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Scholarly Communications at Swarthmore

Everything you need to know related to scholarly communications at Swarthmore

Why Open Access?

Get more from your research: share it.

Greater visibility allows you to reach a wider audience and leads to earlier and more frequent citations.

Research has begun to demonstrate that the more accessible a publication is, the more readership and citations it ultimately receives, even further increasing the visibility of your work. Open access online articles have appreciably higher citation rates than traditionally published articles across a range of disciplines. (source)

How Open is It?

How open is it, really? Openness comes in many different levels; not all are equal.

A table describing levels of open access in terms of reader and reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability. Click this image for a screen-readable version

Click the image for a bigger version. Source

Green Open Access Journal Archiving Policy: Myth vs. Fact. Myth: Pay-to-play or pay-to-publish. Fact: Institutional repository deposit is usually free. Myth: Feeds non-scholarly journals that solicit contributions. Fact: Protects faculty rights from for-profit publishers. Myth: Compels faculty to publish in Open Access Journals. Fact: Freedom for faculty to deposit and share articles as they choose. Myth: Detrimental to RTP and publishing in top journals. Fact: individuals can opt-out anytime, no questions asked. Myth: hindrance to publishing royalties. Fact: Only applies to journal articles. Myth: undermines scholarly quality and peer-review. Fact: allowed by a vast majority of scholarly journals. Myth: top-down administrative mandate. Fact: usually initiated and passed by faculties. Myth: more work for faculty. Fact: empowers librarians to help faculty.

CC-BY. Content by Mark G. Bilby and graphics by Karen Vazquez, CSU Fullerton, 2017.

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