Skip to content

Tag: Open Access Publiishing

Published on
Image of orange buttons with Open Access logo using the letters O and A to form an open padlock in a white bowl.
"Open Access promomateriaal" by biblioteekje is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

What is Open Access?

Open access (OA) journals make content available to anyone free of charge. While traditional publishing models require readers or institutions to purchase subscriptions to gain access to published content, users attempting to access this content without a subscription will find the content hidden behind a paywall. OA articles, on the other hand, can be accessed and read by anyone without payment or a subscription. 

The two most common OA publishing models are Gold OA and Hybrid OA. Gold OA journals make all published articles available to readers free of charge. Hybrid OA journals publish OA articles that are free to all readers, as well as traditional articles that can only be accessed and read by subscribers who pay for that content. Hybrid OA journals let authors choose whether or not to make their research available as open access or to restrict access via the traditional paywall model.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

While publishing your research as OA makes your work more widely accessible, it does come at a cost to the author. OA journals transfer the cost of publication from the reader to the author by charging authors Article Processing Charges, also known as APCs. The cost of APCs varies by journal, but the cost range from $2,000 to $5,000 for health sciences journals.

If you’d like to publish your research as OA, it’s important to consider how you will pay for APCs early in your research process. We recommend that you request funding for APCs in grant and funding proposals. Building these costs into your funding proposals will ensure that you have the necessary funds needed to cover APCs when you’re ready to publish. NIH grants and NSF grants allow for publication costs to be included in grant applications - so be sure to secure funding from the start of the research process!

To learn more about APCS, take a few minutes to watch Himmelfarb’s tutorials on Locating APCs and Including APCs in Funding Proposals!

Locating Article Publishing Charges (APCs) tutorial:

Including APCs in Funding Proposals tutorial:

APCs Waived for GW Authors!

GW currently has active “transformative agreements” with two publishers: Cambridge University Press, and The Company of Biologists. These agreements allow GW authors to publish their research as open access at no cost to authors - APCs are waived! The Cambridge University Press agreement covers nearly 50 medicine and health sciences journals. The Company of Biologist agreement waives APCs for GW authors in the following three hybrid journals:

It’s important to note that these agreements do not guarantee acceptance for publication in these journals. Manuscripts must meet the journal’s acceptance criteria. Authors must also use GW as their primary affiliation upon manuscript submission. Authors who claim another organization (such as the MFA, GW Hospital, CNHS, or the VA) are not covered under these agreements. For more information about GW’s Read and Publish agreements with Cambridge University Press and The Company of Biologist, contact Ruth Bueter at rbueter@gwu.edu.

Learn More:

If you’d like to learn more about open access publishing, check out our Open Access Publishing page of the Scholarly Publishing Research Guide. 

Published on

In 2021, UNESCO developed a Recommendation on Open Science to be adopted by member states. This recommendation evolved from a 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers promoting science as a common good. 

UNESCO’s Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers, https://youtu.be/94T7NGirUlM

The Recommendation on Open Science includes a definition of open science:

Open science is … an inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming to make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society, and to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community. It comprises all scientific disciplines and aspects of scholarly practices, including basic and applied sciences, natural and social sciences and the humanities, and it builds on the following key pillars: open scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems.

(UNESCO, 2021.)

The recommendation calls for scientific publications, research data, software and source code to be open and available to scientists internationally. The NIH adopted an open access policy for manuscripts resulting from funded research in 2008. Early this year the NIH adopted a policy requiring that all newly funded grants include a data management and sharing plan to make the underlying research data freely available to other researchers.  For more information on the data sharing policy and how to comply, explore our Research Guide.

Platforms that support the sharing and dissemination of research findings and their underlying data are becoming available. The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a “free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration”. It provides tools to design a study, collect and analyze data, and publish and share results. OSF was designed and is maintained by the non-profit Center for Open Science. 

A helpful feature of OSF is the ability to generate a unique, persistent URL (uniform resource locator) for a project for sharing and attribution. There is also built-in version control and collaborators can be assigned a hierarchical level of permissions for data and document management. Researchers can decide to make all or parts of a project public and searchable and add licensing. Public projects can be searched on the OSF site. Registering a project creates a timestamped version for preservation. Pre-prints can also be hosted and made available for searching.

OSF has integrations with a number of useful tools including storage add-ons like Amazon S3, Google Drive, DropBox and figshare. Zotero and Mendeley can be integrated for citation management and GitHub can be used for managing software and code. 

Institutions can set up a custom landing page for OSF and build user communities to promote sharing and collaboration within the institution and beyond. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and NYU are among the many research universities that are using OSF in this way.

Last month Nature and Code Ocean announced a partnership to launch and curate Open Science Library. The Open Science Library contains research software used in Nature journal articles. “Compute capsules” which include the code, data, and computing environment will allow researchers to reproduce results, re-use the code, and collaborate. As open science becomes the norm, more multifunction platforms that enhance sharing and reproducibility while preserving work and ensuring attribution will continue to emerge.

References:

UNESCO. (2021). UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949.locale=en

UNESCO. (2017). Consolidated Report on the Implementation by Member States of the 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379704

Foster, E. D., & Deardorff, A. (2017). Open Science Framework (OSF). Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 105(2), 203–206. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.88

Code Ocean. (2023). Code Ocean Partners with Nature Portfolio to Launch the Open Science Library with Ready-to-Run Software from Authors in Nature Journals (Press Release). https://codeocean.com/press-release/code-ocean-partners-with-nature-portfolio-open-science-library/

Published on
Image of an invoice with the words "Pay now" magnified.
"Invoice payment button" by recreahq is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

It’s a familiar scenario. You’ve completed your research, written up your findings, and selected a target journal  - which has sent your article out for review and accepted your work for publication!  You decide that you want to publish your research in an Open Access format to ensure that your findings are widely and equitably accessible. You convey your intentions to your publisher only to discover that they want you to pay a hefty Article Processing Charge (APC) in order to publish in an Open Access format. Shocked by the price, you go to your department chair with fingers crossed and request the funds to cover the fee. If you’re lucky, there are funds to cover the APC, but if not, you may find yourself having to reconsider publishing in an OA format. 

How can you be better prepared for the next time you try to publish in an Open Access format? Article processing charges frequently range from $2,000-$5,000 or more. Therefore, knowing how to identify these fees early in your research process may help you to better explore publishing options and account for costs. But finding exact costs on publisher websites can be challenging - many are located on supplemental spreadsheets that can be difficult to find. The following list can help you locate APCs for many prominent science journal publishers:

Looking for an APC not included on the lists above? Reach out to Sara Hoover, Metadata and Scholarly Publishing Librarian at shoover@gwu.edu for assistance. 

For more information on this topic, see Himmelfarb’s video tutorials:

Viewing Message: 1 of 1.
 Notice

This site uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. Visit GW’s Website Privacy Notice to learn more about how GW uses cookies.