As the fall semester progresses toward the holiday season, Rice University’s Fondren Library is making efforts to increase the visibility of Rice research and reduce barriers to open access publishing for Rice-affiliated scholars.
In the past academic year, the Fondren negotiated agreements with Cambridge University Press, Company of Biologists, Institute of Physics Publishing, The Royal Society and Sage Publishing, allowing Rice corresponding authors to publish their research with open access in select journals from these publishers with no publication fees.
“The Fondren Library continues to explore how we can support open access and new models that support the scholarly communications ecosystem,” said Sara Lowman, vice provost and university librarian. “We are committed to supporting research and seek to help researchers make their publications accessible to all. Open access aligns with the university’s new strategic plan by making scholarship more visible.”
Transformative agreements, or read-and-publish agreements, are one model for supporting open access scholarship. Under traditional publishing agreements, access to content is limited to subscribers. Under open access agreements, readers are able to access content at no cost. Transformative agreements also cover costs associated with open access publishing through an integrated model that bundles reading, access and publishing fees.
“This unrestricted access leads to the dismantling of economic, geographical and technology-related barriers to research and scholarship,” said Scott Vieira, head of collections and content strategy at the Fondren. “For research and researchers, this means wider reader engagement, larger citation counts and various ways to disseminate research to a larger, more diverse audience via tools like social media.
“For scholarship and scholars, this means better accessibility, straightforward access to research regardless of their affiliation to any organizations and all this at a minimal cost — essentially whatever it takes to get internet access.”
For additional details and eligibility, please see: libguides.rice.edu/OJS . The Fondren will continue reviewing options for future agreements with publishers that benefit campus researchers.
These new agreements represent one aspect of the Fondren’s overall investment in open access scholarship, which also includes membership discounts and subvention grants for publishing open access journal articles, chapters and monographs as well as sponsorship of entire publications such as the Fondren’s recent investment in the journal Foucault Studies.
Fondren also hosts the Rice Research Repository, a robust platform for Rice scholarly outputs including articles, papers, presentations, theses, dissertations, journals and data. For additional information, see repository.rice.edu/home.