Open Access

This guide focuses on "Open Access" scholarly publishing.

Here we are referring to scholarly journals/articles that do not require a subscription (no login or payment required) to view. 

SPARC defines OA as:

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives. - https://sparcopen.org/open-access/

If you're interested in the topic of "Open Educational Resources" (OER), please review our OER LibGuide, where we cover OER (what they are, how to find, use, adapt & make them) while highlighting what's happening at CCSU (& statewide) to promote OER.

Read and Publish Agreements for Open Access Journals

The library currently has ‘read and publish’ agreements with several publishers, including almost 600 journals. These agreements cover some or all of the APC (article processing charge, or publication fee) when CCSU faculty authors publish in a journal included in the contract. This can save CCSU faculty authors thousands of dollars while helping to move scholarship into the open access model.

Current agreements (rev. 1/11/24) :

American Chemical Society

• Agreement overview: https://acsopenscience.org/institutions/read-and-publish/
• List of journals included in contract: https://acs.chronoshub.io/

Cambridge University Press – Cambridge Core

• Agreement overview: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/read-and-publish-agreements
• List of journals included in contract: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/waivers-discounts#waiversProductDataInner

Institute of Physics – IOP Science Extra

• Agreement overview: https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/questions/institutional-open-access-agreements/
• List of journals included in contract: https://iopp.chronoshub.io/

Below, you'll find a list of resources helpful for finding open access journals. Please also review the next box with information on "Open Access Journals: A Critical Analysis". If you are not using a curated list of open access journals, but rather searching on the open web for open access journals, you may get results that include predatory / low-quality titles.

The rise and proliferation of illegitimate, profit-maximizing but low-quality publishers and their journals continue to pollute the scholarly publishing landscape. At one point, the openly published "Beall's List" offered insights into whether or not academic researchers could trust a given so-called "open access" journal, but the list and its creator were sued. More recent iterations of the database and commercial subscription-based products from Cabell's,may offer scholars some insights into journal quality. Diagnosis of how "predatory" a journal is the responsibility of scholars, as publishing in such journals can create issues with one's academic reputation. Librarians can help faculty wit this process. They may also want to review the criteria used by Cabell's to determine if a journal should be blacklisted which is openly available at https://cabells.com/predatory-criteria-v1.1. 

Check your department's promotion and tenure guidelines and discipline-specific white / blacklists to see where you should and should not publish your work. For faculty in the School of Business, check out the Australian Business Deans Council's Journal quality list at https://abdc.edu.au/abdc-journal-quality-list/