Yesterday, Nicola and I facilitated an Open Access Publishing seminar here in the Library at Milton Keynes.  We’ve done these for a few years now but I think this one was the most successful.  I’m going to bullet point some things that stuck with me.

• The enormous difference between Article Processing Charges (APCs) in pure Open Access journals and hybrid Open Access journals i.e. from £0 to £3K.
• The link between publishing in prestige journals and career progression for researchers.
• The potential of bargaining with publishers to get an equitable deal when publishing Gold.
• The issue of predatory Open Access publishers.
• Things differ between disciplines!!!
• Should pure Open Access journals utilize APCs for a sustainable business model?
• The potential difficulties of archiving Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) at point of acceptance. (e.g. do co-authors have access to these versions and how do repository staff identify these versions?)
• Using Social Networking sites to archive research papers.
• The implications of archiving Author Accepted Manuscripts at point of acceptance (e.g. harvesting of AAM metadata from repositories by Google Scholar).
• Using Open Access materials (and materials from library subscriptions) in Open University Modules.

There were lots of other really important points raised and as ever I worried that we confused some issues rather than clarify them.  But then that’s part of it really, it can be confusing!

Optical Illusion by Aaron Fulkerson (https://www.flickr.com/photos/roebot/1461507866)

What we need to try and do is identify the key points about Open Access publishing and get them across clearly, without forgetting that Open Access can be complex.

Thanks to everyone who attended.

Chris

Slides are here: Open Access Publishing Slides

Notes (with links to contacts) are here: Open Access Publishing Notes