Category Archives: General Information

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship (Full Movie) CC BY 4.0

EN, General Information, Publishing

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, produced by Jason Schmitt, provides focus on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. For more information please visit: Paywallthemovie.com

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship (Full Movie) CC BY 4.0 from Paywall The Movie on Vimeo.

What is Open Access?

EN, General Information

What is Open Access?

  • Unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research
  • Free of charge
  • Free of most restrictions on use (though attribution is still a must)
  • Defined by the Bethesda, Berlin and Budapest statements on open access publishing

What are the Benefits?

  • Increases impact – studies have found that OA research has higher citation rates
  • Increases the amount of accessible research – no more being locked out by paywalls
  • Stimulates collaboration
  • Unrestricted access to research, regardless of economic status or institutional affiliation
  • Freedom to use and re-purpose research materials in new and interesting ways
  • Enables access to the research that their taxes fund and encourages lifelong learning
  • Allows independent researchers to access research
  • Gives businesses and other organisations access to research and encourages innovation

How do you make your work openly accessible?

There are two routes to open access:

Gold Open Access
  • Available immediately upon publication
  • Available at the source of publication (usually the journal website)
  • No charge at point of access for users
  • Typically paid for with APCs (article processing charges) though there are other business models
  • Typically made available under a Creative Commons licence
Green Open Access (or self-archiving)
  • Subject to journal enforced embargo periods
  • Available from a secondary source, such as a subject or institutional repository
  • Author accepted manuscript rather than formatted publisher version deposited by authors themselves
  • Check SHERPA/RoMEO for your journal’s Green OA policy

Article Processing Charges

  • Fees charged to authors by journals to recover the costs of publication
  • Average price around €1.200 but can vary between €0 and €4.000+
  • Fees charged by hybrid journals tend to cost more than those charged by pure open access journals

Pure or Hybrid?

  • Pure open access journals contain only work made openly accessible
  • Hybrid journals contain a mix of both open access and subscription based content
  • Some of these journals have been accused of “double dipping” as they are receiving income from both APCs and journal subscriptions

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Creative Commons License
source: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Link to the original. Link to the creator.