Open Access

"Open access" is free, unrestricted, online access to scientific and scholarly research.  There are two primary vehicles for providing open access: open access journals, and open access archives or repositories, such as eScholarship@UMMS. The purpose of this guide is to provide resources and information to the UMass Medical School community about open access and new models of scholarly publishing. 

For some great overviews, we suggest:

• Open Access Overview by Peter Suber
• Open Access to Scholarly Articles: The Very Basics by Jill Cirasella
•  "Open Access Explained," an 8-minute fun and engaging animated video from PHD Comics.

- Better visibility and higher impact for scholarship.  Research has shown that articles available freely online are more often cited and have greater impact than those not freely available:  

• The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (Piwowar et al., 2018) found that open access articles receive 18% more citations than average
• The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership (preprint, Piwiwar et al., 2019) found that in 2019, 52% of article views are to open access articles, and estimate 70% of article views will be to OA articles in 2025
• Releasing a preprint is associated with more attention and citations for the peer-reviewed article (Fu and Hughey, 2019) found that biology articles with preprints had 36% more citations than biology articles without preprints
• The Post-Embargo Open Access Citation Advantage: It Exists (Probably), It’s Modest (Usually), and the Rich Get Richer (of Course) (Ottaviani, 2016) found that an open access citation advantage as high as 19% exists and that "better" articles gain more when made open access
• The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review (Tennant et al., 2016)

- More knowledge leads to better patient outcomes. Opening access to research will allow all doctors access to relevant information for decision making, leading to more effective treatments and better outcomes.  Access to medical research is also crucial for patients and patient advocates.

- Return on the public's investment in taxpayer-funded research.  Open access allows the public to see the results of that investment.

- To help achieve science's full potential by removing price barriers.  With open access, researchers worldwide can read and build on the findings of others without restriction.

- Improved education.  Faculty and students will not be limited by the selection of scholarly journals their campus libraries are able to provide.

"Openness increases transparency and reliability, facilitates more effective collaboration, accelerates the pace of discovery, and fosters broader and more equitable access to scientific knowledge and to the research process itself."
— National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25116

There are 2 primary ways to make your publications open access:

1. Publish in open access journals.  See the Evaluating Open Access Journals page of this guide for more information and a list of Publishing Opportunities.

2. Deposit your publication in an open access repository, such as eScholarship@UMMS.  This process is called "self-archiving." Deposit your new works as you finish them. Deposit your older works retroactively. Follow these steps:

• Check the journal's copyright policy for self-archiving (use SHERPA/RoMEO or search for information on the journal's website)
• Identify an appropriate repository available to you (such as eScholarship@UMMS or a disciplinary repository)
• Deposit your work (or have someone deposit it for you)
• Consult your UMMS librarians for assistance with all these steps (see Contact Us information on this page)

Want to know more?

• Peter Suber has written a detailed post on this topic called "How to Make Your Own Work Open Access" for the Harvard Open Access Project.
• Researcher Jonathan Eisen's list of "10 things you can do to REALLY support open access"

• Ross Mounce's "Easy Steps towards Open Scholarship"

This infographic shows how researchers can make their work publicly available, free and legally.

What are preprints?

Preprints are research manuscripts that have not been formally published or refined/critiqued through the peer review process and are often deposited in preprint servers:

Preprint Resources

NIH Preprint Pilot (June 2020- )

During the pilot, NLM will make preprints resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) available via PubMed Central (PMC) and, by extension, PubMed. The pilot aims to explore approaches to increasing the discoverability of early NIH research results posted to eligible preprint servers. Pilot is running for a minimum of 12 months, starting June 2020.

Preprints can be submitted to the NIH as a product of award but do not fall under the NIH Public Access Policy since they are not peer-reviewed. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the peer-reviewed manuscript will still need to be submitted through the NIH Manuscript System (NIHMS) by the publisher or author to receive a PubMed Central ID (PMCID).

"Green" Open Access:  Depositing a scholarly publication for public access in a repository other than that of the publisher, e.g. an institutional repository or a discipline-related repository such as eScholarship@UMMS or PubMed Central (also called "self-archiving")

"Gold" Open Access:  Publishing a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal with open access, sometimes financed through article publication charges.

"Hybrid" Open Access:  An option now offered by many traditional publishers where an author can pay a publication fee to make an article open access. 

Embargo:  A fixed delay between the time a publication or data is deposited into a repository and the time it is made public

Version Terminology:  Here are generally accepted definitions for a journal article in its various versions as it moves through the publication process:

• Pre-print: Author-created version first submitted to publisher, before peer review
• Post-print:  Author-created final version after peer review, also known as the "accepted manuscript".  This is the version mandated in the NIH public access policy and in most institutional open access mandates.
• Publisher's version/PDF:  Copyedited version with publisher's formatting and paging

See also the VERSIONS Toolkit, which has practical advice for academic researchers as authors.