Open Access (OA) to research results means that this material is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open Access articles come with a licence, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (and is not used for commercial purposes).
An extra conditions can be non-commercial use.
Read more at
http://www.openaccess.nl.
There are three good reasons to publish Open Access. The first is that anything that is financed with public money should also be available to the public.
This call for justification is becoming stronger and more frequently heard. The second reason is that publications which become available via OA usually have a greater impact than similar articles
which can only be consulted in Toll Access journals. The third reason is that the traditional role which Wageningen plays for developing countries is better served with Open Access.
In developing countries, there is definitely a lack of quality information. OA can help improve the situation.
Wageningen UR signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. Wageningen UR aims to make as much publications as possible open access via the institutional repository Wageningen Yield,
which is a database in which all publications by Wageningen authors are described. Wageningen UR does not oblige authors to publish in OA journals,
because in the choice of journal impact prevails over open access.
You can get OA for publications by publishing your results directly in OA journals. When doing so, it is important to choose good OA journals.
Another option is to
file your publication in the institutional repository Wageningen Yield.
If you publish a paper in an OA journal, the costs for production, review and dissemination of the paper are charged to the author when the article is accepted.
The user can access the paper free of charge.
It is advised to take up publication costs in your project budget. For scientific articles, the costs per article are €1000 - €3000.
Alternatively, you can seek extra funding for publishing.
If your project is financed by NWO, you can get reimbursed a maximum of €5000 in Open Access Fees per approved project.
Go to the
NWO website for the complete terms.
For other projects, the library is making €50,000 in 2012 available in its Open Access Fund to authors within Wageningen UR.
The fund will cover a maximum of 50% of the costs of an Open Access publication, and subsidises the costs for Open Access Fees in proportion to the Wageningen UR contribution,
as mentioned in the author's affiliation in the article. The fund will be distributed on a "first come, first served" basis.
To apply for the Fund, the corresponding author pays the publisher's invoice first and then sends a copy of the invoice with a billing number to
aquila.weijers@wur.nl.
With a few publishers special arrangements are negotiated:
- For Biomed Central journals, the Library is automatically invoiced 50% of the Open Access Fee and a 15% discount is received on the total fee.
- For Sage Open Choice titles, the author gets a 90% discount on the OA fee.
- For Springer Open Choice, no fee needs to be paid for articles accepted before July 1, 2012.
For the complete terms and for requests, please contact
aquila.weijers@wur.nl.
The number of Open Access journals is growing substantially and, as a result, qualitatively good journals are now available for almost all fields.
BioMed Central (BMC) is a large Open Access Publisher with a long list of
journals.
In 2008, Springer took over BMC and also began a new publishing unit with
Springer Open.
Besides Springer Open journals and Biomed Central journals, Springer offers Open Choice for their subscription-based journals.
In a short time
PLoS One has grown to the world's largest scientific journal. In 2011, the journal published more than 14,000 articles.
The journal has scored an impact factor of about 4.4 in the period 2009-2010. The Public Library of Science publishes more
journals.
The traditional publishers have started similar initiatives. The most striking is the launch of
Scientific Reports by Nature.
Because Scientific Reports has the same policy as Plos One with respect to peer review, accepts all methodologically correct articles and also wants to be a multidisciplinary journal,
it's also been called Nature One.
Other examples are
BMJ Open in the field of medicine;
SAGE Open for the social sciences;
AIP Advances from the American Institute of Physics;
G3 from the Genetics Society of America;
Wiley Open Access with the first journals and the Royal Society with
Open Biology.
These and other Open Access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (
DOAJ).
A list of OA journals and impact factors (from
Journal Citation Reports by Thomson Reuters) can be
downloaded.
Besides the impact factor, for each journal the quartile classification in JCR and the subject field in Essential Science Indicators is given.
This information is relevant for participants of the tenure track.
Wageningen Digital Library, 9 March, 2012