Open Access & Scholarly Communication

Open Access articles have been shown to be more cited than articles behind paywalls. But there are many reasons you might publish in a journal that is not Open Access, and that's why we offer you other options.

"Studies that investigated the [Open Access] citation advantage grouped by their conclusion.

The majority concluded that there is a significant citation advantage for Open Access articles. Source: Data from The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, SPARC Europe, accessed March 2016."

Figure and caption from Tennant, Jonathan P., François Waldner, Damien C. Jacques, Paola Masuzzo, Lauren B. Collister, and Chris HJ Hartgerink. "The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review." F1000Research 5 (2016).

Post your article or pre-print in an Open Access Repository so you can gain all the advantages of OA Publishing, without much effort at all!

We're available to help you determine what rights you have for each article, chapter, or other item you have published and to help you deposit your work!

Contact the Scholars' Bank Manager (scholars@uoregon.edu or 541-346-1961)

Scholar's Bank is the UO's Institutional Respository. We can post and manage your publications, data, and more, so that it gets strong exposure and is accessible to scholars around the world whether they have a well funded library or not.

For more information about Scholar's Bank, see this guide:

Many fields have, or are developing, field-specific Open Access Repositories. Simmons University maintains a thorough list.

Among many other benefits cited for OA publication are:

• "Public interest" – argument that the general public should have access to publicly funded research (particularly appropriate when journal articles are produced at public research universities such as the UO, or funded by government grants)
• Equity
  • within the academy –why should faculty at institutions with smaller library budgets be penalized?
  • Internationally –high cost of journal access particularly disadvantages 3rd world
• Alignment with other "opens", e.g. open source
• Leveraging of modern web technology (implying, among other things, reduced costs by eliminating "legacy" publishing requirements like printing and subscription management)