How to make your own work open access

• This page is part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP).

• Peter Suber wrote these notes as the online handout for a talk at the Berkman Center, October 23, 2012. Also see Chapter 10 ("Self-help") of Open Access (MIT Press, 2012). These notes focus on OA for peer-reviewed research articles and their unrefereed preprints, and do not cover books, theses and dissertations, conference presentations, datasets, audio, video, multimedia, or source code. The live audience for the talk consisted of Harvard people, which explains the many Harvard references. But the sources cited will be useful for scholars anywhere. The full title of the talk was, How to Make Your Research Open Access (Whether You're at Harvard or Not).

• Suggested short URL for this page = bit.ly/how-oa

Publish in an OA journal ("gold" OA)

• Find a suitable OA journal. Go to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and browse by field.
  • Some will be high in quality, impact, and prestige. Some will be low.
  • Some will use liberal open licenses, like CC-BY. Some will use more restrictive open licenses like CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND. Some will offer only gratis OA without open licenses.
  • Some will charge publication fees, and some will not.
  • If the best journal for your purposes charges a publication fee, see whether your funder or university will pay it.
    • Many universities are willing to pay publication fees on behalf of faculty.
    • If you're at Harvard, apply to the Harvard Open-Access Publishing (HOPE) fund. For a Harvard-based project to spread HOPE-like funds to other institutions, see the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE).

• Then submit your manuscript, just as you would to a conventional journal.

• If you don't find a suitable OA journal, check again when you publish your next paper. Things are changing fast.

Deposit in an OA repository ("green" OA)

• Find a suitable institutional or disciplinary repository for your work.
  • Institutional repositories try to capture the research output of an institution. Disciplinary repositories try to capture the research output of a field.
  • Consult the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) or the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Both list both sorts of repository. Also see the list of disciplinary repositories at the Open Access Directory.

• Harvard's institutional repository is called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard or DASH.
  • Anyone with an active Harvard ID may deposit in DASH. Students and Fellows: that includes you.

• If there isn't an OA repository in your institution or field, then consider a universal repository like OpenDepot, Academia, or Mendeley.
  • You could also post your work to your personal home page, as a last resort. Repositories are more durable than personal home pages.

Permissions

• Whether you make your work OA through a journal a repository ("gold" or "green" OA), the provider will need permission to make the work OA. The permission must come from the relevant rightsholder.

• You are the relevant rightsholder, and may authorize OA on your own, when you are the sole author of a new work and have not yet transferred your rights to anyone else.
  • You may authorize publication at an OA journal (gold OA). Just signing the publishing contract.
  • You may authorize OA through a repository (green OA) for an unpublished preprint. Just making the deposit and clicking the box (or equivalent) to affirm that you have the right to do so. However, publishing an article usually requires transferring some rights to the publisher. Hence, the process is not as simple for published articles or postprints (see next).

• If you want to deposit a published article in a repository, then the repository will need permission from the relevant rightsholder.
  • If you retained all rights when you published, which is rare, then you may authorize OA through a repository without involving the publisher.
  • If you transferred key rights to the publisher, which is common, then you will often, but not always, need the publisher's permission.
  • Most conventional or non-OA publishers give blanket permission for their authors to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository. To see whether your journal or publisher does so, read your publishing agreement with care or look up the policy in the SHERPA RoMEO database.
    • In most cases, this permission applies to the version of the text approved by peer-review, without subsequent copy-editing. To take advantage of this option, you'll need to put your hands on that version of the text. Going forward, always retain that version of the articles you publish.
    • SHERPA also maintains a considerably shorter list of publishers giving blanket permission for authors to deposit the published articles in an OA repository.
  • If your journal or publisher does not give blanket permission for green OA, then try one of these strategies.
    • Ask for permission. Many publishers who don't give blanket permission will agree to case-by-case requests).
    • Use an author addendum. An author addendum is a proposed revision to the publishing agreement, written by a lawyer, giving the author the right to authorize OA. Because it's a proposed revision, publishers may accept it or reject it.

• To insure that you'll always have permission to make your future articles OA, work toward a Harvard-style OA policy at your institution.
  • Today seven of Harvard's nine schools have effective OA policies.
  • The Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) can help you with a policy at your institution. Also see our guide to good practices for university OA policies.
  • Through Harvard-style OA policies, faculty grant the institution non-exclusive rights to their future scholarly articles, including the right to authorize OA through the institutional repository. This assures that faculty may make their work OA even when they publish in a non-OA journal, and even a non-OA journal that does not already allow author-initiated green OA.