Thing 15: Open Access and Surrey Research Insight

This Thing is about making academic papers freely available, rather than having them accessible only to journal subscribers, or giving access through one-off payments. The information about this has come from the 23 Things Surrey 2019 blog page. 

The benefit of making research papers freely available, i.e. ‘Open Access’,  is that the research can be shared to the world without cost to the reader, and thus making any discoveries found in the research accessible to anyone who would like to know.  In addition, since these papers are widely downloaded (because they’re free!), the paper may receive a greater deal of citations, and the author increase in reputation.

There are two main routes for publishing papers in Open Access; Green and Gold. The Green route is as follows:

• You retain the right to post your accepted version wherever you may do so
• There are no charges to you
• Your own version is posted
• Is will be publicly available immediately, or after an agreed embargo period with the publisher (6 months – 3 years)
• It will be available from your university, and any other repository that the publisher specifies
• Copyright is usually transferred to the publisher, but you retain certain rights

The Gold route however offers a more professional service:

• The publisher makes the published version immediately open access.
• There is a cost of around £1800
• The version is typeset according to the publisher’s standards
• The paper is immediately available – no embargo is given
• The paper will be available via the publisher’s website, and almost any repository
• The paper is published under a creative commons licence, and you retain the copyright
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I am yet to publish a paper, however so long as I am allowed by my industrial sponsor, and the University, I would like to publish my research as Open Access as I think it will give the greatest visibility to the discoveries. Whether or not its Green or Gold depends on whether we can finance it! 

Many thanks for reading this week’s blog, here’s a picture of green and yellow parrot by Zdeněk Macháček (Unsplash)!