In this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs, host Melissa Deuber (Nursing and Research Impact Informationist) sits down with Jenny Townes, Emory Libraries' Open Access Librarian, to demystify the world of open access publishing. Tune in to explore what open access and public access really mean for students, researchers, and taxpayers. Jenny breaks down: the complexities of copyright, the impact of article processing charges (APCs) from commercial publishers, and how Emory's "read and publish" agreements help support campus authors. Plus, discover how institutional repositories like Open Emory preserve and showcase university research, and learn top tips for finding peer-reviewed, fee-free open access journals.
Emory Scholarly Communications
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Open Access Podcast
[00:00:00] Melissa: Welcome back to Behind the Breakthroughs, the podcast from Emory Libraries, where we explore the people, resources, and ideas that support research, learning, and discovery across our community. Today, we're talking about a topic that affects students, researchers, healthcare professionals, and really anyone who wants access to reliable information: open access. My name's Melissa Deuber, and I am the Nursing and Research Impact Informationist.
Joining us is Jenny Townes, Emory Libraries' open access librarian. Jenny leads outreach and advocacy efforts around open access and manages two of Emory's repositories, Open Emory and Emory Theses and Dissertations. Before coming to Emory, she worked as a scholarly communication librarian at Georgia College and State University and spent more than a decade working in academic libraries throughout North Carolina and Georgia.
In this episode, we'll discuss what open access is, why public access to research matters, how publishing fees can [00:01:00] create barriers for authors, and how Emory helps make scholarship more widely available. We'll also learn more about Emory's repositories and hear Jenny's perspective on what she wishes everyone knew about open access.
Jenny, thanks for joining us today.
Jenny: Thank you for having me.
Melissa: So, I guess my first question here is for everyone to understand, what is open access?
Jenny: That's an excellent question, and it can be as... It's one of those questions where the answer can be as complicated or as simple as you want to make it. So, in a nutshell, open access is free access to information and unrestricted use of electronic resources for everyone.
You can describe it as a movement. You can also describe it as a set of principles and practices. So as a movement, it's, it aims for the free, open, and permanent online access to scholarly outputs. As a set of [00:02:00] principles and practices, like this would be the practice through which something that is normally copy- copyrightable, like a book, a piece of art, something like that, a scientific article, are delivered to readers free of access charges, or other barriers.
So, you might have kind of seen a theme throughout what I was saying: free, open access. What makes something open, as opposed to just a random thing that you find on the internet, is that it's free of cost to the reader, but most importantly, it's free from copyright restrictions, or it carries an open license.
Melissa: So copyright is something that's very often talked about during open access, and I know it can seem kind of far off, but in general, why should students really care about open access?
Jenny: Well, in terms of [00:03:00] copyright, it's extremely important, just like you said, to kind of understand what the rights that you have as a creator are.
Melissa: Okay.
Jenny: So, copyrights are all the rights that give you exclusive control to copy, share, adapt, and display your creation. So, when it comes to things that you might traditionally think of as publishing, so that would be the right to sell it online, the right to give it to a publisher, the right for a publisher to display your work, that would be, you know, to, to put it out online.
So you would be giving that right to the publisher. And it's important to know that in the United States, any time you take an idea and fix it in a tangible form, you automatically incur copyright. You do not need to register a [00:04:00] copyright. And what I mean by that is any time you record something, you write something down, um, you put something in an email, these are automatically copyrightable things.
And I could go on and on about, you know, what's copyrightable and what's not, but-
Melissa: That's definitely a legal rabbit hole.
Jenny: Yes. Yes. So students should care about open access because it is highly integrated with their own copyrights. If you think about your senior thesis or your PhD work or these things that we're gonna ask you to put in the electronic theses and dissertations repository when you graduate, what we are doing at the library is asking you to give us some exclusives, give us some of your copyrights, and that would be to distribute your work, and to distribute, to display, et cetera, these sorts of things.
We're not asking for, [00:05:00] um, exclusive rights to your work, but we are asking for certain ones. And it's also important when you go out into, um, into the world, you're gonna want to, you know, do your own research, find certain things. And if you've ever had the experience of going to Google to research something for your classes, and you find an article, and it looks great, and it says, you know, "For the low, low price of $45, you too can read this article."
