Leonard Lief Library’s Spring 2026 Innovation Event – Paths to Open Publication: Share Your Research Widely

On March 18th, Lehman and CUNY faculty and staff gathered in the Library’s Periodicals Room to learn more about open access publishing.  Welcoming remarks by Associate Provost Karin Beck reminded us that communication about scholarship is a necessary accompaniment to scholarship itself.  Keynote speaker Professor Jill Cirasella from CUNY Graduate Center described the nature of open access scholarly publishing today, using the apt metaphors of sunshine, clouds, and storms.

Altruistic motivations for publishing open access include making scholarship freely available to the public, recognizing unpaid labor of authors and peer reviewers, rising costs for libraries to sustain subscriptions to traditional journals, and inequity in access to scholarship.  Contextualizing these factors, Professor Cirasella explained that open access in its purest form is “community-owned, scholar-led, values-driven open access that doesn’t concentrate power in the hands of the same old high-profit, exploitative publishers” (Cirasella, 2026).  This form manifests in born open access journals, where articles are published automatically free for anyone to read.  Other forms are slightly more prohibitive, including posting final version of a manuscript to an author’s institutional or personal webpages, or institutional or scholarly digital repositories.

Some journals permit final versions be included in a repository after a set embargo period, while others only allow the accepted manuscript without editing or formatting to be included in the repositories.  The “stormiest” forms of open access are publisher approaches to making certain issues or articles open access through requiring authors to pay hefty article processing fees (APCs), sometimes to the tune of several thousand dollars per article.

At times authors can obtain grant or institutional funding to pay these APCs, but for those who cannot, this model reinforces inequities among authors, who do not have full access to the very articles they write, and neither may their institutions if they cannot afford a subscription.  A somewhat cloudy form of open access is transformative agreements, where institutions are given full access to a publisher’s journal collection at a cost based on their institutional faculty scholarship output (the greater the output, the higher the cost).

This approach may prove counterproductive since in some ways, it punishes faculty for publishing more.  However, it could also justify the library’s subscription due to faculty getting more access to content, perhaps publishing more in these journals since their scholarship could potentially reach a wider audience.  Conclusion of the keynote advised faculty to “think, check, submit” when deciding where to publish, seeking guidance from their library and CUNY experts in this somewhat confusing forecast, hopefully showing promise of sunnier days (Cirasella, 2026).

A video presentation from Assistant Vice President of Research Administration and Strategy Brandon Begarly highlighted his office ORACLE’s role in providing some funding for open access publishing to faculty.  ORACLE staff Patrick McInnis and Valerie Luria explained in person the application process.  This initiative strengthens the relationship between ORACLE, which can underwrite costs and identify projects with the Library, which in turn will help ensure and promote access to projects.

The next speaker, Professor Marco Ramirez Rojas, described his decade-long experience as Managing Editor of Ciberletras, an open access journal focused on “study of literature, cinema, and cultures of Latin America, Spain and the larger Hispanophone world,” published through his department on the Lehman College website (Lehman College, 2026).  The challenges and opportunities running an open access journal contextualized what open access publishing looks like for those living, funding, and advocating for it.  The journal’s content highlights his impressiveness as a scholar, representing Lehman pride in the best way.

Lastly, Office of Library Services Scholarly Communications Manager Jojo Karlin detailed origins of open access from Budapest Open Access Initiative to CUNY’s Faculty Senate Statement on Open Access.  She explained how Academic Works, CUNY’s institutional repository, demonstrates commitment to open access through its equitable form of highlighting and making publicly available faculty and student scholarship.

The event concluded with an engaging dialogue between the three scholars whose commitment to inclusive scholarship and author’s rights fuel their work in open access.  Shedding light on real issues of unpaid labor, barriers to access, occasional lack of institutional support, and artificial intelligence, the panelists captivated the audience with their knowledge and experience. The audience left inspired, encouraged to reflect deeply about their roles as author, reader, and – for those who are librarians – champions of making scholarship accessible to our communities.

Michelle Ehrenpreis

References

Cirasella, J. (2026, March 18). Open access scholarly publishing: sunshine, clouds, and storms. Google slides. https://tinyurl.com/lehman-oa-2026

Lehman College. (2026). Ciberletras. https://www.lehman.edu/academics/arts-humanities/languages-literatures/ciberletras/