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Published: October 21, 2009

Are you interested in increasing citations to your journal articles by at least 20 percent? More than 25 peer-reviewed studies report that open access (OA) scholarly articles, freely available on the Web, are cited 20 percent to 250 percent more than equivalent articles in subscription-based journals.

OA is a growing international movement permitting any scholar access to research results, regardless of institutional affiliation or economic status. The National Institutes of Health now require published research they fund be made open access. The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently adopted a similar policy.

The advantage of open access for readers is obvious. Access to full-text is no longer blocked by a request for payment or subscriber log in. However, why would scholars want to give away their journal articles?

Actually, scholars have long given away their articles by transferring all rights to the publisher with no monetary compensation. Scholars publish for prestige, but they also publish to be read and have their research used. Prices for traditional journals have increased to the point where even large libraries have had to cancel hundreds of subscriptions. Of the 126 academic libraries that used to subscribe to the journal Ferroelectrics, not a single one now has a current subscription. Is it really publishing if no one can afford to read it?

Scholars can make their articles open access in two ways:

• They can publish in an open-access journal. A directory of more than 4,000 OA journals can be browsed by discipline.

• They can publish in a subscription journal, but retain the right to submit their final manuscript to a disciplinary or institutional repository. More than 70 percent of publishers, including Elsevier, allow authors to make their manuscripts open access. The UB Libraries hope to soon roll out the UB Institutional Repository.

There are many misconceptions about open access:

• Myth 1: Open access journals are not peer-reviewed. Actually OA is an access model, not an editorial model. OA journals often have the same rigorous standard of blind peer-review exercised by traditional journals.

• Myth 2: All OA journals require publication fees that authors must pay themselves. In fact, 67 percent of OA journals charge no publication fees, and most that do charge fees waive them for authors of limited means. Finally, some funding agencies and institutions pay these fees to assure the widest possible readership.

• Myth 3: Open-access journals uniformly have low quality and impact. Like subscription journals, some OA journals are low quality. However, other OA journals have become leading journals in their fields, despite being less than a decade old. PLOS Biology, started in 2003, has a journal impact factor of 13.5, seventh highest out of 263 biochemistry journals.

For more information on the advantages of open-access publishing, click here.

—A. Ben Wagner, University Libraries