That article is not open access. That article is behind a paywall. So, when you think about it, if you want to leave Emory with access to all of the articles, all of your textbooks, if your textbook was online or anything like that, if you wanna have continuous, lifelong access to these things, you're gonna want them to be open access.
Because right now, when you leave Emory, [00:06:00] you lose access to all of our databases. You no longer have permission to use them. If you have a digital textbook, you're-- that's a license thing. You're no longer gonna have access to it. So if you think about it, open access for students can be an entire ecosystem where there are no paywalls.
The playing field is completely leveled, so even people who do not come to Emory could have access to Emory quality education, despite their background, despite where they are in the digital divide, despite where they are in the world, and despite their economic circumstances. So again, no paywalls, lifelong access, and, you know, a community of people who can be kind of at the same level with research, and education.
Melissa: Great. Yeah. So a lot of what you said was about kind of distribution and having permission to [00:07:00] distribute work. And that is a really big deal when you're talking about research, particularly with funded research, especially in health sciences. We focus a lot on funded research and public access to funded research. So why is that kind of an important thing for society and for Emory in general?
Jenny: Well, in a nutshell, it's important because if it's tax-funded research or taxpayer-funded research, as a taxpayer, you have paid for this research.
And I think, and so do a lot of other people, that you deserve the right to read the research, to have access to it. Currently, that research, most of the time, is behind a paywall, like we were talking about. Researchers take their work, they write up an article, or they publish a dataset, and they publish in a journal [00:08:00] where those articles, all of that research is, again, behind a paywall.
So you, unless you have, you know, if you're at a university, like a student, you have access to our databases. If you, if you don't, then you can't read it. So to understand why this, why public access-funded research is important, you kind of have to understand a bit about the publishing ecosystem.
So as I just described, a researcher gets funded either by the government through an NIH or a National Science Foundation grant. And so that money comes from taxpayers. They do their experimentation, they do their research, they write it all up, and they give it to, or license or hand over that article, that dataset, whatever it may be, to a publisher, who then their job is to sell that.
They are, they are for profit. So [00:09:00] if they are not selling that research, the concern is how are we staying in business? What is our, what does our business model actually look like? So, public access would be the access to that research that is free. And as we just talked about, for something to be open, it needs to be free of cost, but it also needs to be free of copyright restrictions, and that's why we call it public access instead of open access.
So public access to research is you, you as a taxpayer, you funded it, you get to go read it. However, you don't get to use it. You don't get to redistribute it. You don't get to sell it yourself. So those rights have been reserved to the author or the publisher. It's important because it kinda helps regulate the publishing ecosystem by ensuring that taxpayer-funded results are available to taxpayers. [00:10:00]
And, when you think about it, public access to federally funded research on day one immediately, that helps accelerate scientific discovery, and it, it enables more and better innovation. Like what we were just saying, when people who might normally not have access to this for a variety of reasons all of a sudden do, you just have more people reading your work.
You have more people to collaborate with and more people to, you know, come up with ideas. And I think that's better for everybody.
Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. That was a great explanation of open versus public. I actually had no idea about the distinction, so thank you for that.
Jenny: You're welcome.
Melissa: And as far as this research tends to be kind of how it's paid for as far as the publisher is concerned, there's particular kind of funding models through that, right?
Jenny: Mm-hmm.
Melissa: Can you touch on that?
Jenny: Sure. Um, it's really important to know that most [00:11:00] open access journals, so these would be journals or, or publishers that consider themselves open access-- Let me back up. An open access journal would be a journal in which everything is, is open. Most of them do not charge a fee in order to fund their own business model, and there's a lot of research that one can do on how these different journals and publishers operate.
For other journals, again, not the majority, but most of the ones that you hear about, publishers like Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, et cetera, those are for-profit publishers. Some of their journals are open access, some of them are not. It kind of depends on which-- how they go. For a lot of those, they will charge something called, um, an APC, and that is...
Again, it's a business model, [00:12:00] for commercial publishers. The fee-- This is the fee that is sometimes charged to authors to make their article open. So if you're a researcher and you have a big study that you wrote an article about and you wanna publish, you go to a journal like, Nature or Cell or The Lancet or any of these big journals that are published in big publishers.
They'll say, "Yeah, of course. We totally want you to publish this open access. This is good for the scientific community. This is good for everyone. But in order for us to recoup our costs, we need you, the author, to pay that." So it's a fee that funds their business model. And there's a lot of theories out there and a lot of different opinions, but right now the reality is that, a lot of commercial publishers will charge a fee for-- to publish something open access, and those fees can be astronomical.
[00:13:00] And so typically they're around $3,500, and this is charged directly to the authors, not your department, not your library, not your, your university. So the author is on the hook for coming up with that money. Nature is at the very high end. They actually charge $12,000-
Melissa: Wow.
Jenny: -for an APC, yes. Cell, like I mentioned, $11,000. The Lancet is $5,270. So, you know, and these are a Springer pub- a Springer journal, and Cell and The Lancet are Elsevier, so these are word-- names that'll probably be familiar to your audience.
Melissa: I did wanna ask, so the alternative if they don't, if they can't access the APC cost, it would be to publish it via a paywall?
Jenny: Yes.
Melissa: Okay.
Jenny: Yes. Mm-hmm. And there, there are implications to that, [00:14:00] and maybe we'll talk about it later. But there's, for, at the moment, there's certain federal granting institutions that require that you do not publish in a paywall-- I'm sorry, that require that you publish in an open access journal, so no paywalls. So it's putting people in kind of a conundrum.
Melissa: Yeah, especially because there's also been recent news about grant funding-- federal grant funding not being able to be used to charge for an APC.
Jenny: Yes. That’s something that might be coming up on the horizon. Yeah. Yeah. That could be. We're not sure.
Melissa: But there's a lot of interesting things that are happening in the publishing world. But in general, um, we do have something called APC-free publishing agreements at Emory, and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that.
Jenny: Absolutely. So we typically call these transformative or read and publish agreements, and this is a contract that's negotiated between the [00:15:00] library and the publisher that allows for researchers to publish in that journal without paying that APC, which is great.
But I-- I do want to make just a little note that it's not APC-free. The library is actually paying that on behalf of the researcher, so we're paying negotiated rates.
Melissa: So it's more of a subsidy.
Jenny: Yes, exactly.
Melissa: Okay.
Jenny: And the-- Emory actually has-- our read and publish agreements are with ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
You'll notice that the larger publishers are not on that list, and that's for a variety of reasons. But that's good to know.
Melissa: So if that agreement is kind of...if somebody wants to publish in that journal, how would they kind of go about using that [00:16:00] agreement?
Jenny: Sure. So usually what happens, (and we do have a website about it) You can go on the Emory Library's website and find, what is it called? Agreements, Assisting APC Free Publishing, I believe it's called. I'm gonna get that wrong. That sounds right. Yeah. but it is there on our website. You can find it. So what usually happens is you'll go to one of these publishers and find a journal in which you want to publish. And you go through the whole, you know, process of getting accepted and editing and all that. And at the final stage, you'll come to-- It's usually a pop-up screen that says, you know, "Do you wanna publish this open access?"
Click yes or no. Which institution are you from? Emory. Great. And that's it. It's very, very simple. I believe there's one of [00:17:00] the publishers requires you to be the corresponding author. But as far as process goes, it's really simple. You just check a box and it's all automatic.
Melissa: That is really good to know. So we also have what I understand to be a repository. And what is there? What's kind of the purpose of it?
Jenny: Yes. So we have a repository. It's our institutional repository. Alongside Emory Theses and Dissertations and one or two others, it's our main institutional repository for scholarly works by Emory researchers.
And it's called Open Emory, and you can find it at open.library.emory.edu. It's recently gone through a big overhaul, so it's much easier to use, like this year than it was last year. So the user interface, all of these things are updated, and it looks much nicer too. So it's [00:18:00] a, it's an open access repository, so everything that we put in there has to be open access.
