Librarians at Milner Library regularly hear from faculty who would like to make their research Open Access, or available online for anyone to read at no cost. That can be easier said than done, however, as some publishers charge author fees to publish their work Open Access, which provides income that would otherwise have come from subscribers.
Thanks to new deals made with scholarly publishers Annual Reviews and Company of Biologists, Milner Library continues to expand both access to journals and opportunities for ISU faculty to publish their research Open Access without paying processing fees.
A three-year deal signed with Company of Biologists—a charity and non-profit publisher of scientific journals—increases Illinois State’s access to their content and allows University scholars to make their accepted articles openly available. The deal gives Illinois State unlimited access to current and archived articles from Company of Biologists’ hybrid subscription journals Development, Journal of Cell Science, and Journal of Experimental Biology, and fully OA journals Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open. The deal also allows unlimited waivers of publication fees (which are typically charged by these journals) for ISU scholars that are corresponding authors on accepted articles in any Company of Biologists journal.
In addition, the library has signed a two-year agreement with Annual Reviews, another non-profit science publisher. Since 2017, Annual Reviews has used an Open Access journal funding model called Subscribe to Open, which relies on sufficient library subscriptions to convert gated journals to Open Access volume-by-volume. If the journal maintains subscriptions at a level to sustain its operational costs, the current year’s volume becomes Open Access. The 22 Annual Reviews journals included in this deal run on the Subscribe to Open model, so Illinois State’s subscriptions are helping to make research published by Annual Reviews—including articles written by University scholars—available to everyone.
“We are very excited about these new agreements as their impact for our campus is twofold,” said College of Arts and Sciences Interim Associate Dean for Research, Facilities, and Technology Dr. Laura Vogel. “First, having immediate and free access to research studies published by others is critical for our faculty and students. Second, this is a great opportunity for our faculty and students to be able to share their research results with a wider audience. Open access benefits not only the researchers, but also the general public and provides further insight and transparency to the process of science.”
Milner Library maintains an online guide with more information about these deals and publishing your work Open Access. Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team is also happy to speak with you, address any questions, and learn more about your goals. Contact us at isured@ilstu.edu.
