Scholarly Communication

Open Access (OA) is academic literature that is free to read and often has various re-use rights. Research can be Open Access through publishing or archiving.

Open Access has the same standards of peer review, copyright, quality, prestige, and research impact as traditional publishing, but is free to read.

There are a number of benefits from either publishing your work Open Access or archiving, such as:

- Open access publications have proven potential for greater citation

- Research is more discoverable

- Authors retain copyright

- Taxpayers get access to tax-funded research

- Help eliminate inequalities in access to research

- Federal funders require Open Access

Thanks to their FGCU-affiliation, faculty can publish open access either for free or at a discount with several publishers, listed below. You can contact Research Systems & Applications Librarian Kaleena Rivera at krivera@fgcu.edu 

• Cambridge University Press allows FGCU faculty to publish open access in any of their gold open access or hybrid open access journals without having to pay an article processing charge (APC). Qualifying journals include a number of disciplines, including history, psychology, legal studies, ecology, mathematics, arts. language and literature, and more.
  • List of Cambridge Journals (can be filtered by discipline) 
  • Step-by-Step Guide to Publish Open Access in Cambridge Journals

• The Company of Biologists allows FGCU faculty complimentary open access publishing with no APCs for all five of their journals: 
  • Development
  • Journal of Cell Science
  • Journal of Experimental Biology
  • Disease Models & Mechanisms
  • Biology Open
• Elsevier offers a 15% discount across all of their open access/hybrid journals. You can find out more here.