This year’s International Open Access Week kicks off on the 23rd October with the theme “Open in order to…”
The theme is an invitation to answer the question of what benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.
In the past our team has spoken of the many potential benefits that open access can bring to a wide range of people. This year however, we decided that we wanted to focus specifically on the benefits of OA to the researcher and their publication. We wanted to hear directly from our academics here at Queen’s and find out if they felt OA has had a positive impact on their publication.
To achieve this, we decided to create a new page on our OA LibGuide devoted to discovering the “Impact of Open Access”. This new webpage contained a simple “Open Access Feedback” box where academics could share their OA experience and thoughts with us.
A small number of Queen’s academics were emailed and invited to share their OA experience. Within a very short space of time, over half of the academics emailed had responded.
What was really pleasing and perhaps a bit surprising was the level of detail in each response. It became clear that our academics have had their own specific OA experience and they were happy to share this with us.
The great benefit of our “Impact of Open Access” page has been that we no longer have to only speak of the potential benefits that open access can bring.
So whether it’s “Open in order to… “widen the parameters of who has access to my research” or “achieve significantly higher citations and greater attention from the scientific community and beyond”, we can now say that the benefits to making scholarly outputs openly available are real.
If you would like to share your OA experience with us, please visit our “Impact of Open Access” page.