Open Access Guide
About this guide
This guide is focused on the Open Access initiatives at UTRGV, which take on many forms. The primary purpose of Open Access is to create scholarly materials that are openly licensed in ways that make the distribution, reuse, and access to them freely available worldwide. This outcome is important, but several hurdles exist to create such a system equitably. Article Processing Charges, for example, prevent reserachers without funding to pay the fee necessary to publish in the most prestigious Open Access journals run by major publishers, which can affect their career progression.
The various ways we approach Open Access at UTRGV has to grapple with both the goals of free access to information, as well as the potential barriers created by the existing publishing systems. Any questions can always be directed to scholarlycommunications@utrgv.edu.
Open Access Publishing Agreements at UTRGV
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has entered into several agreements with publishers that allow our researchers to publish their work Open Access without paying an article processing charge (APC). We also have several agreements that provide an APC discount with major publishers. Below is information about each of these agreements and the relevant announcement links with more details. If you are having any issues receiving your waiver or discount when publishing your work Open Access with any of these publishers, please contact the Scholarly Communications Librarian justin.white@utrgv.edu.
Fully waived APC
BMJ Case Reports: https://casereports.bmj.com/pages/authors/#openaccess
- UTRGV has an Institutional Fellowship to BMJ Case Reports, which means there is no charge to publish OA with this journal. For our Fellowship code, contact justin.white@utrgv.edu
Cambridge University Press: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/read-and-publish-agreements/oa-agreement-university-of-texas-system
- UTRGV authors can publish their article Open Access in gold and hybrid journals. You can double check the journals available to you by using their OA Waiver & Discount checker tool.
Institute of Physics (IOP): https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/questions/researchers-from-the-united-states/
- Our subscription through UTSDL will mean UTRGV authors should not have to pay APC charges after January 1, 2023.
SAGE Premiere: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-university-of-texas
- SAGE Premier APCs will be waived for UTRGV authors as of January 2023. The UTRGV author must be the corresponding author for this agreement to be activated. This process should be automatic. A full list of participating journals is available in the announcement linked above.
Discounted APC
Elsevier: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access/agreements/texas-library-coalition-for-united-action
- UTRGV authors will receive a discount of 10% on Hybrid and 15% on fully OA Elsevier journals (except for Cell Press and Lancet journals, and some society journals who have opted out of the agreement). The UTRGV author must be the corresponding author. View the agreement page linked above for eligible journals, as well as support for navigating Elsevier's APC invoice process. Author queries can go to support@elsevier.com.
MDPI: https://www.mdpi.com/about/ioap
- UTRGV authors are entitled to a 10% discount on all MDPI APC charges.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does UTRGV have an Institutional Repository?
ScholarWorks is the institutional repository for UTRGV. Faculty can deposit their work in the repository in accordance with the policies of the publisher or as a pre-print before a publisher has been approached.
The library now offers mediated deposit. Simply send an email to scholarlycommunications@utrgv.edu with your paper(s) and we will do the rest! We will contact you if there are any questions about deposit rights.
If you prefer to self-deposit your work, you can go to the Faculty Publications and Presentations collection for your department and click the Submit Research link on the left sidebar.
Archiving your pre-print or accepted manuscript in the institutional repository will greatly enhance the impact of your work, particularly in parts of the world that rely on open access copies of new scholarship. Items in the repository are harvested by Google Scholar, Unpaywall, and other aggregation services.
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge to the reader, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The definition is fluid and might not always encompass the open licensing aspects when used.
Open Access, as an option for wider dissemination of research, is entirely compatible with and insists on upholding standards of peer review, copyright, quality, prestige and research impact.
There are multiple models for supporting Open Access. These may include Article Publishing Charges (APCs) which ostensibly cover the production costs of the journal. Most OA journals do not have APCs and rely on institutional funding, but the largest volume publishers of OA articles do. Most established publishers like Springer and Elsevier provide APC-funded OA options as part of their business model.
What version of my work can I submit to ScholarWorks?
The library now offers mediated deposit. Simply send an email to scholarlycommunications@utrgv.edu with your paper(s) and we will do the rest! We will contact you if there are any questions about deposit rights.
Be sure you understand what version of your article you're submitting to the Institutional Repository. Most journals only allow the pre-print and accepted manuscript (both formatted in typical double-spaced, 12 pt font). If you only have the publisher's version of an article you'd like to deposit, you might need to contact the publisher for permission.
You can check the self-archiving policies of any of your works by looking up the journal in Sherpa/Romeo.
The diagram below is to help you understand what versions are referenced in your journal's self-archiving policy.
What are my options regarding publishing and copyright ownership of my work?
Before you sign an agreement, take a moment to think about what you want to do with the work in the future. Will your publishing contract allow you to do those things?
As the author of a scholarly work, you are also the original copyright owner in that work. When it comes to how that work is reused by others (copied, distributed, etc.), you are in charge! You are free to make copies of your work and give them away, post them online in an institutional repository, or create derivatives based on the work. When you publish the work, however, this could change and you could lose the right to do some of these things freely depending on what you agree to in the publishing contract!
As an author you may face one of the following options when publishing you work:
1. Author assigns/transfers copyright to the publisher. Historically, this has been the most common option. Many academic publishers require that an author assign his copyright in a work to the publisher. In this scenario, when you want to reuse your article, such as by making copies to give to colleagues, distributing copies to students in a class, archiving it in an online repository, or even adapting the article into a conference presentation, you will face the same limitations on reuse that you would when you need to reuse someone else’s work. You will likely need to get permission to reuse the article from the publisher unless your proposed activity qualifies for a copyright exemption, like fair use.
The law allows for the termination of transfer during a certain period after publication, in order to give authors control over their early works that they may have signed away rights to. One tool is the website RightsBack.org.
2. Author retains some rights by:
Granting exclusive licenses: Not all publishing agreements involve the complete transfer of rights. In some cases, rather than asking for a transfer of rights, a publisher may request an exclusive license to exercise specific rights. For example, if a publisher asks for the exclusive right to publish a work, the author retains his copyright ownership, but grants the publisher the exclusive right to copy and distribute the work. Since the license is “exclusive,” the author cannot grant this license to anyone else and would need to get permission from the publisher to reproduce or distribute that work. Since this is not a complete transfer of the author's copyright, it is possible for the author may retain the right to do other things with the work, such as create derivatives based on the work.
Using an “Author Addenda”: It is also possible to customize your publishing agreement using an "Author Addenda". These addenda often grant the author a non-exclusive license to reuse a work. Licenses are usually limited to specific types of activities, such as allowing a copy of an article to be uploaded to an institutional repository. A license of this type may come with additional limitations such as specifying that only a “pre-print” version of the article that can be uploaded to the repository. There are model agreements available to help authors sort out the details. (See links below.)
3. Author keeps all copyright. Complete transfers or assignments of copyright ownership and exclusive licenses are not always necessary for publication. It is possible for you to maintain ownership over your copyright and give the publisher a non-exclusive license to publish your work instead. These types of arrangements are common among open access publishers, quite often using a Creative Commons License.
Take a look at SPARC's Author Addendum for more information on how addendums can preserve your rights over your work.
