Academic journals are ‘interesting’, to say the least. They often contain vast swathes of incredibly wonderful material. Material that inspires you to write, and that sometimes drives you to drink (not because it’s bad, but just depressing topic matter).

These same journals are often locked up – scholars contribute to them, often acting as editors and reviewers for honorariums at best (more typically for free), and the journals publish the scholarly work. To gain access to those journals you have to pay reasonably substantial fees, and when authors publish their work they tend to lose most or all of their copyright.

As someone who is: (a) anal retentive when it comes to controlling my work; (b) thinks that philosophical discourse is most useful when made transparent and publicly available; (c) moderately techno-savvy and young (which I’ve often heard used derogatorily when I talk about these things, so I might as well include it for those that ignore the rest of this post based on their technophobia and ageism), I would love it if there were more recognition given to Open Access Journals. 

Open Access? What’s That?

To begin, open-access articles are typically research articles published in peer-reviewed journals, where the authors retains a significant degree of control over the copyright, and where the articles are available for the public at large to read, review, and download. There are two forms of Open Access – Open Access self-archiving and Open Access publishing. When archiving, the academic places a copy of their paper in an online repository. The paper is subsequently made available to the public, whereas when publishing the journal is made available to the public (often digitally). When talking about digital repositories, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other major search providers will index that article so it can be found using their respective search engines.

Open Access doesn’t involve Digital Rights Management schemes that might give your readers only 24 hours with an article they paid $15 to the publisher to download. It doesn’t mean that you give your hard work away to another group to profit by. It doesn’t mean that you have to ‘suck it up’ and publish in places that the public will never be able to see it. It means that you can have previous versions of the work available on your website without entering into a breech of contract.

In essence, Open Access means that your work is made available to anyone who is even moderately interested in what you have written while letting you retain some rights to you document.

Sounds Great. Why Should I Care? 

Well, this is really the question that you’re asking: Why do you care about open access?

I’d suggest it’s actually more fruitful to start with another question, posed by me to you: When was the last time that you used Google scholar to track down an article, or to find an article that related to a current research interest? Personally, I use gScholar on a reasonably regular basis if only because Google does search incredibly well (and breathtakingly better than anything I have access to through my university). If you’re publishing in Open Access journals that are being archived by Google people can not only search and find your work, but they can access your article. This is important – in many cases when searching using gScholar you find what looks like it would be a great article to read  . . . only to find that the university doesn’t subscribe to that the journal. In lieu of that locked journal article, I have to find another one for my research.

When you publish in an Open Access journal you increase the chances that people will find what you’ve written and reference you in lieu of the journal that they can’t access. As more and more people access your article you rise in the Google search index, which gives prominence to your article and increases the number of hits it receives. In essence, Open Access is a great way to increase the likelihood that others will reference you.

It's Not a Big Name Journal, So It's Not Worth Using

Yeah. This is really the 500lb. gorilla in the room. This is the ‘It’s not Mind (or other major leading research publication that is specific to my field), so there really isn’t any real value in publishing to some Open Access journal.’ That’s a fair stance to take, I guess, especially if your sole drive is to achieve tenure. I’ve read enough about how tenure works in some departments to know that a major publication in a prominent journal is worth more than publishing in dozens of smaller journals/presenting at smaller conferences.

I guess, when it comes to this, it depends on whether you want to publish for tenure, or publish to spread your knowledge. (Yeah, that simplifies things way too much, but I’m OK with that at the moment because of my youthfulness and therefore naive ignorance and all.) I ‘freely contribute’ what I write wherever I can because I see that the role of academics is to move beyond exclusive philosophical clubs and give the public the option to at least watch what I write. But, then, I’m the person (along with every other person who freely contributes content online) that creates some kind of a paradox for Digital Rights Management proponents – I don’t get paid for what I write, so then why do I do it?

Because I love to do it. Why are you writing?