Open Access: Academic research

Practical:

• Broaden your audience and impact [citation]
  
• Traditional journals allow green access-check RoMEO 
  
  
• Normally authors and reviewers are NOT paid, but they pay for access [citation]
  
  
• Open access does not affect impact, but the quality does [citation] [citation]
• Lists of high impact Open Access journals 
  
  
• Faster review process and publishing [citation]
  
  
• Journal prices keep going up, forcing libraries to make cuts to the collection [citation]
  
  
• Surveys show authors can still publish that book [citation]

Ethical:

• Expanding knowledge for your field and everyone [citation]
  
  
• Current model creates artificial knowledge scarcity with barriers to access [citation]
  
  
• Knowledge is nonrivalrous [citation]
  
  
• Authors maintain rights
• Creative Commons
  
  
• Allows scrutiny, replication, refutability of data [citation]

• Targets: mainly the inexperienced and researchers from developing nations

• Action: publishers charge money to publish articles, some times BIG TIME

• Lost: robust peer-review or no review at all

• Outcome: academic community suffers- bad research and data floods the scholarly debate

• Example: Chronicle of Higher Education 'Predatory' Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish

What happens when a researcher submits a bogus article to 100s of open access journals?

See what happens in this thrilling Science article The Sting.

Read a few different perspectives:

Beall, J. (2013). The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access. TripleC (Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation): Open Access Journal For A Global Sustainable Information Society, 11(2), 589-597.  

Are libraries protecting students rights enough?
Hawkins, A. R., Kimball, M. A., & Ives, M. (2013). Mandatory Open Access Publishing for Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Ethics and Enthusiasm. Journal Of Academic Librarianship, 39(1), 32-60. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2012.12.003

What happens to the individual in large datasets?  Are there privacy concerns?
Mannay, D. (2014). Storytelling beyond the Academy Exploring Roles, Responsibilities and Regulations in the Open Access Dissemination of Research Outputs and Visual Data. Journal Of Corporate Citizenship, (54), 109-116.

DOAJ: Dictory of Open Access Journals
Criteria: Definitions section on the about page
List:  http://doaj.org/

Beall's List
Criteria: 3rd Edition
List: Publishers and Journals

Grand Valley State University Library
Criteria: Positive and negative indicators