New University of Georgia Libraries’ agreements have expanded free open access publishing opportunities for UGA researchers, now covering more than 3,000 titles from prominent academic journal publishers.
Increasingly, researchers prefer open access options in order to expand the visibility, use, and impact of their work, and federal funding agencies require that grant-funded research be made openly available. UGA Libraries’ agreements with eight publishers cover the open access charges normally passed to researchers. These new arrangements are called “publish and read” agreements, as they address terms both for subscriptions to a publisher’s e-journals and support for open access.
The largest increase comes from the Libraries’ contract with Wiley, one of the world’s largest academic publishers. The 2024 deal includes Wiley Gold publications on top of the hybrid open-access journals that were available to researchers last year. This brings the total number of open access Wiley journals where article processing charges (APCs) are covered to nearly 2,000.
“Open access publishing ensures the free and immediate availability of research, accelerating the dissemination of ideas and expanding the potential for collaboration. Research published in open access journals enjoys the benefit of reaching a broader audience, resulting in increased citations,” said scholarly communications librarian Camila Lívio, citing studies from 2008 and 2020.
“This holds true for UGA authors, as our pilot study demonstrates a statistically significant relationship between OA publications and the number of citations they received,” she continued. “We also observed a 1.48% increase in OA publishing at UGA from 2022 to 2023 and anticipate steady growth in the coming years with the addition of new agreements with various publishers.”
The expanded Wiley slate includes an additional 600 of the publishers’ top titles, including Ecology and Evolution, Grassland Research, Conservation Science and Practice, the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia, and Muscle, and The Plant Genome, for example.
In addition, new read-and-publish agreements have been reached with the Institute of Physics and Royal Society of Chemistry in 2024, and UGA Libraries signed contracts with the Association of Computing Machinery last fall. These add to the publish and read agreements already in place with the American Chemical Society, Company of Biologists, and Cambridge University Press. UGA Libraries contracts also offer article processing charge discounts with BioMed Central and MDPI.
The additional agreements in 2024 expand fee-free open access publishing for UGA researchers to more than 3,000 titles, nearly doubling the options compared to last academic year.
For more information about open publishing at UGA, consult our libguide or contact faculty in the department of research and computational data management.