Open Access and Knowledge Sharing

According to Suber, “open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder” (2004). In scholarly literature, open access articles and journals can be found across all disciplines, but vary widely in their scope. While the final product of open access publication is free to use, the costs to produce it remain the same, So, the question becomes: who foots the bill?

Costs normally associated with producing open access articles and journals include peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. To fund these costs, several models exist. These include Article Processing Charges (APCs), journals being subsidized by a host university or professional society, annual membership/subscription to the journal, institutional or consortia fee discounts, or realizing enough income from other non-open access journals to cover costs of the publisher’s open access journals.

APCs are usually charged to the individual author or sometimes to the institution, and can be quite costly, often to the tune of several thousand dollars. Leonard Lief Library recently signed a transformative agreement with Cambridge University Press, which waives APCs for authors publishing in qualifying open access journals. While this agreement is in place for this publisher, covering APCs is not something libraries generally fund, and instead look for other ways for faculty to disseminate their research more broadly and freely.

One method often available is depositing an article’s preprint in an institutional repository. The preprint is the edited version of the manuscript as submitted for final production, minus typesetting and professional formatting applied to the manuscript when it is published. For authors, preprints can be an excellent way to publicize their research and make it freely available by depositing it in an institutional repository.

At CUNY, each college has access to its own repository, known as Academic Works, which can be searched and viewed by anyone. This repository is indexed by Google, ChatGPT, and more. The repository’s content can also be found via the Library’s OneSearch platform, which searches most of the Library’s electronic resources. When submitting a preprint to the repository, one chooses which subjects to associate with the paper, adds relevant abstract and keywords, and if they wish, an embargo date, so that the paper will not be freely available before then.

Once a paper is submitted, the author is able to see metrics in their account for usage, including citation counts, media mentions, and tweets. One can also discover institutions and countries where readership came from. This is helpful for authors to gauge their research’s output and demonstrate its impact.

From a research standpoint, having the preprint freely available means libraries or institutions without access to non-open access journals can still download and disseminate this research to their communities. This is important for freely sharing knowledge, not to mention cost effective. Libraries can leverage their institutional repository data to increase their journal subscriptions based on faculty research and other institutional repository retrievals to pinpoint possible journals for subscription.

Visit Academic Works and read the Library’s Research Guide on how to submit articles to Lehman’s Institutional Repository.

Michelle Ehrenpreis

References:

Suber, P. (2004). A very brief introduction to open access. Earlham.edu. Retrieved from https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm