Open Access Publishing

Whether you're new to open access or have years of experience, below are common and emerging tools to help guide you through the open access publishing process. These include resources on metrics, third-party peer review, determining the legitimacy of an open access journal, social media, and more. If you have questions or ideas for additional tools, please ScholarsArchive@OSU.

OSU faculty passed an Open Access policy in 2013 that requires deposit of research articles to the ScholarsArchive@OSU open access repository. The policy builds on the COAS and Geosciences OA policies previously passed in 2011.

More information about the Oregon State University Open Access Policy.

The library offers some Open Access article publishing support by providing financial support for authors interested in publishing their articles in MDPI or PeerJ.

Open Access

Tools to help you write, code, and create scholarly articles.

  • Authorea (Write science together): A collaborative writing tool that lets you write in LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, Javascript, and more. Different coauthors can contribute to one document, centrally stored. Offers a free option and several tiered plans. See sample article on paleoclimatology.
  • Overleaf: Similar to Authorea — features real-time collaborative writing and publishing. Also has free and paid options.
  • Manuscript App: Appears to be similar to Authorea and Overleaf, but with limited information until you sign up.
  • IPython Notebook: The IPython Notebook is an interactive computational environment, in which you can combine code execution, rich text, mathematics, plots and rich media. See a sample session.

Independent peer-review services to help improve the review process. Note that journals may still want to perform their own peer-review.

  • Rubriq: One of the better-known third-party reviewers. They perform a double-blind review within two weeks over a wide variety of disciplines. They also offer plagiarism checks and journal recommendations. Costs $.
  • Peerage of Science: Offers a non-traditional approach to peer-review, where authors control set deadlines (e.g., deadline for sending peer reviews or sending the revised manuscript). The process is also not limited to two reviewers, meaning some papers may not have any interested reviewers while others may attract more than two. Free service.
  • Publons: a PRE- and POST-production review service. They collect peer review information from reviewers and publishers to produce comprehensive reviewer profiles with publisher-verified peer review contributions that researchers can add to their resume.

Ways to make your data and articles more dynamic and easy to read.

  • ReadCube: Optimizes PDF versions of journal articles (e.g., clickable inline citations, ability to take notes and highlight text), provides customized article recommendations, and is fully functional on iOS and Android devices.
  • eLife Lens: Provides a novel way of looking at content on the web (see introduction post). It is designed to make reading and access easier for researchers, reviewers, and authors.

Tools to help you assess the impact of an article, whether number of times cited, read, shared, or blogged.

  • Almetric: Provides real-time article metrics, analysis, and reports. Offers a variety of products. Costs $. Altmetrics are automatically supplied for articles deposited to the ScholarsArchive@OSU institutional repository. See AM button in bottom right of this page for example.
  • Research Articles by eLife: Research articles published by eLife are full-length studies that present important breakthroughs across the life sciences and biomedicine. Each article contains a "metrics" tab that displays views, citations, and shares thru databases such as CiteULike, Scopus, PubMedCentral, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and event social media sites such as Facebook.
  • PLOS One: Included are robust metrics that show HTML page views, PDF downloads and more. It also shows whether it was saved in Mendeley or discussed on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.

Other ways to share and discuss your science—because science is social!

  • Mendeley: Publicly or privately share reading lists, references, or full-text articles. Create groups to tackle research assignments, share feedback, and write papers with your collaborators.
  • Figshare: Allows users to upload any file format so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow.
  • ResearchGate: Add publications, make your research visible, connect with colleagues, and get stats about views, downloads, and citations.
  • Academia.edu: Share research, monitor analytics around the impact of your research, and track the research of academics you follow.