Can I obtain help with the cost of publishing Gold Open Access?
See the Open Access Fees tab for more info, but the answer is yes! There are different ways you can obtain help for paying Open Access Fees, including journal waivers, help here at UNM, and grants.
If I publish Open Access, what impact does it have on my tenure and promotion?
Look at your department's tenure and promotion requirements, and see if Open Access journals are valued and how it counts. Check with your departmental colleagues to see if they have published Open Access. Individual departments and colleges have different guidelines for what counts toward tenure and promotion. If OA is not part of your departmental guidelines, you can also consider advocating for this type of publishing.
One way to advocate is through modeling Open Access publishing, as Peter Suber writes, "If you find an OA journal high in quality but too new to be high in prestige, consider submitting good work there anyway, to help it earn prestige in proportion to its quality. Without this kind of help, especially from senior scholars [emphasis added] who have prestige to lend and don’t need tenure, good new OA journals can be trapped in a vicious circle, needing high-quality submissions to generate prestige and needing prestige to attract high-quality submissions" (2013, pp. 169-170).
Will my articles be cited less if I publish them Open Access?
This might depend on your discipline. Some studies find that an Open Access Citation Advantage is hard to prove because of many variables (Langham-Putral, et al., 2023). However, articles in some disciplines report there is a citation advantage when you publish OA (Eger, et al., 2021; Khan, et al., 2023).
The main takeaway from the bullet above is there isn't one definitive answer to this question, and you can research where to publish and consider your own publishing priorities. Your priorities might depend on where you are in your career. If you are an assistant professor who is unsure about how your department will receive an OA publication, you might want to go the traditional route. If you are a tenured professor who is fired up about Open Access, the citation advantage might mean less to you, and your priorities may lie with growing the availability of Open Access research on the web.
Is Open Access a pay-to-play or vanity system of publishing?
Peter Suber writes in his book Open Access, "the existence of a fee doesn’t mean the journal is engaged in vanity publishing. Your work will be subject to peer review, the fee only kicks in if your work is accepted" (Suber, 2007, p. 170). However, predatory publishers do exist, and you can find out more about predatory publishing on that specific tab on this libguide.
If I publish my work Open Access, will I lose my copyright?
Works published Open Access will often use Creative Commons licenses. When you apply a CC license to your intellectual property, you retain the copyright. Creative Commons licenses allow readers and users different usage rights after publication. For example, users can remix a work licensed CC BY 4.0. And users can re-distribute materials published CC BY ND without violating the copyright of the author because the license details how you can use CC materials. See the OER Libguide for more details.
