Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Access (OA) publishing means making your work available using an "open" license which makes it easier for other researchers to access, and interact with, your work. The open license lets potential users of your work know the terms they must follow to use your work. Users are able to use the work without charge.

You can use an open license for book publication (see the OAPen OA Books Toolkit linked below). You can also make an article available through open access by publishing in an Open Access journal (see the What is an Open Access journal box below on this page).

The most common type of open license currently used is the Creative Commons license.

There are a number of advantages to making your work available with an open license, including:

• Greater reach. Because the publication makes your article available for free, anyone can access it. Access is not limited to those who can afford it, or who belong to an institution which subscribes to the journal.
   
• You retain control. Generally, traditional publishing involves transferring your copyright to the publisher, which then owns (and has control over the use of) your writing. An OA license gives the publisher the right to make your work available under certain terms specified in the license, but otherwise you retain control over your work.
   
• You can make your work available. Because you retain control over your article, you can make it available. You can post a copy in FUSE (Franklin University’s institutional repository). You can post a copy in Canvas. You can email it to interested researchers / students. These are things that may be prohibited by publishing in a traditional journal.

There are two types of OA journals. Some journals are entirely open access – everything the journal publishes is available for free and published under an open license. Others are what is called a “hybrid” journal.

Hybrid journals publish a mix of content. Some of the articles are freely available, and published under an open license, and some of the articles are published under the traditional, restricted model where users need to either pay for access to the article or belong to an institution which has a subscription to the journal.

Just because a journal is open access – either fully or hybrid – does not mean it is of lesser quality. OA journals may be peer reviewed. To make sure that an OA journal (or any journal) is one you want to publish in, review the Think Check Submit journals checklist.

Sometimes, open access journals will require authors to pay an “Article Processing Charge” or APC.

The idea behind the APC is that publishing journals does require money and, since the end user isn’t being charged for the article, the journal will charge the author up-front. However, not all open journals require an APC. You will be able to tell if a journal requires an APC to publish OA when you look at the journal’s author submission information.

Additionally, you may be able to avoid an APC for many journals which do charge them because of the Franklin University Library’s membership in the OhioLINK consortium. OhioLINK has negotiated deals with several major publishers (Wiley, Cambridge University Press, IOP Publishing, Elsevier, and Springer Nature) which permit corresponding authors affiliated with an OhioLINK institution (such as Franklin University) to publish articles in journals from those publishers without paying an APC.

If you are interested in publishing an OA article in a journal from one of these publishers, see the library’s guide to Open Access Publishing Through OhioLINK.