Publishing open access means that your work can be immediately accessible to everyone, increasing the number of potential readers. Your work can be freely used in courses as an open educational resource, and data you make open can facilitate reproducibility of results. The Bloomington Faculty Council adopted an Open Access Policy on February 21, 2017, which applies to all IU Bloomington Faculty. You may read the full text on the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs policies index.
Publish Your Scholarship Open Access
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Begin your work with guides compiled by our team with tips and insights for open access publishing support, and understanding open access.
Funding Opportunities
Occasionally open access publishing can come with high expenses for researchers. These costs often take the form of an Article Processing Charge (APC), which shifts costs from readers to authors and requires authors to pay a fee to ensure that their article is published open access.
Indiana University Bloomington has several resources to help IU faculty pay for APCs in order to make open access publishing more accessible.
In collaboration with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, we have established a new Open Access Article Publishing Fund for faculty on the IU Bloomington campus. Faculty may apply for up to $2,000 to cover the article processing charges associated with eligible journal articles. Faculty can apply for this funding opportunity through InfoReady. More information about the fund is provided on the Scholarly Communication Department Blog.
We have collaborated with the following publishers to secure an open access publishing discount for IU Bloomington affiliates:
- Frontiers: A news report from Frontiers details the 7.5% discount this publisher grants IU-affiliated authors
- MDPI: A blog post guide details how to activate the 10% discount for MDPI publications.
- Springer Open and BioMed Central: Review our LibGuide to apply your 15% discount on APCs
Publication Support
Pre-Publication: Establish your Research Identity before you Publish
You should register for a free ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) before you publish. ORCID is required by many grant funders and publishers. It is a solution to common publication worries such as correct attribution of research, name changes, and disambiguation of researchers with similar names. It connects all your papers even if you published under a different name or gender.
Begin your work with a guide compiled by our team with tips and insights for quick and easy registration, and automatic updates of your ORCID record with any research work that has a DOI.
Post-Publication: Demonstrate the Impact of your Published Work & Scholarly Output
Whether you are working to demonstrate the impact of your scholarly work, or concerned about metrics and their biases or reliability, we can help! Our research impact librarian can work with you to navigate disciplinary differences, data sources, and responsible use of research metrics and indicators.
Begin your work with guides compiled by our team with tips and insights for responsible, appropriate, and properly contextualized indicators of research excellence and impact.
Taking action with the Open Access movement
The lack of access to information that many experience is a direct result of several large, ingrained, complex systems, including the tenure and promotion process and journal publishing. Still, individuals can make choices that could help improve scholarly publishing and make access to information more ubiquitous.
Here are examples of steps that scholars are already taking to promote change:
- Share a version of your work and your data in IUScholarWorks
- Share your preprints in a disciplinary repository
- Assert your author rights and negotiate your publishing agreement in partnership with IU’s Copyright Program
- Reform promotion and tenure in your school or department
- Journal Editors: “Declare Independence” or start a new open journal with IU Libraries
- Scholarly Society Members: Transition your closed society journals to open
- Consider joining a boycott of vendors with unsustainable business models:
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