Open Access Publishing

Open access (OA) publishing models allow free, immediate access to research and support the continuous, free dissemination of an author’s research to an international audience of scientists, researchers, faculty, and the public. Publishing research using open access mechanisms provides greater chances of visibility for researchers and scholars, subsequently leading to more citations and greater impact. Researchers retain copyright to their intellectual property to reuse, remix or distribute their work how they wish.

Government organizations and agencies funding research increasingly have open access requirements for any publications resulting from their funded research. You can visit the department or funding agency's website directly to find information about how to make these publications available (See OA Mandates) or discover published research in an OA repository such as PubMed Central.

To read more about open access view the OA guide.

Kresge Library's Open Access Resoltion

On November 18, 2016, Kresge Library faculty members unanimously approved an Open Access Resoltion for OU Libraries. The eight point pledge details the Library faculty members' commitment to: Make our own research freely available whenever possible; Encourage all OU faculty to publish their research in openly accessible journals; Give equal consideration to peer-reviewed articles published in open access journals during the tenure and promotion process. OU Libraries encourages other departments who wish to utilize open access mechanisms to enable continuous and free dissemination of research to an international audience of scientists, researchers, faculty, students and the public to use this resolution as model. Read the full-text of the resolution.

Locating OA published research

Open access publications are available for free on the web and can also be discovered in many subscription databases.

Popular open access databases:

• PubMed Central
• BioMed Central
• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
• DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)
• OpenHumanities Press
• PLOS (Public Library of Science)
• World Digital Library (Library of Congress & UN)

View the OA guide for more information about open access databases.

Funding for Open Access publishing

Open access publishing models vary, some OA publications are sponsored by universities, scholarly societies, or organizations that fully or partially subsidize the publishing costs for contributing authors. Other OA models are based on an article processing fee (APF), paid by the author after the manuscript has ungone peer-review and has been accepted by the journal. Authors can use research grant funding to cover the APF’s, or receive money from their institution either from an OA publishing fund, the Research office, or their departments.

Oakland University Libraries are committed to supporting open access as a publishing option for our faculty and researchers to publish their scholarly work. OU Libraries closed its OA Fund in April 2022. (Review the final report.) However, we continue to support faculty with making their scholarship open and available to the public. Ask you liaison librarian about how to post your author’s accepted manuscript in the institutional repository. We also have publishing agreements that offer free or discounted OA publishing with select publishers

Brief Rationale for Open Access Publishing:
The academic community has been a driving force in supporting open access to research. Currently, twenty-one universities have committed to developing mechanisms to financially support OA publishing by their faculty through signing The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE). Another thirty-three universities have established OA funds compatible with the underlying principles of the COPE compact and, to date, over 240 universities and over 90 research funders worldwide have adopted open access mandates.

In 2014, the federal government passed the Omnibus Appropriations bill, ensuring public access to federally funded research by directing government agencies with research budgets of one hundred million dollars or more to make electronic manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles freely available on the internet within twelve months of publication. This extended the open access requirements first enacted in 2005 by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to include the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Department of Education, among other smaller agencies.

Researchers at universities have long been giving away their scholarship for free, while their university library struggles with skyrocketing journal prices to maintain access to the same publications. Locking up results to research that is generated with public funds can no longer be justified. The public, as well as, researchers all around the world should have a right to gain access to research to increase the speed at which scientific discoveries can save or improve lives.