October 20, 2017, by Rob Ounsworth

International Open Access Week: five reasons to share after publication

It’s the 10th International Open Access Week on 23-29 October 2017 and this year’s theme is an invitation to answer the question of what tangible benefits can be achieved by making scholarly outputs openly available.

“Open in order to…” is intended as a prompt to go beyond talking about openness and focus instead on what openness enables us to do within individual disciplines and institutions.

 

To celebrate, we’ve pulled together the top 5 benefits to open access publishing:

• Disseminating your work to a broader audience
  Your work isn’t subscription only and is therefore accessible to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world
• Complying with open access mandates
  HEFCE’s open access policy states that any journal article or conference paper accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 must be madeopen access to be eligible for submission in the next REF. Your funder may also mandate that findings of work funded by their grants must be made open access
• Promoting and publicising of quality research
  You’ve worked hard to get your work published in a reputable journal, and now everyone can access your final published manuscript easily and quickly
• Providing easier access at no cost
  Once you’ve published open access your manuscript isn’t sitting behind a paywall, accessible only to subscribers. It’s easily found through a Google search and at no cost to the reader.
• Maximising impact and citation potential
  This wide, free and timely dissemination of work means that more people will see it when it is relevant, maximising citation potential and therefore making more of an impact.

 

For Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), this year’s theme will “help focus discussions during Open Access Week on those benefits of openness that are most compelling locally—whether that’s increasing citation counts, enabling anyone to learn from the latest scholarship, or accelerating the translation of research into economic gains—and encourage action to realize these benefits.”

#OAweek

The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek. You are invited to use the hashtag #OpenInOrderTo to participate in an online conversation about the benefits of an open system of communicating scholarship.

For more information about International Open Access Week, please visit www.openaccessweek.org
The University of Nottingham is committed to supporting its researchers in improving their publications’ visibility and impact. Contact the Libraries, Research and Learning Resources team for support and advice on the routes to open access by emailing openaccess@nottingham.ac.uk, or visit the Open Access webpages to learn about open access and the REF, the University’s and funders’ policies on open access and how to deposit your research outputs into our institutional repository ePrints.

Want to know more about open access and how it affects your research? Take a look at our comprehensive webpages.

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