At MU Libraries, we’re committed to making access to research more sustainable, affordable and open. And we need your help!
In traditional publishing models, scholars surrender their copyright to commercial publishers in order to disseminate their research findings in scholarly journals. Publishers then sell or rent that same content back to the institution through journal subscriptions—at ever increasing prices. This unsustainable practice costs institutions millions of dollars every year and creates barriers to access for many. Open access publishing encourages scholars to retain their rights and make their work freely available online, increasing the availability and impact of research.
What You Can Do:
Retain Your Rights: No matter where you publish, the single most important thing you can do to make scholarly publishing more sustainable and equitable is Retain Your Rights. It’s your copyright – don’t just sign it away! Contracts are often negotiable. And read those agreements: you may have more rights to share your research than you realize.
Know Your Options: Choose the right venue for your research and know your open access options. If you’re an editor or manuscript reviewer, ask about the journal’s OA options.
Share Your Work: Deposit your research in MOspace, MU’s Digital Institutional Repository. Submitting your work to MOspace is easy. Just log in with your SSO and complete the Creative Commons license.
Read the OA policies of journals or publishers for which you edit or review.
Check out the attention received by your department in MOSpace, thanks to Open Access. Click on your school/department, scroll to the bottom, and click on “show statistical information.”
Predatory publishing doesn’t just take advantage of authors by misrepresenting review, editorial, and fee structures. It also hinders access to the work itself, hurting the overall enterprise of research. The epidemic of predatory journals reached serious enough heights in 2016 that the Federal Trade Commission charged OMICS, one such publisher of hundreds of predatory journals, for its deceptive practices.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” says Janice Dysart, Science Librarian and creator of the Where to Publish Your Research guide. “Be wary of these email solicitations from publishers trying to get you to submit articles to their journals.” She recommends using the Think Check Submit checklist to determine whether a publisher is legitimate.
Anyone can fall victim to predatory journal publishers. Jung Ha-Brookshire, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, College of Human Environmental Sciences, and Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Textile and Apparel Management, relates her experience after a graduate student recommended a journal a few years ago. She says, “I didn’t think twice about it. We submitted our paper and got accepted without any revisions. Then they were asking us to send money somewhere in Pakistan.” She still didn’t realize what was happening because she hadn’t even heard of “predatory journals.”
That all changed about a year later when she learned of a list of predatory journals from her colleagues. “We found out that our journal was on that list,” she says. They tried to withdraw their work from the publication but couldn’t. Because the journal wasn’t legitimate, the article could only be found via the specific URL and not by searching, so they pulled the publication information from their CVs. Jung says, “We had to take that manuscript as a loss because we couldn’t even take that paper to other publishers since, technically, it is already published.”
After that experience, Jung now checks with her subject librarian, Noël Kopriva, every time she encounters a journal she hasn’t heard of, “no matter how good the website looks.” Jung advises, “Be careful with choosing the right journals. Do not get fooled by address, location, a beautiful website, and a wonderful set of editorial board names. Check with your librarian first when in doubt!”
This week is Open Access Week! Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Recently we asked Dr.Julie Kapp, MPH, PhD, FACE, Associate Professor at the School of Medicine why she considers open access when publishing her research.
I published open access because anyone can access the paper, regardless of institutional affiliation or journal subscriptions. There is a demonstrated citation advantage. Open access also facilitates broader diffusion and dissemination of your ideas inside and outside the academic community. That means it is more accessible to journalists and bloggers who may write about your work. And isn’t the purpose of science to have a broader societal benefit? Open access allows anyone with an interest to learn about your work.
Why was it important despite the fee to move your article out from behind the paywall? Do you see a benefit to having taken the open access route?
For this particular paper, a lot of the interest comes from the topic and the timing of my paper. Still, it being open access no doubt facilitated its accessibility and circulation. This paper was highlighted in Discover Magazine, The New York Times, Yahoo Lifestyle, Psychology Today, an Australian blog, and the official news broadcast of Israel, among other outlets.
Advice to others?
If you have the funding, I would highly recommend open access. If you do not have the funding, our Departments and Schools/Colleges should consider creating resources tagged for open access requests, if we are to be competitive with top schools.
