Scholarly Communication

Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.

The benefits of publishing OA include:

• Meeting publishing mandates
• Disseminate the results of your research more widely and increase the impact of your work 
• Retain more control over your works, instead of signing all or most rights away to commercial publishers.
• Results of taxpayer-funded research are more accessible to everyone. Publicly-funded research belongs to the public.
• An alternative to subscription-based scholarly journals, which have increased in price annually beyond the rate of inflation. A lack of paywalls leads to more accessibility of resources for researchers.
• OA publications can be utilized as course readings, activities, and assessments for relevant research and expertise on topics covered within courses

There are different types of publishing models for OA journals:

• Gold: Journals that publish OA immediately and free of charge for readers, but authors or funders pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to publish. APC discounts are often offered by institutions.
• Green: Publishing in a subscription journal, but making a pre-print or post-print version of the article available for free in a repository. Green OA is free to the author, but an embargo period is usually in effect, causing a delay in making the article freely available in the repository. 
• Hybrid: A subscription journal that allows individual articles to be published OA with the author(s) paying APCs.
• Diamond: Journals that publish OA and do no charge subscription costs or APCs. 

There are 3 versions of an article that can be archived in a repository, depending on the policies of Journals you have published the article in:

• Pre-print: The author's copy of the article before it has been reviewed by the publisher.
• Post-print: The author's copy of the article after it has been reviewed and corrected by the publisher, but before it has been formatted for publication.
• Publisher's version: The version that has been reviewed, formatted, and published.

We offer a variety of services to help you communicate and archive your scholarly work: