Open access publishing
What is open access publishing?
Why publish open access?
- Ethical argument: science is often financed by public funds and therefore should be accessible to all
- Impact: increase visibility, use, citations and therefore impact
- Required: most funders nowadays require articles to be published open access
Routes to open access
Publishing open access is possible via the gold and the green routes:
- Gold route: publish open access via a journal, which often requires paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). APCs can sometimes be reimbursed because of Big Deals made between publishers and university libraries. According to Plan S, the open access journals have to fulfill several requirements that you can find here".
- Green route (self-archiving): publish a version of your article in an institutional repository (RePub for the EUR) after publishing it via a journal.
- Each repository should be registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
- You can check which version of your article (submitted, accepted or published) you can archive in a repository in Sherpa Romeo
Read more about open access at the EUR open access website.
Preprints
A preprint is the submitted, non-peer reviewed version of your article. An increasing number of researchers publish preprints in Preprint servers in order to get their results out there quicker. Read more below and in this preprint FAQ.
Why publish preprints?
- Speed: Preprints are almost immediately publicly visible, besides some checks on content and ethics
- Visibility: Because preprints are open access and many preprint servers are indexed by search engines (e.g., Google Scholar), you can reach more people with your work
- Feedback: Some preprint servers allow collecting feedback on preprints, which can make your work so much better
- Prevent scooping: preprints are timestamped, so by posting it, you have established precedence
- Individual gain: such as showing productivity, openness to feedback, etc.
Where to publish preprints?
Preferably a preprint server that provides a persistent identifier. For example:
- OSF Preprints: you can choose many preprint servers and can also share supplementary files. A list of preprint servers hosted via OSF Preprints can be found here.
- Directly via a preprint server, such as BioRxiv or PsyArXiv
- You can even add a preprint on ResearchGate!
Feedback and updating
There are different ways researchers can give/receive feedback on preprints: - In OSF preprints, you can use their tool Hypothes.is to annotate preprints, see their help guide - Some servers offer comment functionalities (e.g., when logged in) - Use (academic) twitter
What you do with feedback is completely up to you. If you want, you can update your preprint to a new version. However, note that all versions are timestamped and retained. Often new versions get a new identifier (DOI) and old versions cannot be removed! If your work gets published by a publisher, many preprint servers also offer the possibility to refer to the identifier (DOI) of your published work, so that readers of the preprint get a notification that they are not reading the most up-to-date version.