MAKE IT OPEN!

Open Access is a phrase that is bandied about a lot by the Library at CDU – what is it and who even cares? Why do we mark Open Access Week in October each year?

Imagine you are an academic or researcher that doesn’t have access to all the specialised literature that you require for your research through your institution.

Imagine you are an academic or researcher living in a developing country without access to ludicrously expensive journal databases such as ScienceDirect or Medline. How would you keep up with developments in your field? How would a doctor or a health worker access up-to-date medical research so that they can make a difference to their community?

They would look for online material that could be freely downloaded. It is in situations like these that open access can and does make a big difference. Open access makes the results of research freely available and accessible to all, online. In this way, anyone anywhere would be able to access the results of the research. If the results have been written up as an article in a journal, there are ways to make them available open access, rather than rely on the Library’s subscriptions to journals.

Prices of journals keep rising at a dramatic rate whilst library budgets remain unchanged or are severely cut. It is, therefore, unrealistic to expect the Library to be able to subscribe to a wide range of journals.

In Australia, all universities have an institutional repository. Researchers are encouraged to self-archive a version of their research into the repository and thus make it open to all. It can either be the submitted version or the accepted version of a journal article so long as the particular journal publisher allows it. Research has shown that 70% of all journals allow you to do this. This is known as green access.

Alternatively, researchers may want to publish in a journal such as BioMed Central or PLos where the author pays a fee upfront to make the research open access. This is known as gold open access.

The two major funding bodies in Australia — the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council — have mandated that the results of any research that they fund be made freely accessible within a required period of time. So the Library can and does play a major role in helping with this compliance.

In addition, there are many benefits to the researcher and the institution as a result of their research being made more widely available. The more visible and the more discoverable your research, the more its impact, resulting in an increase in citation rates. Other benefits include:

In 2017, CDU Library presented two Open Access Awards — Professor Peter Morris from the Menzies School of Health Research won the award for the most number of open access articles, and Professor Lindsay Hutley won the award for the most cited article.

Do you want to know more about open access and how to make your research more openly discoverable? Contact Jayshree on 8946 6541 or jayshree mamtora@cdu.edu.au.

Jayshree Mamtora is the Research Services Coordinator at the CDU Library