How to make your own work open access

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  • Peter Suber wrote these notes for a talk at the Berkman Center, October 23, 2012. Also see Chapter 10 ("Self-help") of Open Access (the book) (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, multimedia, or source code.

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, and some low.
    • Some charge publication fees, and some do not. (The DOAJ will tell you whether a given journal does or doesn't.)
    • If the best journal for your purposes charges a publication fee, see whether your funder or university will pay it.
  • 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)

  • Institutional v. disciplinary repositories
    • Institutional repositories try to capture the research output of an institution. Disciplinary repositories try to capture the research output of a field.
  • The Harvard institutional repository is called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard or DASH.
    • Faculty, students, and fellows may deposit in DASH. Anyone with an active Harvard ID may deposit in DASH.
  • If there isn't an OA repository in your institution or field, then consider a universal repository like Academia or Mendeley.
    • You could also post your work to your personal home page, as a last resort.

Permissions

  • When you publish in an OA journal, you give the journal permission to make the work OA when you sign the publishing agreement. If you wrote the article and haven't previously published, you hold the rights necessary to authorize OA through the journal.
  • If you deposit an unpublished preprint in a repository, then (again) you hold all the rights necessary to authorize OA.
  • But if you want to deposit a published article ("postprint") in a repository, you will need permission from the relevant rightsholder.
    • If you retained all rights when you published, which is very rare, then you may authorize OA through a repository without involving the publisher.
    • If you transferred key rights to the publisher, which is very 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. Also use this database to discover which conventional journals do not provide OA themselves but at least allow author-initiated OA through repositories.
    • 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 be sure that you'll always have permission to make your future articles OA, work for 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.


COPE, <www.oacompact.org/>

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