Open Access and Scholarly Communication at Ferris State University: Why Open Access

Open Access research papers can have a big impact because they are easily used and shared. Traditional metrics judge a paper's impact by how often other research papers cite it, or by whether it is published in an influential journal. Altmetrics uses many other measures to describe the impact of a research paper or other online publication. It looks at how the article content is used and re-used, and it measures how often the article is mentioned on Facebook, in tweets, and in blog posts.

Altmetrics can be used to show the impact of scholarly work that is not published within the controlled world of current scholarly publishing.

See Ross Mounce (2013). Open access and altmetrics: distinct but complementary. ASIST Bulletin April/May 2013. https://asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-13/AprMay13_Mounce.html; Jason Priam, Dario Taraborelli, Paul Groth, and Cameron Neylon (2010). altimetrics: a manifesto. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/; Robin Chin Roemer and Rachel Borchardt (2014). Keeping up with... Altmetrics. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/altmetrics

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

"Open access" refers to the practice of making scholarly research available online for free upon publication (or soon after). Implemented by academics, institutions, journals, and major funding bodies, open access policies allow everyone across the globe to benefit from the latest findings and discoveries—whether it’s assessing Ebola risk in West Africa or the studying the effect of cute kitten pictures on people’s attention spans. (our emphasis.)

For more EFF content, click here.

Open Access mandates are found throughout the world. For example, in the U.S., scientific articles based on work funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must be deposted into PubMed Central, an Open Access Repository, and made freely available within 12 months of publication. Some universities have adopted Open Access policies that require faculty to keep their research papers and data accessible to all. Click here for information about the policy adopted by the University of California system in 2013.