In this series of posts, we will address some of the key questions researchers have around open access, to help support the community in finding information and making publishing decisions. This first post will address the basics of open access, the benefits, and how you can use maximize impact by choosing to publish in this format.
Look out for future posts where we continue to address researcher questions around open access. Please get in touch via help@hindawi.com if you have a specific question for us.
What is Open Access?
Open access (OA) is a publishing model for scholarly communication that makes research information available to readers at no cost. According to UNESCO, open access means publications are free to anyone to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself”.
All Hindawi journals are published Gold Open Access. This means all articles are immediately available to read and reuse upon publication. Authors retain copyright of their work, with articles licensed to Hindawi. The vast majority of Hindawi articles use the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). Articles in Hindawi journals can be downloaded, shared, and reused without restriction, as long as the original authors are properly cited.
Benefits of Publishing Open Access
Here are some of the key benefits to publishing your research open access:
Increasing the usage of your research: Because OA articles are free to access online, they are more likely to be read, shared and cited than articles behind a paywall.
Accelerating scientific discoveries: By publishing OA articles online shortly after acceptance, they can reach a wider audience thanks to barrier-free accessibility, so new discoveries can be read and shared faster around the globe.
Encouraging collaborations: More collaborations are made possible when research is openly accessible. For example, the Covid-19 rapid review initiative - a large-scale collaboration among publishers and organizations across the scholarly publishing industry - enabled research to be reviewed, published open access, and shared with active scientists all over the world.
Being compliant with OA mandates: More and more research institutions, universities and funders require researchers to make their published articles free to access. By publishing your research in an OA journal, you are compliant with OA mandates.
Maximize your research impact with Hindawi
Hindawi believes that science deserves an open approach freed from any barriers between people, between research outputs, and between organizations.
Our open approach and the tools and services that we make available as part of the wider community empower researchers to build on open knowledge and share their work with a global audience.
Here’s what we are doing to maximize the impact of the research we publish:
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The marketing services Hindawi provides such as social media marketing and targeted email campaigns encourage more views, downloads and citations of your article.
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Hindawi’s open access articles are available on ResearchGate immediately upon publication. As the first publisher to have all content available on this community platform, our partnership aims to help accelerate the discovery of research.
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Our articles appear in a wide range of databases and are indexed by several other services to maximize the reach, impact, and visibility of your work.
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Hindawi content is machine readable and search engine optimized. By providing open and machine-readable content and following best practices to increase the search engine exposure of our articles, Hindawi is maximizing the discoverability of your research.
Learn more about publishing open access with Hindawi.
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This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). Illustration by David Jury.