Ask a Librarian
Introduction
Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. OA encourages dissemination of research and knowledge and promotes equitable access to all.
Who benefits from open access?
Open Access
- More exposure for your work
- Practitioners can apply your findings
- Higher citation rates
- Your research can influence policy
- The public can access your findings
- Compliant with grant rules
- Taxpayers get value for money
- Researchers in developing countries can see your work
CC-BY Danny Kingsley and Sarah Brown
- Faculty: Open access increases the amount of research available to faculty and makes their own publications more widely accessible and cited more frequently.
- Students: Open access allows students to retain access to high-quality research well after graduation, when they’ve lost access to the library’s subscribed content.
- Taxpayers: Research that is funded through federal grants (i.e., taxpayer dollars) should be published OA to ensure taxpayers have access to the research their taxes paid for.
- Researchers in developing areas: Open access enables researchers in areas that can’t afford expensive subscriptions to journals, expanding the reach of information and opportunity.
Publishing
Identify and evaluate journals
Publishers that support open access publishing often have an equally rigorous submission and review process as traditional journals. Many publishers/journals use the same review process for traditional and OA manuscripts. When considering publishing, it’s important to find credible, high-quality journals and avoid predatory publishers. Predatory publishers attempt to mimic legitimate journals, but often provide little to no editing, peer review, or other publishing support. Predatory publishers exist for both open access and traditional journals, so it’s important to thoroughly review a journal, its publisher, and the review committee to vet its quality.
- Think. Check. Submit.Think. Check. Submit. is a tool that can help you review a journal/publisher to determine credibility.
Open access publishing support
The Library supports open access publishing through agreements with publishers to help reduce costs to authors. These agreements provide access to the content behind the paywall for the university, but also support open access publishing to journals on that platform by waiving the article processing charge (APC) for authors.
Current Agreements
Each link provides more information about publishing OA with that publisher. While the process differs slightly for each, you will generally need to create an account, choose University of Wisconsin - Green Bay as your affiliated institution, and submit your manuscript as the corresponding author. Most publishers will follow up after accepting your manuscript to determine if the article will be published OA and will have more information about how the APC will be waived.
Contact Stephanie Alvey if you have any questions.
Institutional Repository
The Library maintains a collection of faculty and staff-published materials in the University’s institutional repository (IR) to provide long-term access and preservation of scholarly research.
Scholarly Metrics
There are several tools used to measure research and journal impact. Traditional measurements include publishing and citation analysis, though alternative measurements are becoming more popular to quantify scholarly impact.
Citation analysis
Citation analysis studies the impact and assumed quality of an article, author, or institution based on the number of times works/authors have been cited by others.
Publishing traditions vary between disciplines, so it is important to compare journals within similar disciplines as much as possible.
Some popular citation analysis tools include:
- Web of ScienceCross-discipline measures for citation analysis
- Google Scholar MetricsAllows authors to view journal rankings and ratings by various h-indices
- EigenfactorMeasures journals in the scientific community
- Scimago Journal & Country RankUses citation data from Scopus to provide impact data
One of the most well-known sources for scholarly impact metrics is the Impact Factor measurement from Journal Citation Reports (a Clarivate product). The Library does not have access due to its extreme cost. If you are visiting the UW-Madison or UW-Milwaukee campuses, you can access Journal Citation Reports through their libraries.