Promoting faculty scholarship to a global audience by creating a more sustainable and equitable academic publishing system.

Why Open Access?

Open Access (OA) is an increasingly common end goal among academic publishing stakeholders and the benefits for Trinity authors who publish as OA are significant:

  • OA works are more easily discoverable and cited more often, which raises the visibility of Trinity scholarship.
  • Ensuring that Trinity research is widely accessible fits with Trinity’s focus on global engagement and commitment to equity.
  • Our collective investment in sustainable academic publishing models today will ensure that tomorrow’s generation of Trinity students will continue to have access to the information they need. 
  • Open Access allows faculty to connect and collaborate with their colleagues more quickly and easily, increasing their effectiveness and scholarly impact. 

How to publish work as Open Access and unlock your scholarship

New! Trinity’s Library supports Open Access publishing initiatives in a variety of ways. We also subscribe to some publishers that will waive the APC for Trinity Authors. Find out more

Best

  • Submit your work to a Diamond Open Access journal. Diamond OA does not require Authors to pay to publish, nor does it require subscriptions to read, resulting in a more equitable publishing system. These journals are usually independently funded through non-profits, libraries, academic societies, and other investors. Go to doaj.org and limit your search to journals that do not charge an APC to find a short list of Diamond OA publications. 

Better

  • Publish your work for free in the journal of your choice, but deposit a post-print (author’s manuscript) copy in the Trinity College Digital Repository, which provides free web access beyond Trinity. Many journal publishers allow authors to upload a post-peer review manuscript copy of an article to their institution’s repository. Colleges and universities that have passed Open Access “policies” or “resolutions” typically promote this method of Open Access publishing. You can look up your publisher’s policies by searching the Sherpa/Romeo database.  then submit your work directly to the Digital Repository.

Acceptable

  • Submit the work to an Open Access journal (Gold OA). Often, you will need to pay an article processing charge (APC) to publish the article. Use the Sherpa/Romeo database or the Directory of Open Access Journals to find reputable, peer-reviewed Open-Access publishers for your discipline.

Submitting the work to a hybrid journal will make your work OA, but it results in additional expenses for academic institutions. Many journals from the big publishers are hybrid, in that content within journal volumes can be either paywalled or OA depending on whether authors have paid an APC. A journal with both author-funded OA and paywalled content means the same institution can pay twice for journal articles. This model is the least sustainable.

You can also try to negotiate with your journal or monograph  publisher upfront to retain your copyrights. Read more about this from SPARC and use their Author Addendum with publishers.

Learn more

Pre-Print vs. Post-Print: What’s the Difference?

  • Preprint: A preprint is the original version of the manuscript as it is submitted to a journal. Usually, these are .doc files with minimal formatting or typesetting.
  • Postprint: A postprint is a manuscript that has gone through the peer review process, but has not yet been subjected to the final copyediting, formatting, and typesetting by the publisher. Usually, post-prints look like .doc files. Sometimes this version is referred to as the accepted manuscript version.
  • Version of Record: The version of record, sometimes called the publisher’s version or final version, is the version that is published on the publisher’s website. It is professionally formatted and looks more professional than preprints or postprints. 

Review this bibliography of selected readings on Open Access and some of the inherent equity issues in the financial models currently in use, particularly the author-pays model.

DEI in Scholarly Communication from University of California. A resource for exploring and taking action on DEI issues in scholarly publishing. 

Resources for publishing and discovering OA works:

Faculty publications recently added to the Digital Repository

Trinity’s Institutional Repository is a digital archive that showcases and provides access to scholarly and creative works by Trinity College community members. Works in the Repository are open to anyone on or off campus, resulting in increased readership and visibility.