Increasing the impact and visibility of your research
By increasing the visibility of their research, universities demonstrate the contribution they make to the knowledge economy, improve their chances in the competition for government research funding and position themselves well to work with industry or third sector partners.
An institution’s research reputation benefits when authors make their research papers freely available to readers over the internet via an open access repository or journal. Studies have shown that such papers are more frequently cited than those solely available via subscription based journals.
Open Access benefits not only researchers and their institutions, but the economy and society at large, as the outputs of publicly-funded research are available for all to use. JISC is a leader in the movement towards making research outputs more openly available.
- Our work has shown that Open Access can help institutions achieve more with less as well as increase their impact. According to the JISC-funded Houghton report, the UK higher education sector could benefit from about £80 million a year in efficiency savings and increase its contribution to the UK economy by about £120 million, if all research were published in open access journals (where publication costs are met by authors rather than readers).
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Heading for the open road, a report from JISC, the Research Information Network and a number of other organisations, maps the different routes institutions can take to move over to Open Access. Assess the institutional costs and benefits of doing so using our methodology and find out about the open access business models you could adopt from the Knowledge Exchange’s briefing paper.
- Houghton showed that the benefits of Open Access would be even greater if journal articles were archived in open access institutional repositories. Over the past ten years, we’ve helped more than 70 UK institutions improve or create repositories. Based on this experience, we’ve developed a large body of information, advice and guidance around repositories and open access publishing.
- The digital repositories infoKit will take you through the stages needed to build your own institutional repository.
A next step will be to ensure that researchers use it. Our Embedding repositories guide and self-assessment tool will help.
- You can also keep abreast of developments to promote Open Access in the UK through the UK Open Access Implementation Group.
What does the future hold?
We will continue to work with various stakeholders to develop ways of making the transition to Open Access and develop new ways of extracting useful information across repositories. We’re also working with international partners to develop and extend Open Access.
Support from JISC Services
Our impact
JISC has been at the forefront of the Open Access debate from the very beginning, investigating the benefits (PDF) and supporting researchers in making the outputs of research more widely available. Financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research could result in an additional £172 million per year (PDF) of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone.
- JISC's promotion of the use of Open Access means that the UK has more digital repositories than anywhere in Europe Our SHERPA repository project was awarded the prestigious SPARC Europe Award (PDF) for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications in 2007
- Our Welsh Repository Network project has put a repository in every higher education institution in Wales, making it the first country in the UK - and one of the few in the world - to achieve that coverage
- We fund support to help higher education institutions take advantage of and build their own business cases for Open Access such as facilitating Salford University to become the 100th university in the world to issue an Open Access mandate '...evidence shows that research published online has higher citations and can also be used as a way to promote our competitiveness internationally...' Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor
- JISC is engaging with the wider academic research community and with policy-makers to transform attitudes towards Open Access worldwide (PDF) to amplify the impact of research and enable research conversations and collaboration to take place globally
