The Open Access movement is a worldwide effort to provide free online access to scientific and scholarly research literature. For researchers, publishing open access can enable research to reach a wider audience and be more discoverable by industry as well as other researchers. The more visible and the more discoverable research is, the greater its impact.
There are many other benefits of Open Access, as demonstrated in the image below:
There are several pathways to achieving open access at JCU. One of these pathways is to take advantage of Read and Publish Agreements, which allow academics to make their research freely available to a global audience without incurring the cost of open access fees. Fees for Open Access publishing (also known as an Article Processing Charges or APCs) can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars, with some prestigious journals like Nature charging APCs as high as A$18,000.
In 2023, JCU signed 15 Read and Publish Agreements to benefit JCU Researchers. These publisher agreements take the fees the Library already pays for journal subscriptions, and repurposes them to cover both reading and publishing in select lists of journals provided by publishers as part of each agreement.
In Australia, the Read and Publish Agreements are negotiated through CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians), and each Australian institution has selected the agreements most appropriate to their teaching, learning and research needs.
JCU’s 2023 agreements cover 8,169 journals titles from the following publishers:
|
American
Institute of Physics (AIP) Publishing |
Oxford
University Press |
|
Brill |
Portland
Press |
|
Cambridge
University Press |
The Royal
Society |
|
Company
of Biologists |
SAGE |
|
CSIRO
Publishing |
Springer |
|
Elsevier |
Taylor
and Francis |
|
Karger |
Wiley |
|
Microbiology
Society |
|
At JCU in 2022, participating in the agreements resulted in the publication of 146 open access articles and avoided the payment of close to $686,000 in publishing fees.
The introduction of the Read and Publish Agreements at JCU and across institutions in Australia has seen an increase in the number of open access articles being published. Feedback from researchers indicates that the Agreements have provided an opportunity to publish in higher quality, open access journals which would otherwise have been out of reach due to the high cost of APCs.
Detailed information about the Read and Publish Agreements, and the journals covered in each agreement and including FAQs is available from the Open Access Library Guide.
For enquiries, please contact Jayshree Mamtora, Manager, Scholarly Communications, JCU Library.
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