Auburn University interdisciplinary team finds advantages for an alternative to hefty fees when publishing research

Publishing research open access is a great way to broaden its exposure, including to the public, but paying article processing charges (APCs) to do it can be expensive. Academic librarians, including those at Auburn, do their best to educate researchers about all of their options when it comes to open access publishing. Since authors commonly ask about the pros and cons of paying to make work open, an interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers from the College of Sciences and Mathematics (COSAM), the College of Forestry, Wildlife and Environment (CFWE), the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) and Auburn University Libraries decided to examine the issue by the numbers.

In order to find out whether paying an APC to open an article results in a citation advantage for the authors, they analyzed five years of records totaling 146,415 articles in 152 biology journals with both open and subscription-access options. to uncover if paying for open access results directly produces more citations than not using the APC option. Their article Does it pay to pay? A comparison of the benefits of open-access publishing across various sub-fields in Biology, published recently in PeerJ, showed that while there is a citation advantage for researchers who pay APCs to open their work, there are similar advantages for articles that take advantage of “green” open access alternatives.

“Green” open access involves placing articles into public repositories at no cost to the author. At Auburn University, any AU-affiliated researcher can archive their work in the institutional repository, dubbed AUrora. Articles deposited in AUrora are indexed in Google Scholar and appear as alternate open versions of the paywalled originals in the search results.

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