On Jan. 1, NC State Libraries launched two new open access publishing agreements with Cambridge University Press and Wiley. These agreements will allow NC State researchers to publish their work for free in the companies’ open access journals.

Open access is a type of transformative publishing model which allows NC State students and faculty to access and publish articles for free due to NC State’s agreements with the publications. NC State currently has running agreements with other publications, but Cambridge University Press and Wiley are the newest additions.

According to Hilary Davis, the head of collection and research strategies at University Libraries, open access publishing increases the visibility of researchers’ work.

“Some people say that open access articles tend to be read and downloaded four times more than the traditional, non-open access journal articles and that open access articles tend to get cited more by other researchers than the non-open access articles,” Davis said. “So high visibility, and that’s what every researcher wants, and that’s what every researcher’s home institution wants as well.”

According to Davis, NC State is a part of the Carolina Consortium, a group of academic libraries, who negotiated the deal with Wiley, which allows NC State access to this agreement. Darby Orcutt, assistant head of collection and research strategies at University Libraries, negotiated the agreement with Cambridge University Press. Both began on Jan. 1 and will last for three years.

Davis explained what traditional publishing methods look like.

“[With] traditional journal subscription models, a library subscribes to a whole set of journals, from a publisher,” Davis said. “And that subscription allows the members of an academic community, like NC State, to get access to read any published articles in those academic journals. And it’s only due to the library paying that subscription fee.”

According to Davis, NC State’s new agreements are a hybrid of traditional and modern publishing.

“This model includes both the traditional subscription model; people from an institution can get access to read articles based on the library’s paid subscription,” Davis said. “Plus … it covers the cost of open access fees so that anybody from NC State who writes an article, gets it accepted to be published by Wiley or Cambridge can publish their articles open access. That means they’re publishing their articles so it’s open to the world, not just to subscribing institutions. The cost of that traditional subscription model and the open access fees are bundled together in the same cost that a library pays on behalf of an institution.”

Rohan Shirwaiker, an associate professor of industrial & systems engineering and an associate director of the Comparative Medicine Institute, was the first person to take advantage of the new agreement with Wiley. He said he appreciates the connectivity that open access publishing provides researchers.

“With open access, what it means is it really reaches a wider, broader audience, an audience not only in the United States, but an audience all across the world,” Shirwaiker said. “You want to think of research in general; it is always building on each other’s ideas, building on existing science and innovations. So really, there’s always a symbiotic relationship between research and papers where you learn from each other and grow. So I think, open access and the amount of reach it provides, from a scientific perspective, I think it helps scientific ideas spread faster.”

According to Davis, in order to publish open access there is a fee that the researcher must pay but, with NC State’s agreements, those fees will be covered. Cambridge University Press said it estimates the fees total an average of $3,000 per article.

More information about publishing with University Libraries can be found on the library’s website.