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HSRC

Plan outputs and publication: determine where to publish (data and research Outputs)

Why is Open Access (OA) important 
  • Extreme costs of packaged journal subscriptions
  • Drive to make publicly funded information freely available
  • Has many advantages
Advantages
  • Create better visibility:
    • Visibility of a researcher in a networked community
  • Visibility of your research on a bigger platform
    • Discoverability and searchability of your research
    • Repositories make use of powerful software to enhance the discoverability of your work
    • Repositories are interlinked.
    • Author retains copyright of his/ her research, through proper and responsible Rights Management
Disadvantages

  • It takes some time before new journals, both traditional and open access, can acquire an impact factor.
  • The number of high-quality, fully open-access journals varies enormously across the different disciplines. Some disciplines have very few or not enough.

  • Publishing in open-access journals sometimes involves additional administration, whereas delivering articles to traditional journals can usually be done easily online.

  • In this transition period, most research institutes have not yet made provisions for the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

  • Researchers can be spammed by open-access publishers of often dubious quality ("predatory journals"), which colours their perception of the open-access publication model.

Two routes of OA publishing
  • Gold OA: Publishing in an open access journal.
    • To consider: APCs (Article Processing Charges)
  • Green OA: Publishing of a version of research output (sometimes a pre-print, or post-print) via an open access repository.
    • To consider: Embargo periods