Open Access Policy Support

What We Offer

The University of Oklahoma's Open Access Policy aims to make OU research freely available to the public while complying with institutional mandates. The OU Libraries' Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication team collaborates with faculty, librarians, and campus stakeholders to support policy adoption, assist researchers in depositing their work into OU's institutional repository, and provide workshops and resources on open access practices. Through their efforts, they advance OU’s commitment to transparency, innovation, and equitable access to knowledge.

  • Consultations and support
  • Workshops and resources
  • Assistance with depositing your work
  • CV scraping

Get Started

How Do We Support Open Access Deposits?

The OU institutional open access policy facilitates the dissemination of OU-Norman’s research and scholarship products as widely as possible, extending the reach and impact of our scholarly work. To support the publishing of your work, our team provides three options for depositing work into the SHAREOK Institutional repository: 

  1. CV Scraping: Our team reviews a list of your publications and uploads them to the repository on your behalf.
  2. Self-Deposit: Log in to shareok.org and submit your publication.
  3. Faculty Activity System: Log in to the faculty activity system and add your work there. 

Who Can Use This Service

This service is open to all OU faculty.

About the Policy

OU-Norman’s Open Access Policy allows faculty to legally share their scholarly articles, making them available for anyone to read.

The policy was adopted by the OU-Norman Faculty Senate on May 8, 2023 and approved by the Senior Vice President and Provost on August 15, 2023. The policy is based on the Harvard model policy

To learn more, read the official OU-Norman Campus Open Access Policy.

Benefits of Open Access

More citations: Open Access journals garner more citations, as numerous studies have shown (and continue to show).

More readers: A 2008 BMJ study showed that “full text downloads were 89% higher, PDF downloads 42% higher, and unique visitors 23% higher for open access articles than for subscription access articles.” These findings have been confirmed for other disciplines, as well.

More social media attention: An Altmetric.com study found that open access articles also receive more academic social media attention than articles that are paywalled in toll-access journals.

More access for those who need it: there are plenty of people who might need access to your work – scholars from small institutions and low- and middle-income countries, patient advocates, patients themselves, and citizen scientists. Publishing open access will allow more people to read your work and potentially benefit from it.

Nature.com reports that open access articles have:

  • greater public engagement
  • faster impact
  • wider collaboration
  • and increased interdisciplinary conversation

Why OU Authors Choose to Make Their Work Open Access

Carol Silva has blonde hair, glasses, and is smiling. She wears a navy top, navy suit blazer, and silver necklace, conveying a professional tone. Behind her, there's a soft, blurry background.

I support OA publishing because it fosters the possibility of a more diverse and wider audience for research and creative works. Arbitrary paywall barriers to access do not serve the goals of supporting ingenuity, knowledge growth, and changing the world for good. Access to new research isn’t a given—locally or globally, and we want folks everywhere to be able to see our work, comment on it, and build on it with their own research and creative endeavors.

Dr. Carol Silva, Senior Associate Vice President for Research

Chung-Hao Lee has short hair and glasses and is smiling. He is wearing a dark gray suit jacket, white collared dress shirt, and a plaid tie, conveying a professional demeanor. The background shows a hallway with windows and red brick walls.

Easy access for other researchers, an increase in the visibility of the research work, and fast publication turnaround are benefits I’ve seen by publishing articles in open-access journals.

Dr. Chung-Hao Lee, Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering

Ji Hong has dark, shoulder-length hair and glasses. She is wearing a purple cowl-neck sweater and a blue jacket. She is outside and is surrounded by lush greenery and vibrant red flowers.

I chose to publish open access because I can reach readers that I want to reach more easily. It makes new knowledge publicly available to people outside university academic circles. This is a more equitable and just distribution of ideas.

Dr. Ji Hong, Educational Psychology

Headshot of Dr. J.P. Masly

I choose to publish in OA journals so I can retain the copyright to my work. Publishers often ask authors to transfer the copyright. Without holding the copyright, if I want to use a figure from my paper— a figure that I produced— I have to request permission from the publisher to use that figure elsewhere. Why should a publisher have the right to decide if and how I use my intellectual products?
Dr. J. P. Masly, Biology

FAQ

Gold Open Access 

Gold open access journals make all of their articles open access immediately. There are many different business models for gold open access publishers, and you can search the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for a quality, vetted journal in your discipline. Some gold OA journals require that authors pay a publication fee or “article processing charge” upon acceptance for publication. About 70% of Gold OA journals don’t charge a fee though, and some publishers offer fee waivers for those who need financial assistance. With some careful planning, you can also cover Gold OA publishing fees by writing the expected fees into a grant budget or by applying for Research Publication Subvention Funding provided by University Libraries.

Hybrid Publishing

Some subscription journals will allow authors to pay an APC to make their work open access, even if other papers in the journal are not. This practice is known as “Hybrid OA.” Hybrid OA journals allow authors to publish in a journal that may be more recognized by their peers, while also reaping the benefits that open access publishing provides. If you must publish in a hybrid journal because of its perceived prestige, OU’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships (OVPRP) and Provost’s Office offer subvention funding that pays for a portion of authors’ APCs. And there are ways to publish in hybrid journals and still make your work openly available (discussed next in "Green Open Access").

Green Open Access (Institutional Repositories)

Green Open Access is the practice of publishing an article as you normally would in a subscription journal and posting a copy of your article in an institutional repository such as SHAREOK. It’s a popular option for those who can’t pay open access fees, but it has two major caveats: embargo periods and the inability to upload the publisher’s pdf of your article.

Often, publisher restrictions mean authors have to wait a year or longer to make their work available via an institutional repository, leading to major delays in the dissemination of their work. And most publishers never allow authors to upload the publisher’s pdf. Instead, they allow uploading the post print (author’s final, submitted manuscript after all peer review and revisions, but before copy editing and layout) or a preprint (author’s final draft before peer review). Yet even with these restrictions, uploading your work to SHAREOK still provides access to those who need it.

Open Access Books

UC Press, Open Humanities Press, and Springer are just a few of the many publishers that are now publishing open access books. All are free online but also available for purchase in print. Some are open access immediately; others become open access after a period of being restricted for sale only. You can find thousands of them at the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

What the policy IS

The policy ensures faculty can share their scholarly articles

What the policy ISN'T

The policy does not require faculty to share their work, transfer their copyright, or publish in specific journals

What the policy DOES

The policy enables faculty to share the final accepted version or OA version of their scholarly articles; upon request, faculty may receive an automatic waiver from the policy for individual articles

Some content on this page was derived from the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication and is used is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Content on this page, unless otherwise noted, is licensed CC BY 4.0 International.