Sharing Your Work in Open Access [Open Access for Researchers, Module 5]

This is the last Module of the course on Open Access for researchers. So far you have studied about Open Access, its history, advantages, initiatives, copyrights and licensing, evaluation matrix for research – all in the context of scholarly communication. In this Module with just two units, we would like to help you share your work in Open Access though repositories and journals. At the end of this module, you are expected to be able to:
- Understand the publication process involved in dissemination of scholarly works;
- Choose appropriate Open Access journals and repositories for sharing research results;
- Use social media to promote personal research work and build reputation.
In Unit 1, we discuss the research publication process at five stages – planning stage, preparing stage, pre-publication stage, publication stage and postpublication stage. We emphasize the importance of social media in sharing and making your work visible to the target groups.
In Unit 2, we focus on sharing your research through OA repositories and Journals. First we discussed the different types of repositories to select and highlighted the steps that you may consider including deposit in your own institutional repositories or in global open repositories. We then discuss the sources of finding and deciding on OA journals. This unit also provides guidance on choosing the right OA journals, as the quality of OA journals is often questioned.