Launched in 2011, WJT is devoted to reporting the latest research progress and findings in the field of transplantation. The fact the the journal was an open access journal indexed in Pubmed was a big draw to the team. Dr. Tahran says, “if the journal is open access, your papers and ideas can [reach] more people.” For Dr. Dailey, the instant access was the key factor for an open access journal as well. “As a reader of the medical literature I prefer the articles I search for to be open access for ease of obtaining access, and I want others to have this ease as well.”
This review presents current literature of stem cell therapy for patients with perianal inflammatory bowel diseases since the therapy’s emergence in the early 2000s. The team looked at several adipose and bone marrow stem cell studies to analyze the efficacy, outcomes, and safety within those studies. Seeing this as much needed information for their field, the open access journal avenue allowed the team to see their research published sooner rather than later. “Getting published in this journal was quicker and easier than traditional, subscription-only journals,” mentions Dr. Bragg. Not being a completely print journal gives open access journals the unique ability to review, provide feedback, and publish faster. Open Access journals are able to do this all while still providing quality research.
“There is no difference to me in the manuscript requirements for open access versus other journals. The quality of open access journals is also comparable to that of non-open access journals,” says Dr. Dailey.
If you are interested in publishing in an open access journal, the Health Sciences Library can assist in steering you toward the journals that best fit your research.
Dr. Francis Dailey is a Gastroenterology Fellow at MU Healthcare. He has publishes research related to gastroenterology, inflammatory bowel diseases, clinical gastroenterology, and others. His passion is clinical medicine and gastroenterology, but lovesalso being able to produce clinical research in these fields that can affect everyday clinical practice.
Dr. Jack Bragg is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at MU Healthcare.
Dr. Vesyel Tahran is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine whose research focuses on inflammatory bowel disease, hepatitis, and liver cancer, to name a few. in 2017, he was recognized as a Quality Improvement Champion by the MU Healthcare Department of Medicine’s Quality Improvement Committee for outstanding work in quality improvement. More recently, Dr. Tahran co-edited the book Viral Hepatitis: Chronic Hepatitis B.
Join us for an Open Access Week screening of the documentary film Paywall: The Business of Scholarship.
Tuesday, October 23
Ellis Library room 114A
2 to 3:15 pm
Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary film on scientific publishing business and on the need for open science. It reports on the huge profit margins of the big publishing companies, like Elsevier, Springer and Wiley and the challenges for open science to change the situation. Scientists, science administration, librarians, editors of scientific journals, open access-activists, representatives of scientific publishing houses and the founder of Academia.edu give their opinions on the matter. This film focuses on the need for Open Access in research and science. There will be a 15 minute post-screening discussion for anyone who would like to stay after the viewing.
What is Open Access? Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. Encouraging the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, the Open Access movement is gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.
For more University Libraries’ Open Access Week events, check out this post.
In addition to “producing grammatical descriptions and dictionaries for four varieties of the Luyia language cluster in western Kenya,” Michael Marlo is an Associate Professor of English and Linguistics and a member of the editorial board of the Language Science Press‘s Contemporary African Linguistics series. Language Science Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed linguistics books, including textbooks, and neither readers nor authors pay fees under the Knowledge Unlatched model, which instead relies on financial pledges from institutions and libraries to fund open access projects.
Michael’s editorship originally grew out of a desire to find a financially reasonable publishing outlet for the proceedings of the Annual Conference on African Linguistics. When researching potential publishers for book projects related to his National Science Foundation project, Structure and Tone in Luyia, he had also made note of their African Language Grammars and Dictionaries series.
“One of the major obstacles to the development of the field of linguistics is access to research results,” Michael says. For example, access to the digital version of the most prestigious publisher’s grammar series costs $10,000 plus annual fees for updates. A single book costs $200. Despite the prestige, Michael doesn’t intend to pursue publication through a press with such a prohibitive pricing model because that would limit his audience to those few whose libraries can afford access. He says, “While I recognize that there are still problems of access with publications that are primarily available as PDF downloads online, due to the fact that not everyone has internet access, having my work available for anyone to download is a major improvement in access over most other publishing options, which are either too expensive for readers or require a large subvention from the author, or both.”
Anne Barker
Last summer, Michael learned that Language Science Press was pursuing the institutional support funding model and asked Anne Barker, his subject librarian, if Mizzou Libraries could contribute. He was “thrilled” to learn that some funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities were able to be put toward the initiative. Michael says, “I believe [this model] has the chance to revolutionize publishing in my field, and possibly by extension many other fields in academia.”
