TA achievements
4. TAs make publishing OA easier for researchers
“APCs [article processing charges] were not institutionally supported per se, but the libraries would put aside some money to encourage researchers to come on board. But we would want a researcher to pay first and then we’d reimburse after publishing. So it was good enough for researchers with funds, but those without money in their research pockets couldn’t do APCs.
Now, with the transformative agreements any researcher can participate.”
Lazarus Matizirofa, Deputy Director, Department of Library Services at the University of Pretoria, South Africa
Many researchers select journals based on reputation, prestige, and high-quality peer review, with the ability to publish OA as a lower priority.17 By removing the financial barriers associated with OA publishing, TAs enable researchers to publish OA in the journals of their choice. This not only ensures compliance with OA policies but also enables them to take advantage of all of the benefits of gold OA publication, including increased usage, citations, and attention.18
Additionally, TAs provide institutions with a more complete picture of their researchers’ involvement in OA publishing. In our case studies, analysis of publishing outputs by member institutions revealed that while researchers were publishing OA, those without access to OA funding were less likely to be listed as first authors.
“We could look across the spectrum and see that lots of publishing activity was in fact happening at smaller institutions, even though their authors tended not to be the first named author on the article.
By looking at that holistic overview of the publishing activity we learned many things, one is that it’s not really appropriate to call these institutions “read” institutions because many of their faculty play significant roles in the research and publishing enterprise.
They just don’t tend to be first authors as much as researchers at the larger institutions, and I think that has a lot to do with grant money coming in and other aspects of working in research universities.”
Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis
To learn more about how TAs are enabling a global shift towards OA, click on each achievement below.
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