During the month of Open Access week (October 24-30, 2016) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access.  We appreciate their contributions.

The third guest post is by Leonardo Marchini, DDS, MSD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Preventative and Community Dentistry.

See his Iowa Research Online deposited publications here.

I consider open access publishing a better way to share research findings, since by removing the financial barrier to access it allows for a larger audience to read and use the findings worldwide. It also allows for authors to share their publications more widely, by promoting it in research oriented social media and e-mailing it to groups of researchers in the same field, allowing for even more exposure.

However, most journals in my research field are not open access. In a recent work with a broader focus, I searched for a journal capable of reaching a larger audience and then selected an open access Journal with a higher than average impact factor in my field. The submission process happened as usual, and the peer review was intense, but the manuscript was accepted after a couple review rounds.

However, the publication fees for this journal would be a problem if I was not supported by the UI Libraries Open Access Fund. My experience with the Open Access Fund was amazing! I applied and got funded really fast!

Since then the article has been published and received great attention from the scientific community in many countries, as we had a lot of comments and requests for additional information through channels that would not be available for non-open access articles, like researcher networks. I hope it will reflect in more citations in the near future.