During Open Access Week, October 22-28, liaison librarians shared messages with their departments on topics including how to avoid predatory publishers, recognizing the profit margins of the five major scholarly journal publishers, and the development of open access monographs and book subvention funds.

So, what is there to do now? Here are a few things to consider if public, open access to research is important to you:

1. Did you know that the faculty of the University Libraries passed an open access policy? Faculty in the Libraries decided that open access should be an expectation for the publications we produce. Any department on campus can pass such a policy. For more information, see the University Libraries’ Open Access Policy.

2. If you work with graduate students, let them know about the topics we covered last week. Deceptive publishers vs. publishers that follow industry-standards are not topics in most graduate courses, so sharing this information helps future scholars succeed.

3. Apply for the Open Publishing Support Fund. If you publish in a fully open access journal, you may be eligible for funding of up to $2,500 per article. Note that if you are applying for a grant, most funders want you to add open access publishing charges to the grant budget, so you won’t need to apply for UT’s OPSF.

4. 4. Regardless of where you publish, remember that nearly every publisher gives you the right (or allowed you to retain the right) to make a version of your article open access through UT’s institutional open archive, TRACE. There are a few steps to archiving your work in TRACE, and you can always email trace@utk.edu for assistance.

5. Schedule a workshop or presentation about open access, avoiding predatory publishers, or other scholarly publishing topics for a group of which you are a part. Presentations to departments, courses, labs, and other groups are available from the Scholars’ Collaborative in the UT Libraries.

Finally, please keep in mind that open access to research has many benefits, not the least of which is that the public can learn more about what researchers at UT do. One organization told us, “There’s an opportunity here with public access to make people more aware of the great research that’s being done [at UT].” And another talked about how important open access to research is to their work: “[It means] the ability to implement evidence-based programs. . . to provide programs that work for our clients.”

Whether you publish openly or archive openly, the Libraries’ resources and open access expertise can help increase the scholarly and community impacts of your research. Please contact Rachel Caldwell (rachelcaldwell@utk.edu, 865-974-6107) in the Scholars’ Collaborative to set up a consultation about open access.