Anne confirms, “Librarians have long been concerned that the commercialization of scholarly communication restricts access for individuals and strains library budgets. Changing the traditional publication funding model to provide for more open access is complex and challenging, but the Knowledge Unlatched model is promising. Mizzou Libraries is glad to be able to join this endeavor.”
Michael encourages students to use MOBIUS and Interlibrary Loan to access books outside of our collection. He also encourages students to find their subject areas in the stacks and look around. “There’s a lot of great stuff in there that you won’t easily find just by searching online databases!”
Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.
If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
This month’s open access article features Dr. Rebecca Johnson, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP, Professor at the Schools of Nursing and Veterinary Medicine and Director of the Research Center for Human Animal Interaction (ReCHAI). Her research shows that companion animals provide a unique source of social support and facilitate wellness-promoting behaviors. Most recently, she’s been testing the effects on physical activity levels and PTSD of veterans paired with shelter dogs and those participating in therapeutic horseback riding.
Dr. Johnson, and her research team, published in Military Medical Research (MMR) in January 2018. MMR is a completely open access, peer reviewed journal that publishes findings on basic medical science and clinical research related to military medicine. All articles published are made freely and permanently accessible online and all article-processing fees are paid for by the People’s Military Medical Press. It is also indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. For more information on the journal, click here.
Effects of therapeutic horseback riding on post-traumatic stress disorder in military veterans focuses on the benefits of a 6-week long therapeutic horseback riding program for veterans diagnosed with PTSD. This randomized trial, with 29 participants, shows that those who participated in the program had statistically significant decreases in PTSD symptoms than those who were part of the controlled group who did not participate in the therapeutic horseback riding. Even those veterans who expressed initial reluctance to participate were found to enjoy the therapy in the end.
This month’s open access article features Dr. Nicole Nichols, PhD., Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and an investigator with the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. Her research focuses on the central nervous system, specifically the control of breathing in models of motor neuron death.
Dr. Nichols, and her team, chose to use the open access option, which gave them the “ability to provide immediate, open and free access to their work without the standard 12-month embargo that applies to subscription access.” Their article, Monitoring undergraduate student needs and activities at Experimental Biology, was published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Physiology Education, which promotes and disseminates educational scholarship in order to enhance teaching and learning of physiology, neuroscience and pathophysiology.
This article was published in conjunction with her responsibilities while serving as the Respiration Section Representative on the American Physiological Society Trainee Advisory Committee. One of the co-authors was also on the committee with her and the other co-author M. Matyas works at the American Physiological Society. Their research “sought to develop and test a pilot survey of undergraduate students to determine how they got involved in research and in presenting at the Experimental Biology (EB) meeting, what they gained from the scientific and career development sessions at the meeting, and how the American Physiological Society (APS) can best support and engage undergraduate students.”
When asked why her team decided to publish in an open access journal, Dr. Nichols said, “we chose to publish this article in the Journal of Advances in Physiology Education because the target audience for this article are Physiology educators. Most physiology educators read this journal and, some, may not have access to non-open access journals.” Dr. Nichols is no stranger to open access avenues, as she had previously published the last piece of her PhD in PLoS One “because the study spanned many different fields and felt that it would be best to publish it in an open access journal.” The instant access to information is the reason why Dr. Nichols would consider publishing in an open access journal again.
This week’s open access article features Dr. Wolfgang Widermann, Assistant Professor of Educational, School & Counseling Psychology in the College of Education.His primary research interests include the development of methods for causal inference, methods to determine the direction of effects in nonexperimental studies, and methods for intensive longitudinal data in the person-oriented research setting. He currently serves as an associate editor of Behaviormetrika and the Journal of Person-Oriented Research.
Dr. Widermann, and his research team, published in the World Journal of Nephrology (WJN) in July 2017. WJN is a leading open access journal devoted to reporting the latest, cutting-edge research progress and findings of basic research and clinical practice in the field of nephrology, and is currently indexed in PubMed Central (PMC) and PubMed.
His research in Causal relationship between hypoalbuminemia and acute kidney injury is an update from a meta-analysis in 2010. Since that publication, a large volume of data from clinical studies has been published further evaluating this relationship. This article serves to reevaluate their original hypothesis that hypoalbuminemia is independently associated with increased AKI risk by looking at those newer studies.
