Open Access Publishing for JMIRO Authors

Wiley and CAUL Open Access Agreement

Access to research is a real problem affecting both scholars and their audiences, particularly practitioners, policy makers and other researchers. And a conundrum is the disconnect between research funding and publication. It’s been estimated that the Australian government invests $12 billion a year of public money in research and innovation, only for most of the publications that eventuate to be locked behind a paywall, inaccessible to industry and researchers. At the same time, Australian universities and others pay publishers an estimated $460 million to $1 billion a year to see this published work.

To overcome this, Open Access (OA) is a publishing movement aimed at making published research freely available online. The Council for Australian University Librarians (CAUL), the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia, recognises the benefits of the wide dissemination of research especially under funder and institutional OA policies. We know that open access articles are used and cited more often than traditionally paywalled content.

Throughout 2022 we saw the rapid adoption of OA across Australian and New Zealand scholarly journals, and this is set to continue into 2023 and beyond. OA brings with it new opportunities and challenges. Open access will see your work being made freely available immediately upon publication, while you retain copyright and publish under a Creative Commons license.

It’s clear that OA is gradually catching on, and this can be seen with our College journal JMIRO: as of the end of November 2022, 38 per cent of papers published in JMIRO (a Wiley publication) were published OA, compared to six per cent for the full year 2021 and two per cent for the full year 2020—so it is fair to say that CAUL has definitely benefited the journal along with some authors and researchers.

When comparing the performance of open access articles in hybrid journals against those published closed, or behind a paywall, Wiley have noted that OA articles were downloaded three times more, were cited 50 per cent more, and generated three times as much Altmetric attention.

However, the costs for authors to publish OA can be a sticking point: even with CAUL and other agreements providing costfree open access publishing for authors, around 12 per cent of eligible Wiley authors choose not to publish open access.

The good news is that Wiley and CAUL’s OA Agreement allows authors in Australia and New Zealand affiliated with CAUL member institutions (bit.ly/CAULmembers) to publish in JMIRO without paying any transactional Article Publication Charges.

One College Fellow who is taking advantage of the new publishing agreement is A/Prof Warren Clements. He has recently published five OA articles in JMIRO.

Tell us about your experience of Open Access

The concept of OA is absolutely the future of academic radiology. We create science to further the world’s understanding of modern medicine. Science is intended to reach patients and clinicians far and wide, and this is achieved through publishing in journals which can offer a broad readership.

The first transition to global readership was moving to an online platform, with clinicians rarely receiving or reading print journals in this modern age. However, online articles were traditionally still held behind paywalls.

When OA began, it required individual researchers to fund OA fees for their article. In Australia, we have traditionally had limited ability to access grants and other funding models to support research, unlike in European and American medicine. Almost all academic radiologists could not fund these fees. Publisher fees were traditionally paid by university and hospital libraries through subscription to online content. While the OA concept had arrived, this model was still prohibitive for researchers. Personally, I was not able to use this for my articles in JMIRO.

The recent CAUL agreement was one of the first to make a progressive change for academic radiology in Australia. This agreement allows universities to fund open access fees for hybrid journals such as JMIRO, and I have been lucky to use my mutual affiliation with Monash University to publish many of my articles through OA.

I hope that at some stage soon this will be extended to cover purely OA journals and not just hybrid journals.

[Update: As of 1 January 2023, the Wiley-CAUL Agreement now covers gold open access journals too!]

By publishing with the CAUL agreement, I can now allow researchers across the world to read and use the ideas and concepts that I have studied. This means ideas are disseminated faster, wider, and may make a difference far sooner than a physical article being printed and sent to a library.

The next iteration is pairing this with modern academic aids, for example, social media such as Twitter. Academic radiology communities are thriving on these platforms and being able to share links to my open access articles in JMIRO, not only does my research get read instantly, but it gets read by the right people.

The future is bright, and the collaboration between CAUL and Wiley/JMIRO is a great start for academic radiology in Australia.