Open Access Week: Help Others Discover Your Research!

The advantages of open access accrue to both authors and their readers. The former gain greater visibility and research usage, the latter gain immediate, free and unfettered access to scholarly studies. For both, the potential result is to achieve impact in the form of beneficial changes to forced migration policy and practice.

To this end, here are several steps academic authors can take to share their research and make it more widely available.

1. Provide open access to your work:
- After all the long-winded verbiage in my first three posts, here is a practical example: Here is an article that just popped up in my RSS feed: "Social capital, health-seeking behavior and quality of life among refugees in Zimbabwe: a cross-sectional study," published in the International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care. It is not yet available open access, but it could be via green OA! IJMHSC is one of Emerald Publishing's journals, and it allows a post-print to be shared immediately after the article has been officially published. According to Emerald's self-archiving policy, the post-print can be deposited on an author's personal website, or in an institutional repository or subject repository. The authors of this article are based at the College of Health Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, so they already have access to an institutional repository which accepts journal articles. Alternatively, they could deposit their article in a multidisciplinary repository like Zenodo.

Here's a guide on how to make your work open access.

2. Spread the word via social media, blogs/other web sites:
- A recent example: Adèle Garnier, Liliana Lyra Jubilut & Kristin Bergtora Sandvik are the three editors of Refugee Resettlement: Power, Politics, and Humanitarian Governance (Berghahn Books, Aug. 2018). To let people know about their book, they contributed commentary to the World Economic Forum blog and the Forced Migration Forum blog, as well as posted the introduction to their book on their profile pages on Academia.edu and ResearchGate. They also shared announcements via Twitter.

Other possible places to showcase your work:
- The Conversation (note the different editions available)
- Refugees Deeply
- SciDev.net

3. Get more ideas from this academic marketing guide:
- Check out the "The 30-Day Impact Challenge: The Ultimate Guide to Raising the Profile of Your Research." It's a few years' old but it provides a very complete review of the various resources that are available for researchers to market themselves.

And don't forget to let me know about your open access articles, books and/or book chapters!

Tagged Publications and Web Sites/Tools.