This week marks International Open Access Week, an annually held event to celebrate the open sharing of knowledge. Open access has the potential to change the ways in which academic research is conducted, and offers a range of benefits to academia, science, industry and wider society.
This years theme is “Community over Commercialization,” referencing the UNECSO Recommendation on Open Science call for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities”*, and support for non-commercial publishing models without associated costs such as article publishing charges. This highlights the aims of the open access movement in its attempts to change traditional academic publishing culture.
What is Open Access?
“Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”**, and enables a wider section of society to gain access to research, often publicly funded, that would traditionally be restricted by publisher paywalls.
There are a number of open access routes for researcher that include research articles being made immediately available at the point of publication in a journal with a reuse licence (gold OA), in a publishing platform with no payment required (diamond OA), and the deposit of accepted manuscripts in a repository (green OA).
The benefits of Open Access are wide reaching, allowing researchers to increase their audience which can result in greater impact, wider research collaboration and higher citations.
Open Access at City
City’s research community can take advantage of the gold and green routes to make their publications open access.
City library has a number of agreements with publishers where researchers can publish gold OA immediately upon publication, with no cost to researchers themselves. You can find more information on this in our Open Access Transformative Agreements guide
City’s institutional repository City Research Online (CRO) provides a platform for researchers to make their accepted manuscript freely via the green OA route. CRO currently holds over 20,000 City research publications and is accessed by over 100 countries across the globe. Read our guide on CRO to find out more about how to make your publicatons available.
We will be posting short blogposts each day this week covering an aspect of OA publications. For further information on a range of OA issues, visit our City Research Online and open access library guides.
*Suber, P. (2004) Open Access Overview. Available at: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (Accessed: 20 October 2023)
** UNESCO (2021) UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949 (Accessed: 20 October 2023)