Access the Policy

Georgia Tech Open Access Policy

Access the Policy

Why Open Access?

Open Access means making the peer-reviewed scholarly work you produce accessible and with no charge to the public, and ideally with as few re-use restrictions as possible. There are several reasons Georgia Tech passed the Georgia Tech Open Access Policy.

  1. Alignment with Federal Policies: More and more agencies are requiring research to be made Open Access. Georgia Tech's OA Policy keeps us ahead of the curve.
  2. Shifting publishing landscape: Traditional paywalled publishing is becoming more expensive to access, and more and more publications are turning to more open models.
  3. Visibility to peers and fellow researchers: Open Access increases the likelihood that your scholarship will be accessible to those who need it and use it.
  4. Making Georgia Tech scholarship available to the public: Georgia Tech is committed to making the cutting edge research conducted here accessible to the public at large.

Faculty can use this policy to make their work openly available, no matter where they publish.

Find out how you can submit your work, or waive the policy.

Why is it Important?

To provide a mechanism for our faculty to share and disseminate their scholarly work, regardless of where they choose to publish.

Georgia Tech faculty are committed to making their work discoverable and making sure it has the most impact possible in research and scholarship. Making your research articles openly accessible means that anyone with an internet connection can have access to your important work, not just those with a paid subscription to an online site.

To proactively position Georgia Tech to meet the increasing federal funding requirements for public access to research.

In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memorandum requiring all US Government agencies that fund research to create and implement plans to make the products of that funded research open access -without embargo. This memo further updates a 2013 OSTP memo which was more limited in scope. The open access advocacy organization SPARC has set up a useful comparison database of federal agency sharing requirements.

Author Rights

An important component of open access is understanding that authors have rights to the work that they produce, and should retain them when possible. In the US, authors automatically have copyright to original work they produce, but often a publisher will require that an author transfer copyright to the publishing organization. This leaves the publisher in charge of how that article will be disseminated or distributed.

What are my options?

Addenda: An agreement with a publisher is a contract, and contracts can be amended. Some great tools for helping you generate publishing contact addenda arethe SPARC addendum, or the Creative Commons addendum engine.

Know what rights you retain: If you transfer your copyright to a publisher, read your agreement carefully to find out what rights as an author you retain. In many cases, publishers that request copyright transfer grant back some rights of distribution to the author. If you would like a right that you don’t see in your publishing agreement, ask for it. A great tool for finding out standard rights retention for journal titles is Sherpa Romeo.

Publish in an open access journal: Check the https://doaj.org/ for open access journals in your field. Open access journals are widely available, and most publishers and professional societies publish open access titles. Usually Open Access journals will ask you to assign your work a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons license will allow free reuse of your work while assuring attribution.

Publish in a hybrid journal: A so-called “hybrid” open access journal is a typical subscription based journal that will also publish peer reviewed open access journals for an author fee. Most of the large commercial publishers have hybrid journal titles.

How does the OA Policy help preserve my author rights?

Per the GT Open Access policy, faculty can submit a peer-reviewed author manuscript version (sometimes called a “post print”) of their own scholarly articles to the GT Digital Repository, the library’s institutional repository. You can submit via the repository submission form, or contact the repository team with any questions.  

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