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Open Access: Open Access Publishing

License for Cornell University Content

Except for the sections on Creative Commons Licenses, The Public Domain, and Copyright, this Libguide Page has been borrowed from the Cornell University Library Open Access Publishing: Where to Publish page. It's licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

LNDL License

The Sections on Creative Commons Licenses, The Public Domain, and Copyright have been borrowed from the Loyola Notre Dame Library Copyright Information Center Research Guide and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

How to Make Your Research Open Access

There are 3 ways to make your publications open access. Note that if your research if funded by a federally agency, you must make it open access using one of the below methods.

1. Publish in open access journals.  See Finding Open Access Journals, here and Predatory Journals and Conferences, here. Publishing in open access journal usually requires paying an article processing charge (APC) that can range from $500 to over $10,000. See Paying for Open Access and Data Sharing for information on how to pay open access APCs.

2. Publish in a subscription journal and pay an APC to make your article open.  APCs that can range from $500 to over $10,000. See Paying for Open Access and Data Sharing for information on how to pay open access APCs.

3. Deposit your publication in an open access repository, such as ScholarWorks@UMBC. This process is called "self-archiving." Deposit your new works as you finish them. Deposit your older works retroactively. Email flinchba@umbc.edu with your submission to ScholarWorks or you CV, Google Scholar Profile, or another website that lists your works.

 

Finding Open Access Journals


  •  
    ROAD

    ROAD synthesizes information about open access journals from a number of sources. Its base is a subset of the ISSN registry. Users may browse to find open access journals by country or by subject. Users may also search for an open access title by name, ISSN number, subject, or other concept.

  • OAISter
  • OpenDOAR
  • BASE
  • Google Scholar
  • PLoS
    Creative Commons licensed science journals.
  • BioMed Central
    Creative Commons licensed medical journals.

Finding Open Access Journal Articles

  • Ulrichsweb Serial Directory. A source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals (also called serials) of all types: academic and scholarly journals, e-journals, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more.

  • Pubmed Central. A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). 

  • arXiv. An open-access pre-print repository of articles in the sciences.

  • bioRxiv. An open-access pre-print repository of biology articles.

  • medRxiv. An open-access pre-print repository of health sciences articles.

Open Access Repositories

Depositing your work in an open access repository is another way to share your research.  Be careful to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions when uploading your published work.  Repositories may be institutional, like ScholarWorks@UMBC, or discipline-specific.

Publisher Copyright Policies

What happens to my copyrights for my own published work? Every publisher has different policies in regards to self-archiving and your subsequent use of your published work. The SHERPA/RoMEO database provides a searchable collection of publisher policies--check here when deciding where to publish.

Where to Deposit Data for Open Access

Data sharing is increasingly important in research and now often mandated by funding agencies. You can deposit your data in ScholarWorks@UMBC. However, there are many discpline-specific data repositories, many of which are open access, and using one of them may increase the chances that your data wil be found and re-used.  Here are some resources for finding open access repositories in which to deposit your datasets:

  • Find a Data Repository

    The best place for your data is in a repository with similar data. Here are some tools for finding one:

  • Health related data repositories: https://sharing.nih.gov/data-management-and-sharing-policy/sharing-scientific-data/repositories-for-sharing-scientific-data.
  • Search for a data repository: re3data.org. After you search, then limit by "Data Upload" and select "Open" to find those that will accept data. You also may be able to qualify to add data to a limited repository.
  • Generalist Data Repositories
  • Zenodo is free for researchers worldwide to share their data. It provides DOIs and is indexed by Google Dataset Search. Total file size per record is 50 GB. Larger sizes can be requested and are granted on a case-by-case basis.
  • Figshare is free for researchers worldwide to share their data. It does not provide DOIs but you can obtain a ScholarWorks@UMBC DOI linking to your data in Figshare by emailing a link to your data in Figshare to ScholarWorks@UMBC. It's indexed by Google Dataset Search, It accepts files up to 20 GB. Larger datasets can be stored on Figshare+ with the payment of a one-time fee ranging from $450 for 100 GB up (Figshare+ pricing info is here: https://knowledge.figshare.com/plus)
  • Harvard Dataverse is free for researchers worldwide to share their data. It provides DOIs for datasets and is indexed by Google Dataset Search. It accepts file up to 10 GB with a 1 TB limit per researcher.
  • Open Science Framework  is free for researchers worldwide to share their data. It provides DOIs and is indexed by Google Dataset Search. It accepts file and projects up to 5 GB, but 50 GB per project if the project is public More storage available with institutional membership
  • Mendeley Data is free for researchers worldwide to share their data. It provides DOIs and is indexed by Google Dataset Search. Free users get 2GB of storage and pricing. With monthly payments more storage can be purchased starting at $4.99 per month for 5 GB and upward (pricing info is here: https://gist.github.com/spl/3dc59588db22c442975f7e2d5fcdaa4e).