1. Scholarly Communication:
From Understanding to Engagement
Open Access Publishing:
Content for Your Teaching /
A Forum for Your Research
Beth Evans
Associate Professor
Brooklyn College Library
June 3, 2013

2. Quiz
• PLoS ONE
• DPLA
• IR
• PeerJ
• MOOC
• A database used to store text and non-text
original content, often associated with an
institution but sometimes connected to a
profession or discipline.
• Courses, often developed at institutions of
higher education, and offered without a
fee
• A biomedical , peer-reviewed research
journal supported by membership
• An open digital library giving access to the
collections of many separate libraries and
cultural institutions
• An open access science journal that
sustains itself through author fees

3. Variations on the following slides are available at
http://tinyurl.com/CUNYITGoldOA
Courtesy of Jill Cirasella
CUNY Graduate Center &
The UFS Open Access Advisory Group
jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu
Licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Attribution

4. Open access (OA) materials are:
• accessible at no cost on a journal website or in a repository committed to
long-term archiving
• available for all to read, download, print, copy, share, etc. (attribution
always required, of course)
Many kinds of documents can be made OA: scholarly journal articles, books,
curricular materials, conference presentations, dissertations, college
documents, and much more.
What Is Open Access?

5. • Gold OA
"Gold OA" means publishing with publishers that automatically and immediately
make the work available online to all at no cost.
Most Gold OA publishers are journal publishers, but a few book publishers make
their books OA.
• Green OA
"Green OA" refers to materials that, regardless of where else they appear, are made
available (usually by the author) at no charge in an online open access repository
committed to long-term preservation.
Use Sherpa Romeo to find out individual publisher policies.
The Colors of Open Access

6. Finding Gold OA Articles
• Articles from Gold OA journals are freely available online and therefore easily
findable via Google and Google Scholar.
• In addition, library databases index OA journals.
(Of course they do!)
• E.g., Scopus indexes 18,500+ peer-reviewed journals, including 1800+ peer-
reviewed OA journals.
• Upshot: You will find OA articles naturally when you use Google, Google Scholar,
and library databases.

7. OA = anyone can read the journal
OA ≠ anyone can publish in the journal
• OA journals are real journals. Publishing in an OA journal is not self-publishing
or vanity publishing!
• OA journals prove themselves the same way other journals do: through the
quality of their articles and the prominence of the people they attract as authors,
editorial board members, etc. Research an OA journal just like you would a non-
OA journal!

8. A journal's peer review policy
is independent of its business model.
• Most scholarly journals, open access and toll access, are peer reviewed.
• (Some open access journals are not peer reviewed; some toll access
journals are not peer reviewed.)

9. Open Access:
Not Just About Published Text
The Digital Humanities:
Technology Meets Literature & the Arts
(and you have access, and can participate, too!)

13. http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html
David McCandless:
The Beauty of Data Visualization