Open Access Policy Support
Service Overview
The OU-Norman Faculty Senate adopted a campus-wide Open Access Policy on May 8, 2023, and it was approved by the Senior Vice President and Provost on August 15, 2023. This policy enables faculty to legally share their scholarly articles, making them available for anyone to read. The OU Libraries' Open Initiatives & Scholarly Communication team leads the implementation of the University of Oklahoma's Open Access Policy.
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
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What is Open Access?
The information people use is increasingly available online, often for free, and scholarly publications are no exception. Open access items are digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, and they may be available at a publisher’s website or placed in a repository by an author. Open access journals are proliferating, as are open access policies at institutions of higher education.
Who Can Use This Service
This service is open to all OU faculty.
About the Policy
The 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. It assists faculty in complying with open access mandates from funders, including the US federal government. The policy enables faculty authors to retain the rights to their work. Readers who cannot afford the fees charged by for-profit publishers to access work behind a paywall can receive access to OU-Norman scholarship that is made open access under the policy.
The policy was developed by faculty appointed by the OU-Norman Faculty Senate during the 2022-23 academic year. The OU-Norman Faculty Senate adopted the policy on May 8, 2023, and it was approved by the Senior Vice President and Provost on August 15, 2023. The policy is based on the Harvard model policy. It was built on the work conducted by the Faculty Senate’s OU Libraries Committee, 2019-2022; the committee consulted stakeholders from across campus as well as representatives of other institutions having institutional open access policies.
- 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.
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
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
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
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
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
Contact Information
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).
Open access publishing has a tremendous number of advantages, but it also has a few caveats to consider:
Perceived lack of prestige: It’s an unfortunate fact that reviewers for tenure and promotion often judge the quality of articles by the journal of publication when skimming CVs. Article-level metrics can be an answer to this problem, though – a highly cited paper is still highly cited, no matter where it’s published.
It might be expensive for authors: Some open access journals charge publication fees that cost up to $4300, making OA publishing a non-starter for underfunded researchers. Fee waivers are available, and OU Libraries has an Open Access Fund to help cover fees. Additionally, 70% of the open access journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge OA publication fees or APCs.
Your colleagues might not see your paper: If you publish in anything but the top journals in your subject area, chances are that your colleagues won’t be aware of your paper’s existence. It’s hard nowadays for your colleagues to follow all the new developments in your field, so if you choose to publish OA, it might take a little legwork on your part to get them to notice your article.
Concern about deceptive publishers: With the rise of OA publishing there has been an increase in the number of unscrupulous publishers – sometimes known as predatory publishers. Of course, publication ethics are important for all publishers. But predatory publishers engage in deceptive, deceitful, and/or fraudulent activities which may actually end up harming your reputation. The Think, Check, Submit initiative was developed to help authors identify deceptive publishers, and the Open Access Journal Quality Indicators were created to help authors as well. When in doubt, contact your OU Libraries liaison librarian.
We think that the benefits of open access vastly outweigh the drawbacks, especially given the pace with which academia and funders are increasingly embracing open access.
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.