Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open Access: Open Access Publishing

* Directory of Open Access Journals
* Open J-Gate

PubMed Central

Learn more about the NIH Public Access Policy

Have you considering open-access publishing? Research made available via this free and publicly-accessible medium is becoming increasingly cited and many open-access journals are now peer reviewed.

Two models of Open Access: OA Self Archiving (repositories) VS OA Publishing (OA Journals)

OA Self-Archiving

• Self-Archiving: The Other Route to Open Access

OA journals are not the only way to achieve free access to scholarly literature. Authors can retain the right to post their articles by submitting addendum's such as the CIC author addendum.  Even if you are publishing in a commercial journal and didn't retain your rights (copyright), you may still be able make your work freely available online by depositing it in a digital repository. In fact, a strong majority of publishers allow this practice (you can check the policies of specific publishers using the SHERPA database).

• Insitutional Repositories, e.g. INDIGO (UIC's Institutional Repository)

• Subject or discipline repositories, e.g. 

  • arXiv.org (Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics);
  • PubMed Central (PMC) (National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.)

OA Publishing in OA Journals

• Publish in one of the 11,000+ OA journals http://www.doaj.org/
• Learn more about the ROAAP Fund - UIC's Open Access Publishing Fund
• Learn more about our Institutional Memberships which will reduce the article processing fee for certain OA publishers.
• Learn more about selecting publication venues including evaluating Open Access journals before you decide where to publish.

• Start your own OA journal - http://journals.uic.edu 

What are the benefits of Open Access?

• The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for. This position is the impetus for the NIH Public Access policy and for current FASTR legislations looking to expand open access policies across many federally funded agencies.

• Many of our health care professionals in this country would not have access to the health literature if it were not for PubMed Central as most don’t belong to large institutions like UIC that can provide access to the literature.   There are several examples of health care professionals finding the perfect article in PubMed (a free database) but the article itself could not be accessed by the health care worker who needed it.

• A new video  with Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the NIH, shows him interviewing Jack Andraka, the 16-year-old inventor of a breakthrough pancreatic cancer diagnostic that is 26,667 times cheaper, 168 times faster, and 400 times more sensitive than the current test.  Open Access played a central role in enabling Jack's discovery, and his story is a perfect example of what's possible in a world of Open Access.  http://youtu.be/G55hlnSD1Ys

• Research shows that open data and open research increases and expands the rate of development and discovery.
• Williams, Heidi. Intellectual property rights and innovation: Evidence from the human genome, December 2009
• Lakhani, et al., The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving, October 2006
• Murray, et al., Of Mice and Academics: Examining the Effect of Openness on Innovation, October 2008

• There is also research suggesting as Open Access facilitates access to articles, it also increases the citation rates.

http://indigo.uic.edu/

http://journals.uic.edu