Libraries and Learning
Open Access Without Tears
October 8, 2015
Let’s say you’re an academic who needs to develop a record of scholarship, either because you are up for tenure, you hope someday to be in a secure academic job, or you need to bring in grant dollars to support the research you do.
Or we could just say you’re an academic.
Let’s also say you’ve wondered whether your work will ever make an impact when the list price for your article in a Google search is $37.50 or the book you published about poverty is being sold at the astonishing price of $145 and you aren’t sure why it costs so much. And let’s say you once had a library account at a research university but now you’re between jobs and your library ID just stopped working and you’re beginning to wonder how long before your friends get weary of sending you PDFs.
Or we could just say you’re an academic. The majority of academics aren’t in tenured jobs at R1 institutions.
Is there any way to do things differently without compromising quality and without threatening your future? You’ve seen debates on Twitter, where some folks get so passionate about open access it’s kind of scary. You also keep seeing articles about “predatory” publishers who charge money to be published in journals that are bogus, and that’s scary, too. Is there a way to do good, respected research and still make it available to anyone in the world who wants to read it?
Actually, yes, in many cases. And it’s not necessarily that hard, though it does add extra steps and can require a bit of research up front.
Open Access Journals There are journals that anyone can read for free that don’t require a fee from the author to publish. Some of them are highly respected though few of them have the long histories to carry the prestige that the big-name journals have. An exception is Cultural Anthropology, a flagship society journal that has gone open access and is trying to develop and maintain a new funding model to keep it open. My profession’s major journal, College and Research Libraries, has also taken the leap and even the back issues are digitized and freely available, which is awesomely great when you want to share something with others by linking to it. Ask around; keep an eye out. There may be a brash new open access kid on the block that someday will have the name recognition that journals established in the print era have. You can explore the Directory of Open Access Journals’ subject lists, but people in your discipline who care about this stuff may be better guides to newly emerging reputations.
If you are working in a field where grant money can cover costs of publishing (and where funders increasingly expect public access to the work they fund), there are likely valuable open access options that cover their operation costs through author-side fees. Again, find out from colleagues which ones are most worthwhile. It’s fairly obvious to anyone who looks closely that some so-called journals are actually opportunist