Our short answer is “YES”. Do you need arguments in favor of Open Access (OA) in Research? Here you go:
More citations per article
OA articles are available free of charge not only to scientists all around the globe, but also to journalists, policy makers, economists and the general public – who pays for large chunk of the conducted research. Alternative metrics (altmetrics) allow especially young scientists to build a reputation by counting the numbers of shares, re/tweets, likes and downloads of a research article. Open Access in combination with altmetrics makes it easy to boost visibility in a timely manner and thus raises the likelihood of a research article being cited.
The downfall of subscription journals is near
Traditionally subscription-based publishers have opened their gates; see for example
- nature.com/openresearch
- advances.sciencemag.org
- degruyteropen.com
- wileyopenaccess.com
- elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access
To get the full scope explore the Directory of Open Access Journals.
Better Peer Reviews
Editors who work for OA journals often practice a general Open Science culture that is prone to Open Peer Review which in turn is usually more efficient and of better quality then reviews from peers who keep their identity hidden.
More affordable
One common arguement against publishing OA is the sticky rumor of the alleged high Article Processing Cost (APC). Despite the fact that less then one third of the open access journals actually raise APC fees it is also worthwhile to compare total costs of publishing in OA versus transcription journal – whether it is APC or page charge that sums up to the actual cost. In most if not all attempts you will find that OA is more affordable taking the scope, reach and whatever ranking of a given journal into account. If you are facing financial constrains of any kind there are many ways to either get a discount from the OA publisher or finacial assistance from the agency that funds your research.
Feel free to comment below. We will be happy to extend this list with your suggestions as well as with additional arguments pro OA that we come across.
Further reading
MCKIERNAN, E. C., et al. How open science helps researchers succeed. eLife. 2016, 10.7554/eLife.16800. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.16800
NASSI-CALÒ, L. How Open Access can boost researchers’ careers. SciELO in Perspective. [published in Jul 2016]. Available from: blog.scielo.org
PeerJ staff. Who’s Afraid of Open Peer Review?. PeerJ Blog. [published in Oct 2014, updated in Nov 2016]. Available from peerj.com/blog