does not necessarily correlate to those who will most benefit from and contribute to the research. Removing paywalls removes these misguided filters on readership.

7IncreaseCitations

7. Increase citation numbers

 Many times, open articles have the opportunity to be cited more by others due to their increased visibility. In addition, since they are often available ahead-of-print, citations can start accumulating earlier in the process.

6EnhanceCollaboration

6. Enhance collaboration

 More readers and diversity of readers can lead to more and richer collaboration. Open access can help identify critical colleagues otherwise not reached through traditional publishing communication channels.

5DriveInnovation

5. Drive innovation

What does Google Scholar always say? Stand on the shoulders of giants!  Our greatest world achievements are rarely standalone accomplishments.  Scholars feed off one another, learn from one another, and grow from one another through sharing and collaboration, which is enhanced by open access.

4IncreaseUsefulness

4. Increase usefulness

Broadening the reach and impact of research makes all those tireless hours of effort that went into creating it all the more worthwhile. I’ll reiterate my early question: You didn’t spend all that time on research and writing to lock away your findings, did you?

3ShifttheEconomics

3. Shift the economics

Publishers provide added value to a manuscript, through editing, formatting, promotion, and some discoverability services, which incur some cost. For many though, the business model has fallen out of balance.  Much research is supported by taxpayers and authors and peer-reviewers are not paid for their publications.  Open access realigns the business model so that the research conducted as a public good is available to the public.

2Jointhe21stCentury

2. Join the 21st century

 We take advantage of several cutting-edge technologies just to tell our friends how good our lunch was, why would we rely on an antiquated print-based model for communicating important research findings? While many journals are available electronically today, the present system artificially treats them as if they were just as encumbered to obtain and create as their print counterparts when they are clearly not.

1SavetheWorld

1. Save the world!

Yes, this is a bold statement to make, but who knows what accelerated and enhanced collaboration and innovation can lead to? Better addressing climate change?  Ending world food insecurity?  Curbing pandemic diseases?  The only way to know is by opening the communication channels and sharing more.

 

Find out more at https://sites.tufts.edu/scholarlycommunication/open-access/

 

Post contributed by Judy Rabinowitz

snowflakeorchid

You are a unique snowflake, or one might say, ORCID.  No, I did not just misspell orchid.  An ORCID® iD, is a unique number assigned to a researcher in order to differentiate that person from others who may have similar names and/or identity researchers whose name change.  It helps link a researcher’s work and make it easier to recognize.  It is a persistent and public identifier, not proprietary or private, therefore it can be used across systems and does not change (even if your own name does). Tufts Office of Research Administration thinks it’s a good idea too.

Don’t get lost in the crowd, register for your ORCID iD today for free and assert your uniqueness! Want to learn more? Check out our exhibit in the display case on Sackler 4!


orcid

“ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.”                         – http://orcid.org/content/initiative


 

Post contributed by Judy Rabinowitz

Tagged with:
 

Open Access Week is October 19-25th this year, which is a great opportunity to focus on how you can broaden your reach.  Open access (OA) is about making research literature freely available on the Internet, with few copyright or license restrictions.  Publishing in conventional journals is one step to disseminating your work – open access takes it to the next level.  An important advantage of OA is that it helps scholars and practitioners who may not be affiliated with resource-rich institutions utilize and benefit from your research.

Two ways to make your literature open:

  1. Publish in an OA journal, e.g. PLOS. These journals may charge authors article processing fees.
  2. Ensure that the conventional journal you publish in allows you to deposit a copy of your manuscript in an OA repository, such as the Tufts Digital Library. This option is free of charge for both author and reader.  The process would look something like this:

Tufts Digital Library

 

Have questions about how this works and/or what else you can do?  Join us for an open workshop, Disseminating your Research: Getting your work out to the widest audience, on Thursday, October 22, 2015, noon-1pm in Sackler 510.  Come find out more!

 

Post contributed by Judy Rabinowitz 

Our final Open Access post for the week is a guest post from Judy Rabinowitz, one of our Research & Instruction librarians and a member of Tufts Scholarly Communications Team: 

Open vs. Public Access:  What’s the Difference?

The NIH Public Access Policy, the now well established mandate requiring scientists to submit manuscripts that arise from NIH funds into PMC, made “public access” a familiar phrase to many in the biomedical field.  The White House memo drafted in February 2013, directing a similar charge to research supported by several other government agencies, including NSF, DOE, and the CDC, is poised to make “public access” even more of a household term.  But why are these not just called open access policies?  Where’s the distinction?

OhYesItsFree

By SpiderWeb-MarketingSystems (Own work) [3.0CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL] via Wikimedia Commons

Many times, “public access” and open access” are used interchangeably, but in fact there are important distinctions between them.  It all boils down to the multiple definitions of the word “free.”

Free as in “gratis” – refers to free of charge

Free as in “libre”
– refers to freedom of use

To put it simply, open access encompasses both definitions of free, being free of costs and also free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.  Public access materials, on the other hand, while free of cost to read, do not necessarily have the same freedoms to use and reuse and therefore the “libre” definition may not apply.

Have more questions about open or public access?  Just ask the Tufts Scholarly Communication Team

Tagged with:
 

Here’s a guest post from our E-Resources and Serials Librarian, Jane Natches: 

Have you thought about posting your published work to your own website or your institution’s open access repository but are concerned you will be in violation of the copyright agreement you signed with the publisher?

Copyright agreements can be intimidating but there is a tool that can help you begin to understand what rights you do have for archiving your works. SHERPA RoMEO is a database of publisher’s copyright policies presented in clear and understandable language. It is intended for use by the academic research community and is easily searchable by journal title, ISSN, or publisher name.

sherpa

The trick to using SHERPA RoMEO is to first determine what version(s) of your work you currently retain because publishers often have different archiving rules based on versioning.

