Publishing and Open Access

CELT hosted an informative seminar this week on Open Access publishing, facilitated by the research support staff from the library. The seminar focused on the development of ARAN, NUI Galway's open access repository. More universities are developing these types of repositories in order to facilitate access to the publications of academic staff, and it seems as though many publishers and funding bodies are in favour of them.

The main reason that they are seen as a good idea by everyone (and not just those in favour of open access on principle) is that they increase citation counts. Citations are of course fast becoming the key performance indicator for academic researchers. Some of you who work in fields where publishing manuscripts or books used to be the more traditional route through an academic career may well be wondering whether it is time to stop writing books and start publishing journal articles. This is the topic of a discussion happening now on the THE website and it is worth a look if you are interested in this question.