What's in it for me?
By publishing in an environment with reduced barriers to access, studies have shown that you can increase the impact of your work.
Swan, A. The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. (2010).
Kayvan Kousha, Mahshid Abdoli, (2010) "The citation impact of Open Access agricultural research: A comparison between OA and non-OA publications", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 Iss: 5, pp.772 – 785
Contact Us
Peter Fernandez
I am happy to help in any way that I can.
CIARD
The Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative is working to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all.
Find out more here.
How We Can Help
UT Libraries offers a suite of services designed to make UT’s scholarly output more accessible.
• OA Publishing Support Fund - A fund to help pay your publication charges in open access journals
• Prepaid PeerJ Membership - A prepaid fund to pay the full cost ($99) of a basic publishing plan for publishing with PeerJ (and a 15% discount when publishing with BioMed Central)
• TRACE - can host and share your scholarly output (including previously published work)
• Data management - Assistance documenting, archiving, and sharing your data
• Newfound Press - is an open access, digital imprint of UT Libraries that can provide peer review and publishing services
• Identify - an open-access journal in your discipline
• Consultation on copyright issues
• Support for your digital media project (digital humanities is not just for the humanities)
and much more... The most important thing you can do is engage with this issue. Feel free to contact me.
What you can do
What you can do:
1. Increase access to your work by retaining the right to share a copy of your work in Trace.
2. Use the Author Rights Retention Kit to retain rights to your work. Read and understand your copyright transfer agreements. Know which rights you care about. These rights are valuable and often negotiable.
3. Publish in author friendly or open access journals (and say yes if one asks you to be a peer reviewer).
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See our guide on identifying quality journals.
There is no one size fits all solution
Scholarly publishing is complex, unlikely to change overnight and integrally tied to the culture of the field you work in.
Librarians available to help facilitate discussions about these complicate topics and explain the libraries role.
Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss these issues in more detail.
What About Impact Factor?
Impact factor is an important tool, and the library provides services and tutorials to help you to use it to evaluate journals. However, in this context it is worth noting:
"The impact factor... was never intended to be used to evaluate individual scientists, but rather as a measure of journal quality. However, it has been increasingly misused in this way...
The misuse of the journal impact factor is highly destructive, inviting a gaming of the metric that can bias journals against publishing important papers in fields"
Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief of Science.
More from the International Mathematical Union and others.
Learn about another related method of evaluation, article level metrics, here.
Open Access Policies
Over 180 open access repository policies have been passed by:
Institutions (ex: University of California, MIT, USDA)
Departments (ex: Harvard University: Faculty of Arts & Sciences)
and Funders (ex: NIH).
Visit ROARMAP for more information.