The pre-print is the final version of your article submitted for peer review / refereeing.

The post print is the version you submitted after addressing comments from the peer review / refereeing process.

The publisher’s version is the final post print dropped into the publisher’s layout. It often includes page numbers, logos, and print registration marks and is usually in PDF format.

You may be surprised by what your standard copyright agreement allows. Many well-known publishers allow the post print to be posted to an author’s personal website or an open access institutional repository without any embargo. Additional requirements tend to be fairly simple and often include acknowledging the published source and providing a link to either the journal home page or the article’s DOI (digital object identifier).

 

Give it a try and see what you find!

Tagged with:
 

In our continued celebration of International Open Access Week, I would like to direct your attention to some of my favorite scholarly resources that just so happen to also be Open Access or promote Open Access.

In case you need a refresher, in his book Open Access, Peter Suber writes:  “The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.” In a nutshell, OA materials are free to access, and you can download, copy, distribute, transmit, harvest, use web crawlers, etc. for free as well. Just give attribution to authors and creators and you’ll all set.

So, can it be any good if it’s free? You bet! OA publishers have banded together to police the landscape, ensuring adherence standards regarding peer review, licensing, and research integrity, and more.

Stay tuned all week as we give you more information about OA publishing, self-archiving, other free learning materials online, and more! But for now, enjoy some of our favorite scholarly resources in the OA community.

SPARC full

 

http://www.sparc.arl.org/

Affiliated with the Association of Research Libraries, the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. Includes excellent information about Article-Level Metrics, a new approach to quantifying the reach and impact of published research.

logo_cropped

http://doaj.org/

Established in 2002, the Directory of Open Access Journals works to collect and provide access to scholarly OA journals across international borders and disciplines.

plos

http://www.plos.org/

With a publishing arm over ten years old, the Public Library of Science publishes seven peer-reviewed, OA journals. A paper published in a PLOS journal has recently received international attention when used as supporting material in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing about the spread of the Ebola virus.

biomedcentral

http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Based in the UK, BioMed Central published 269 peer-reviewed Open Access journals, including a wide array of specialty titles in medicine.

BHL-Combined

http://biodiversitylibrary.org/

Finally, I have to mention the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries working to digitize biodiversity literature and make it available for open access. BHL is not a publisher, but works with libraries and publishers to make important historical and current scientific literature available free to anyone with an internet connection. Besides serving some of the rarest and most remarkable literature you will ever see online, my interest in the OA world stems directly from the 6 years I spent working with BHL.

This is just a small selection of resources in an ever-expanding OA world; feel free to comment if there are others you would like to share!

 

This week, October 20-26th, is International Open Access Week.  Here at the Tufts Libraries, we decided to take this opportunity to highlight the scholarly publishing related workshops we are hosting during the month of October.  In particular, be sure not to miss…

Field Guide to Spotting Predatory Publishers

Wednesday, October 22, 2014 – noon to 1:00pm
Location: Sackler 510

Advice from the Experts: Inside Scientific Publishing

Wednesday, October 29, 2014 – 10:30 to 1:30pm

Location: Sackler 607  (pizza lunch included, so be sure to register)

“But I Found it Online!” Proper Use and Attribution of Images for Papers, Posters, and Presentations

Thursday, October 30, 2014 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: Sackler 510

Open Peer Review in STEM with Dr. Cesar Berrios-Otero, Outreach Director, Faculty of 1000 Research

Thursday, October 30, 2014 – 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Library Austin Room, Medford Campus

 

Curious to find out more about open access?  Check out the Tufts Scholarly Communication website and watch this space! We’ll be posting something Open Access-related each day this week.

Tagged with:
 

The Scholarly Communication Team would like to know more about faculty impressions of open access scholarly literature, that is, literature which is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

Please take their brief survey by Friday, October 11, 2013:

https://tufts.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bOYR9RLp096BXvv

It should only take a few minutes to complete and prior knowledge of open access scholarly literature is not required to participate. This survey is similar to one conducted of Tufts faculty in Fall of 2011. Survey results will be posted during Open Access Week, October 21-27, 2013.

For more information about open access or the Scholarly Communication Team, please visit scholarlycommunication.tufts.edu.

Tagged with:
 

Dryad Logo

 

DataDryad.org is a curated general-purpose repository that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad has integrated data submission for a growing list of journals, but submission of data from other publications is also welcome.

Submission integration allows journal publishers to coordinate the submission of manuscripts with submission of data to Dryad. Benefits:

  • Simplify the process of data submission for authors.
  • Allow authors to deposit, to a single repository, gigabytes of data files in their original formats.
  • Reduce the rate of noncompliance with journal data policy.
  • Have the option of making data available for editorial or peer review, via secure access for editors and reviewers.
  • Ensure bidirectional links between the article and the data and increased visibility for both.
  • Ensure that the data is accessible once the article becomes available online.
  • Give authors the option to embargo public access to data for a limited time after publication, if permitted by the journal’s data policy.
See a list of currently integrated journals, including PLOS Genetics and Biology, HERE.


For more information about submission, pricing and reusing data, click HERE.
Tagged with:
 

doaj

 

Directory of Open Access Journals is one of the leading databases for you to find open access journal articles, and for those of you who already use DOAJ to find articles you most likely noticed it transitioned to a more search friendly interface.

DOAJ’s moved from their basic keyword search to be more robust, allowing users to find articles narrow and limit their searches. There is also the ability to search for publishers who have journals with a certain copyright license. So if you’re grant requires you to publish in a CC-BY journal, then DOAJ could help you out! And as also, if you can’t find what you are looking for get in contact with the library. We’re here to help you find what you need!

Tagged with:
 
Set your Twitter account name in your settings to use the TwitterBar Section.