Open Access publishing increases your research exposure, potentially leading to an increase in your citation counts.
The Open Access movement focuses on Open Access for peer-reviewed literature. Open Access is compatible with peer review. Open Access institutional repositories make available online publications researchers have had peer reviewed with traditional journal publishers. Open Access journals pre-dominantly utilise peer review.
Many publishers allow researchers to self-archive preprint and post-prints of research in Open Access institutional repositories. Some publishers allow self-archiving of published versions. There may be conditions placed on self-archiving (including embargo periods, and providing links to the publisher copy).
Library staff are trained to work through related copyright permissions for you, or alternatively researchers can search the SHERPA/RoMEO database to know more about the self archiving policies of journals with which they publish.
Authors publish in existing scholarly journals and then self-archive their preprints or postprints in their institutional repository or subject repository. Some publishers endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving, while others impose embargoes. SHERPA/RoMEO, an online database of open access policies of journals and publishers, state that over 80% of publishers allow some form of self-archiving into Open Access repositories by authors.
An example of an institutional repository is the UniSC Research Bank, where all UniSC staff and students should deposit a copy of their research outputs.
Examples of subject based repositories include arXiv, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) and PubMed Central.
Authors publish in an Open Access journal that provides immediate Open Access to all of its articles on the publisher's website. This model can be based upon author submission fees. BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) are two examples of this type of Open Access publishers.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) also lists many scientific and scholarly Open Access journals.
Open Access institutional repositories make available online publications researchers have published with traditional journal publishers, therefore impact factors and quality remain consistent with current practices.
Open Access journals are starting to earn high levels of prestige and impact. BioMed Central publishes a list of their open access journals with their impact factors.