We cannot put your copyrighted works in there. So it was created in response to Emory's open access policy from, I believe it was 2011. So it's been in use for a long time. We have over 36,000 deposits, and those include monographs, so digital books, presentations, articles, posters, and we also have some multimedia things like student recitals.
Melissa: Wow, I did not know about the multimedia component.
Jenny: Yeah. Actually, the recitals might actually be in our electronic thesis and dissertations. Apologize about that. But we do have some multimedia things in there as well.
Melissa: Very cool. So that's one thing about Emory's research. And just in general about open access, is there kind of a [00:19:00] concept that you just wish people would know about or just something to know for kind of the everyday user?
Jenny: Absolutely. So this is an idea that it's, it's not mine, but it's something that I have adopted because I really believe in it. So this is an idea from Brandon Butler, who's the executive director of Re:Create. That's a coalition dedicated to, quote, "Balanced copyright and a free and open internet."
But he used to be a librarian at UVA. And his idea is that open access is actually free. We talk a lot about the costs, particularly the monetary costs of open access, and honestly, it is actually free. So if you think about it as kind of a difference between open access as a copyright choice, as a compliance step, like we briefly talked about with, NIH and NSF policies, and open access as a business model for [00:20:00] commercial publishers.
You can think of it under those three umbrella terms and come to the conclusion that open access is actually free. So, for example, as a copyright choice, you can make your work available with an open license like Creative Commons that, so that anyone can share and reuse it without any additional permissions.
So remember those five permissions-- I'm sorry, those five rights that we talked about, those are yours, and you can keep them or give them away. That's totally under your own power. So you can put something in the institutional repository. You can publish something in a completely open access journal that does not charge fees, and there are a lot of them out there.
I can't stress that enough. There are more out there that don't charge fees than do. So there's nothing out there that says publishers are in charge of your [00:21:00] permissions, in charge of your rights, or in charge of all of those fees.
And, you know, as a compliance step, the crucial thing to understand--
So the compliance step, this came out of the White House Office of Science and Technology. And this is a plan to make all published research results, all published results of federally funded research public access. This plan is so that funded researchers can comply with it simply by placing a copy of their published work in a repository. And I have to stress that's an agency repository, like PMC or something like that, not Open Emory.
So open access does not have to cost anything. Open access is free. It's a copyright choice that is completely within your purview. And I could talk about that all day because there's so many different nuances there. But I think if you really start taking [00:22:00] it to heart and really, you know, being innovative and working on those different ways that you can make your work accessible, open, and, you know, free of restrictions, then, then it can absolutely be free.
It does not have to cost anything.
Melissa: So I guess a bonus question from me is if somebody is curious about—Because we hear all the time about open access with large publishers. If someone wants to find those actually open access journals that are free to publish in, how do you think they would do that?
Jenny: The best place to start is something called the Directory of Open Access Journals, and that is DOAJ.org. And this is, as it says, a directory. And it's not... I wanna stress that it's not just any journal out there calling itself open access. There are very strict criteria to get onto the directory, and those journals are vetted very heavily.
So you go to DOAJ.org, and you search [00:23:00] under subject, whatever category you want, and there's a little button on the side that says, "Without fees." If you click on that, you're gonna get a multitude of journals, international, domestic, and otherwise, that do not charge any fees. And, and it's real- it's a really great resource, and that's where I tell people to go first.
Melissa: That is an excellent idea. I get quite a few requests on my end from people asking that, so I am going to be referring them to you, or to that website.
Jenny: Excellent. That would be great.
Melissa: All right. So thank you again to Jenny Townes for sharing your expertise and helping us better understand open access and why it matters.
We learned how open access makes research more discoverable and accessible, why public access to funded research benefits everyone, how APC-free publishing, or APC-subsidized, excuse me, publishing agreements can support Emory authors, and how repositories like Open Emory help preserve and showcase the university's scholarly work.
If you're interested in learning more about open access, publishing support, or [00:24:00] exploring Emory's repositories, visit the Scholarly Communications Office website. If you're interested in learning more about open access, publishing support, or exploring Emory's repositories, visit the Emory Libraries website, go to the Services section, and click on the Scholarly Communications Office.
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Until next time, thanks for listening.