Open Papers: How to make your work accessible, why it’s important (& why you should do it)

Abstract

There is a big push in scientific publishing for researchers to make any papers they publish openly accessible to the public, partially driven by the fact that lots of research is paid by public funds. The traditional publishing system, with subscription-based journals, typically doesn't provide papers free for readers. However, this system is changing, with the introduction of open access journals, and authors self-archiving their work. In this talk, I aim to give an overview of what open access is and give practical information about how you can make your papers open. I'll also discuss why making your papers open is important, both for you as an individual researcher, and for the world in general. There are pros and cons to publishing openly, and we'll talk about these. Aside from publishing manuscripts openly, there is also another type of paper: a preprint. A preprint is a final, non-peer-reviewed version of your manuscript. There has been a recent push for more disciplines to make preprints freely accessible, by uploading them to different preprint repositories. However, there is more concern about the pros, and especially cons, of sharing a preprint. I'll talk more about what a preprint is, how to share it, and discuss why you would - and why you might not - want to share a preprint. Publishing papers - both final versions and preprints - is just the tip of the open science iceberg. At the end of the talk, I'll introduce other areas of open science, and let people know how they can get involved. Bring your open science hats - we want a lot of discussion