LibGuides: Researcher Skills Toolkit: Open access publishing

Publish and share

Open access publishing

Open access provides a way to promote broader access to research outputs via immediate and free of charge online access to all content within each issue of a journal. Any user can download, copy, distribute, print, search for and link to the full text of content.

Publishing open access provides benefits for authors, institutions, and the community:

Authors

Unlocks opportunities for collaboration
Increases citation rates - research has shown that open access publications are viewed and cited more often than articles behind a paywall
Increases your visibility and the impact of your work
Ensures compliance with grant and funding rules.

Institutions

Increases exposure of research activity
Shares knowledge and innovation
Increases community and industry engagement with research.

The community

Research is available to those who cannot access paywalled content, including researchers at other institutions and the community
Ensures taxpayers get value for (research) money and can access findings.

In this video University of Newcastle researchers explain why open access is important for their research.

The University of Newcastle's Open Access Guideline "supports and promotes the dissemination of research findings in an international open-access environment through the lodgement of the information describing a research output, e.g., author, title, keywords, date (metadata) and/or post-print publications into the University's institutional repository." (Open Access Guideline, Section 1(3))

The Guideline supports the principles included in the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) policies.

Further information about options for open access publishing is available on the journal articles, books and book chapters, non-traditional research outputs, preprints and research data pages of this Module.