Mike Nason PRO
Open Scholarship and Publishing Librarian @ UNB Libraries // Metadata Nag and DOI Wrangler @ PKP // General Loudmouth and Malcontent
Mike Nason | Scholarly Communications and Publishing Librarian, UNB Libraries (For ORS, Spring 2021)
“Grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication.”
“Grant recipients can publish in a journal that offers immediate open access or that offers open access on its website within 12 months.”
“Grant recipients can deposit their final, peer-reviewed manuscript [post-print] into an institutional or disciplinary repository that will make the manuscript freely accessible within 12 months of publication.”
But, they are definitely better than nothing.
And you may ask yourself,
That same public should not have to pay a second time to access the products of that funded research.
Some publishers are fully open access. If you publish in open access journals, you are already meeting your criteria.
This is similarly true if the journal you publish in offers delayed open access for material after 12 months.
Not all disciplines have reputable or high-quality open access journals to turn to.
Most major journal publishers allow for an article to be made open access by payment of an Author Processing Charge (APC). This can cost as much as $3000 USD.
This is referred to as “hybrid publishing” via “gold open access”.
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It is worth noting that “hybrid journals” collect APCs on top of their existing subscription fees.
Helping you with this is very literally my job.
Most major journal publishers allow for a post-print to be deposited in an open access repository within 12 months of publication as per government mandate.
This is green open access.
Publishers do not typically provide a post-print after publication.
You usually have to have held on to the version of the document post-peer review and before copyediting.
A word that means something.
If your work is not published in an open access venue, you are required to share it in an open access repository, be it “institutional” or “disciplinary”.
UNB Libraries hosts an institutional repository called UNB Scholar. It houses many forms of scholarship from the UNB community.
A disciplinary repository typically represents the works of a community of practice.
Arxiv.org, for example, is a popular (primarily preprint) hosting space for physics, math, and statistics researchers.
A convenient list of some disciplinary repositories can be found here:
Publishers almost always list their policies somewhere on their website. Some are very upfront with them. Some bury this information in nests of obtuse menus.
The database (with an admittedly insane name), SHERPA/RoMEO, is a collection of publisher and journal policies.
If the journal you want to publish in has no postprint options but does allow for open access via APC, you can apply for that funding in your grant.
The Tri-Agency has stated that this is an appropriate cost to fund.
we might be able to save you some money on those APCs.
Your contact at the Office of Research Services can help you add publication costs to your funding application.
Publishers typically list APC information on their websites. If they don’t, there is a distinct possibility that the publisher is operating in bad faith.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
contacting the publisher to ask about exceptions
putting pressure on the publisher to support authors under mandate
publishing elsewhere
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Having a frank conversation with your dean or the union about whether or not the tenure and promotion process properly addresses the realities, pressures, and evolution of modern publishing practices.
Illustration by Max Fleischman. Featured on The Daily Dot, accessed May 8, 2020.
This will not matter for you this year, but it is looming.
Do not panic!
UNB Libraries is quite prepared to help.
By Mike Nason
Revamped presentation to ORS/Grant Applicants.
Open Scholarship and Publishing Librarian @ UNB Libraries // Metadata Nag and DOI Wrangler @ PKP // General Loudmouth and Malcontent