Dickinson College
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Dickinson Scholar is the open access institutional repository for Dickinson College, featuring scholarly and creative works by students, faculty members, administrators, and staff.

Dickinson's library and Research & Development Committee administer a fund to support open-access publication of faculty scholarship. To request funding, faculty members apply to the R&D Committee. Up to $2,000 per publication may be requested. Publications that receive funding for open-access publication must also be deposited in “Dickinson Scholar,” an institutional repository managed by the Dickinson library. See https://dickinson.hykucommons.org/.

Also, the library subscribes to many journals with packages that include waiving open-access publication fees for corresponding/submitting authors who are Dickinson faculty or staff. The library makes faculty and staff aware of these opportunities and encourages them to make use of waivers of open-access publication fees when available.

In addition, Dickinson’s Research & Development Committee webpage for publication costs includes information about alternative funding options for open-access publication.

Dickinson library guide for open-access publication: https://libguides.dickinson.edu/copyright/openaccess

Dickinson Research & Development Committee webpage on Publication and Dissertation Costs: https://www.dickinson.edu/info/20067/research_and_development_committees/1306/publication_and_dissertation_costs

From the library guide on open-access publication: “Dickinson supports open-access publications and share publicly that removing the subscription barrier has been shown to increase the visibility of scholarship, with a corresponding increase in citation rates in many fields. Open access takes a variety of forms, including institutional- or discipline-specific repositories for pre-prints; mandates requiring specific government-funded research articles to be placed in PubMed Central; and born-digital open-access journals. All of these forms can enhance the distribution of knowledge and broaden the impact of scholarship.

“Open-access publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLOS) show that open access is fully compatible with peer-review, high-quality editing and publishing, and journal impact factors. Open-access journals are no longer new, and in some cases are replacing traditional journals as the desired place to publish. An increasing number of research funders are requiring open-access publication.”