Scholarly Impact Challenge: Day 3: Open Access

"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research." (SPARC)

• Open Access benefits the public because it makes research available without a subscription or other costs.
• Open Access benefits the researcher (you) by expanding readership, increasing citations, and circulating research on social media or other channels.
• Public Access Mandates: Government mandates require peer-reviewed publications and digital data from federally funded scientific research be made freely available to the public.

• Gold: when you publish an article in a journal that makes all articles openly available immediately. Some Gold journals require payments of article processing charges (APCs). Some Gold journals do not require fees. The clue to a Gold journal is, everything is open access, and if APCs are required, they are required for all authors. As the author, you are responsible for paying these fees when you submit a manuscript.
• Green: when you publish in a traditional journal and then upload a copy of your article to your personal website or institutional repository.
• Hybrid:. A hybrid journal sells subscriptions and also alllows authors to decide to make individual articles Open Access. To do this, the author pays a fee when submitting the manuscript, and the publisher agrees to make this single article Open Access once accepted. As the author, you are responsible for deciding if you need to pay fees to publish open access, and then paying these fees when you submit a manuscript.

How do I choose which model to use?
Typically, journals decide and inform you which models they will use. This information can be found on their "copyright" or "about us" pages. The Directory of Open Access Journals also includes information about many open access journals, and can be a good place to start looking for a journal that uses one of these models.

In addition to being aware of your preferred open access model, you will have constraints that might mean you must or cannot publish using some of these models. For example, if you are publishing research results funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant as a research article, you are required to make your article text public through PubMedCentral no less than 12 months after publication. Gold, Green, and Hybrid models would allow this. However, some Gold and Hybrid journals also require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs). If you do not have funding to pay the APC, you would not be able to publish in a journal that charges APCs. Instead, you would need to find a journal that uses Gold model and does not charge APCs, or that follows the Green model where you can self-archive.

The USC Libraries have signed transformative agreements with academic publishers that allow authors to publish using the Gold and Hybrid models of open access. In these agreements, the libraries pay the Article Processing Charges (APCs) on your behalf. Read more about USC Transformative Agreements on the Open Access Research Guide.

How do I use a Transformative Agreement?

It is usually not possible to retroactively apply a transformative agreement : you must know about the agreement and apply it when submitting your manuscript. To do this successfully:

1. Identify a journal in your field that you might publish with, that is covered by a USC agreement.

2. Then, review the Instructions for Submission. The journal will have detailed information about how to apply the transformative agreement: typically, it is bounded by time (the manuscript must be submitted within a specific calendar year); it requires the USC affiliated author to manage the submission process, serve as the corresponding author, and to use a USC email address and mailing address when submitting.

Which publishers have an agreement with USC Libraries?

Explore these links to see more details about the Open Access policies and Transformative Agreements the libraries have created. Not all journals published by these publishers are included in our agreements.

• American Chemical Society (ACS) - agreement through 2025. ACS publishes >90 journals in all areas and applications of chemistry.
• Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) - agreement through 2023. >50 journals in many areas of computing and information technology.
• Cambridge University Press - agreement through 2024. Cambridge publishes >400 journals in all areas of social sciences, humanities, sciences, technology, and health sciences.
• The Institute of Physics (IOP) - agreement through 2025. IOP publishes >90 journals. It includes journals about physics and all areas of science and technology.
• Karger - agreement through 2024. Karger publishes >90 journals on health sciences, medicine, and basic sciences relating to health care.
• PLOS (Public Library of Science) -  agreement through 2024. Publishes 12 journals in all areas of science.
• The Royal Society -  agreement for 2023. 11 journals on all areas of science.
• Springer -  agreement through 2024. Publishes >2000 journals in all areas of social sciences, humanities, sciences, technology,  medicine, and health sciences.
• Wiley - agreement through 2023. Publishes >1200 journals in all areas of social sciences, humanities, sciences, technology,  medicine, and health sciences.

1. Find a journal in your field where the USC Libraries could pay for your article processing charges using one of our transformative agreements. Use these links and instructions to view lists of journals covered by the agreements, then sort or browse by title, discipline, or content type to find a journal in your field.

• American Chemical Society Journal Finder. Click Select Institution and search for University of Southern California. All results are journals covered under our transformative agreement.
• Cambridge University Press Waivers Page. Search for United States, then University of Southern California, to see a list of journals covered under this agreement.
• Wiley: This agreement is complex. There are two lists of journals: Fully Open Access, Hybrid Journals. USC Libraries' agreement covers both.
• Institute of Physics journal finder.  Click select institution and search for University of Southern California, to see a list of journals covered under our transformative agreement.
• Springer Open Access agreement page. On this page, download an XLS file with journals covered under this agreement.

2. Reflect: How could publishing open access increase your research visibility? (For some more ideas about this, review the Wiley Publisher's Open Access benefits page.)

3. Reflect: Would you consider publishing in an open access method? What barriers prevent you from choosing to publish in this way?

4. Optional: save the names of the journal(s) you found, and your responses to the reflection questions. We'll collect these on our finisher's form.

Want to learn more about open access, article fees, and publishing? Helpful links:

Sherpa Romeo

SPARC

Creative Commons

Open Access Research Guide

Open Educational Resources Guide