How to make your own work open access: Difference between revisions

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* Harvard's institutional repository is called [http://dash.harvard.edu/ Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard] or DASH.
* Harvard's institutional repository is called [http://dash.harvard.edu/ Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard] or DASH.
** Anyone with an active Harvard ID may deposit in DASH. Students and Fellows: that includes you.
** Anyone with an active Harvard ID may [http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/dash/quicksubmit 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 [http://opendepot.org/ OpenDepot], [http://www.academia.edu/ Academia], or [http://www.mendeley.com/ Mendeley].
* If there isn't an OA repository in your institution or field, then consider a universal repository like [http://opendepot.org/ OpenDepot], [http://www.academia.edu/ Academia], or [http://www.mendeley.com/ Mendeley].

Revision as of 12:51, 19 October 2012

  • Peter Suber wrote these notes as the online handout for a talk at the Berkman Center on October 23, 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, courseware, 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).
    • Also see Chapter 10 ("Self-help") of Open Access (MIT Press, 2012).
    • Now that I've got the notes online, I welcome suggestions.

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.
  • 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)

  • 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) simply by signing the publishing contract.
    • You may authorize OA through a repository (green OA) for an unpublished preprint simply by 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, which complicates the process a bit (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 text approved by peer-review, but not to subsequent copy-editing, pagination, or look-and-feel. To take advantage of this permission, you'll need to put your hands on that version of the text. Going forward, always retain that version of every article 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 the HOAP guide to good practices for university OA policies, written by me and Stuart Shieber.
    • 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, even when the non-OA journal does not already allow author-initiated green OA, and even when faculty have not negotiated special access terms with their publishers.