Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post recapping a presentation by Erin McKirenan (National Institute of Public Health, Mexico) about her commitment to open access at the SPARC Open Access meeting. There, McKirenan “offered concrete suggestions for early-career researchers who want to work in the open and also get appropriate credit for their work. Her list of ideas was as follows (with some annotations that I have added):
1. Make a list of open access publication options in your particular field. Chances are you will be surprised by the range of possibilities.
2. Discuss access issues with your collaborators up front, before the research is done and the articles written.
3. Write funds for article processing charges for Gold open access journals into all of your grant applications.
4. Document your altmetrics.
5. Blog about your science, and in language that is comprehensible to non-scientists. Doing this can ultimately increase the impact of your work and can even lead sometimes to press coverage and to better press coverage.
6. Be active on social media. This is the way academic reputations are built today, so ignoring the opportunities presented is unwise.
7. If for some reason you do publish a closed-access article, remember that you still have Green open access options available; you can self-archive a copy of your article in a disciplinary or institutional repository. Dr. McKiernan mentioned that she uses FigShare for her publications.