For the last three years the JCU Library has been rolling out several educational initiatives to improve academics’ understanding and usage of the various pathways to making scholarly work open access. These initiatives have included open access publishing workshops, Read and Publish Agreements resources, and an annual green open access competition. At the end of 2025, Library staff released a survey to gauge the impact of open access initiatives and to plan for future activities. The survey received responses from 171 researchers. This brief document highlights some of the results from that survey.
A third of survey respondents came from the College of Science and Engineering, while around 20 percent came from the College of Medicine and Dentistry. The proportion from other colleges and organisational units was quite consistent, with the exception of one respondent who came from the Education Division.
The survey revealed a wide diversity of experience with open access publishing among JCU researchers. More than half of respondents have published research open access using the university’s suite of Read and Publish Agreements, while just under half have published in a diamond open-access journal. Close to 30 percent have converted restricted articles to open access for free using green open access. Less than 10 percent have not published any articles open access and a similar percentage of respondents were unsure whether they had published open access. Significant progress has been made advancing the cause of open access at JCU but work remains to be done educating researchers about the full range of options available to them.
With the proliferation of digital platforms and tools, reaching an audience to promote open access is becoming increasingly challenging. As part of the survey, researchers identified some of the digital platforms that they used most. Almost half of respondents reported using LinkedIn, while just over a third identified themselves as regular readers of The Conversation followed to a lesser extent, by Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and X (Twitter). Surprisingly, 15 percent of the respondents indicated that they did not use digital platforms at all.
If you would like to know more about open access publishing or how to make your publications freely available, check out the Library’s website or reach out to JCU Library.
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