11/17/22 – Culp Center Room 219
Librarians Ashley Sergiadis and Christiana Keinath got this year’s trailblazer series off to a blazing start with their session, The Price of Publishing.
As the first presenters in an ongoing series, Sergiadis and Keinath began by providing attendees with an overview of the movement towards open access publishing. Beginning in the late 1990s with the proliferation of the internet in people’s homes and workplaces, Open Access (OA) publishing gained much traction during the “Serials Crisis” of the early 2000s, an issue of rising subscription costs and price gouging that still impacts libraries today.
Today, Keinath explained, many new open-source journals exist, while traditional journals may offer open access alternatives in addition to paywalled publishing. This has been helpful to scholars seeking free information and to strained institutional budgets. However, in select cases the cost of publication has been offset to the author or the author’s institution through article processing charges (APCs), charged as a prerequisite to publication. Whether or not an author must pay these fees to publish open access will depend largely on the journal and the type of OA publication they choose.
When seeking to publish research, authors may choose open access for many reasons. In some situations, OA publication is now mandated by certain institutions, or even the government. Keinath used the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2008 mandate as an example. This policy dictated that the public must have access to the results of research funded by the NIH. Mandates such as this exist across many fields of research. In a recent announcement, President Biden instructed that all federally funded research be accessible to the public after publication, beginning in 2026.
As the demand for open access publications grows within the confines of strangled library budgets, so does the demand for high-quality open access journals. In the second half of the session Sergiadis tackled the issue of distinguishing predatory journals from the legitimate journals. Some of the advice offered included vetting a journal’s index and impact claims, doing a simple google search of the journal title and the word “predatory,” and checking turnaround time for review—if it is short (2-3 days), that is a red flag.
There are also some alternatives to publishing in an open access journal. First, authors may be able to publish the accepted manuscript of their article in an institutional repository, such as Digital Commons@ETSU. Second, authors can submit an addendum to their publisher requesting to retain certain rights to their research.
Sergiadis and Keinath concluded the session with a Q&A. To view the session in its entirety, visit here. The Trailblazer series is sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and will continue into the new year with monthly workshops and presentation sessions.
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