Today’s post for International Open Access Week focuses on some of the common myths about open access (OA).

Myth: Articles published in OA journals are lower quality.

Truth: OA journals are no more likely to contain low-quality content than for-profit journals. The success of any journal depends on authors submitting their content to that journal so that their findings will be scrutinized by their peers and recognized. If any journal has a reputation for publishing low-quality content, authors will not submit their research.

Myth: OA will make my content easier to plagiarize.

Truth: Making your work more widely and publicly available does not promote plagiarism. Plagiarism is most commonly committed at institutions where access is available to traditional subscription journals and OA journals. Academic integrity has nothing to do with the business model of the journal that you publish in.

Myth: OA publications are not protected by copyright.

Truth: The business model of the journal has nothing to do with the intellectual rights practices of that journal. Most OA journals encourage authors to use Creative Commons licensing with their works. Creative Commons licensing gives authors much greater flexibility when it comes to educational use and attribution related to their work. Very few OA journals ask authors to sign over their copyright to the journal but this does not mean that the works are not protected by copyright. It simply means that the author retains his or her full rights in the work and is authorizing unpaid access  to that work. In fact, most non-OA journals ask authors to give up their copyright to the publisher. This diminishes the rights of individual authors with respect to their own work.

Myth: Scholarly societies will collapse without money from subscriptions to support operations and events.

Truth: The purpose of a scholarly journal is to communicate research findings and encourage feedback. Scholarly journals can support themselves with a variety of fundraising mechanisms but their primary purpose is not to fund other activities. OA journals can support themselves by taking advantage of the in-kind support of any of the hundreds of academic libraries that support OA by hosting journals on an Open Journal Systems platform at their affiliated institution. Dalhousie University Libraries provides journal publication services.

Myth: Open Access journals are not peer reviewed.

Truth: Most Open Access journals include a peer review process much like that used by their subscription peers. The strengths and weaknesses of peer review processes are similar whether the content is submitted to an Open Access journal or to a subscription journal. A recent, non-peer reviewed article that appeared in Science  suggested that the peer review process is flawed in Open Access journals. The findings of this article are controversial and have been been refuted.

Myth: The only way to make research open access is to pay unaffordable author fees.

Truth: Most Open Access journals do not charge author fees. Roughly 30% of Open Access journals charge author fees while roughly 75% of conventional journals charge author fees for page charges and colour illustrations. The least expensive way of making research available is to upload it to either a public repository such as arXiv, SSRN, or PubMedCentral or an institutional repository such as DalSpace. Many publishers will allow articles to be uploaded to repositories at some point in the publication cycle. Most publishers’ open access policies can be located in the Sherpa-Romeo database. If you would like to deposit your research in DalSpace, contact dalspace@dal.ca